Anne-Sophie Labadie: Can you tell me about the PDIS? The aim and how it works.

Audrey Tang: Sure. PDIS, the Public Digital Innovation Space, is a number of online and physical spaces designed for horizontal connection between the social innovators, and the public sector. That’s to say career public service.

Audrey Tang: We have a room here which we are in. We have a room thanks to the NDC, the National Development Council. We have the room nearby that’s just next door, and we also have part of the room on the third floor in the cabinet building, and on the Social Innovation Lab which is the middle of the Taipei City.

Audrey Tang: We also have an office on the ground floor, on the basement, and on the second floor. These six physical spaces are PDIS, and then we also have the online spaces built by open source software, and audited by cyber security department to be as safe, as secure as possible to the physical spaces.

Audrey Tang: Audit spaces are based on the premise that people who join work out loud. Meaning that we are fine with anyone who voluntarily sent delegate, for example, from each ministry, or the civil society sending people here, or even the overseas research community like Fiorella Bourgeois and Yu-Shan Tseng to work here.

Audrey Tang: The aim is to build mutual trust between the existing governance mechanisms, and the emerging ones from the social sector.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Is anyone welcome to join?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. We have some internal HR principles. For example, each ministry currently sent only one delegate at most. That is because we want each new colleague to offer a new perspective.

Audrey Tang: If say the foreign service didn’t send people in the first year, that’s fine, but then they start to send one person, Aurora Tsai, but when Joel Chen want to join here, Aurora is back to the foreign service on a rotating basis.

Audrey Tang: We hear maybe there’s 10 people waiting to join PDIS from the foreign service, but if all of them join, then we become a section in the foreign service. The diversity, the pluralism is very important.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Is there a team dedicated to fake news within PDIS?

Audrey Tang: No. Not at all. I’m personally responsible for part of the strategy to counter this information, but it’s not the core work of PDIS. I’m personally responsible to foster meaningful collaboration between the social sector, and the global platforms.

Audrey Tang: To be specific, the platform that have signed on the norm package to counter this information, namely Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PTT, LINE and such.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Since it’s been implemented, have you noticed any improvement in the way citizens are using this gov, this platform?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Our national platform of participation join.gov.tw as of this year counts more than 10 million users.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Cumulated?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Anyone who has used any petition page counts as one. Very casual visitors, there’s more than 10 million. Considering Taiwan is just 23 million people, that’s a lot.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: What about PO network ?

Audrey Tang: The PO network which started as one person each ministry, so 32 people. They grew to now average maybe three people every ministry, and in many agencies, that’s the level beneath ministry, the various offices, and agencies, some of them also have participation offices.

Audrey Tang: The whole network has grown to be around 100 people. Actually more than 100 people now especially if you count the PO network in the Tainan city, but in Tainan city, we don’t have direct regular meetings. Basically, we share the principle of how to build a PO network, and people overseas or people in the municipalities can adapt that to their needs.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: There’s no…

Audrey Tang: Direct relationship like regular meetings and such.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: They don’t have any obligation to participate?

Audrey Tang: No obligations for them. We mostly interface with the ministry or an agency level participation offices in the cabinet.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: The idea is to…

Audrey Tang: Is to make sure that whenever there is a multi-stakeholder situation, each relevant ministry can respond swiftly without fear because they know that there are existing ways to reduce risk for everybody involved.

Audrey Tang: They can respond without any feeling of uncertainty because they understand even if they say honestly that we don’t have an idea of what to do of those emerging technology, they know that the civil society is willing to co-create. Finally, there’s no doubt as of whether trusting people this much is a good idea because it’s institutionalized as a national level principle.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Through this program, do you think that citizens are more aware of the image of the open government?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I would say nowadays open government is considered as a norm in the sense that there’s no national level political candidate who will discard open government from their platform, or to somehow backtrack from the open government commitments. It’s now a nonpartisan norm.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: In your point of view, has it helped improving also the image politic and politicians?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know about that. Improve the image of career public service because it used to be career public servants are anonymous. Their ministries get the credit, and they take the blame usually, and it’s not only a Taiwan problem.

Audrey Tang: Participation offices as well as any public servant that take place into this direction conversation with people, people see that it’s really the public service serve the public. Not just the minister. This really improves the trust between the career public servant, the civil service, and the civil society.

Audrey Tang: However, as for politicians, I think it enabled a more accurate view instead of a caricature on politicians. It enabled a more evidence based view. Whether it’s a positive or a negative feeling or effect, that’s up for every citizen to decide. We’re not painting a positive rosy picture.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Regarding the efficiency of the work done by the administration, any improvement thanks to the different digital platforms.?

Audrey Tang: Oh, definitely because if people do go to the street and protest, at least they protest about the actual current situation instead of a speculation five years back or three years back. It makes conversation much more focused.

Audrey Tang: Like instead of people speculating the worst, and protesting against that, people have now the evidences of what the actual situation is, and they may still protest around that, but that makes the protest much more constructive.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: How to counter the misinformation? because it’s a core problem in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Basically by mimetic engineering. That is to say make our clarifications, our messages fun, and fun is a great way to make sure that people who see the message enjoy the message.

Audrey Tang: This information is mostly predicated. The personal anger being amplified into a group outrage on social media, but if we can turn anger into fun, into humor, and humor that makes fun not of others, but of one self, then that kind of messages tends to spread virally.

Audrey Tang: When people are laughing about a matter, then afterward, they will be much more calm, and able to co-create a common polity without being attracted to outrage because these two pathways in the mind is mutually exclusive. If you see something, and find it’s humorous, then you cannot feel outrage about it, and vice-versa.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Now, does it mean that you sensor a meme or no?

Audrey Tang: No. We are just making jokes quickly after each rumor rolls out. Within two hours, average one hour now, whenever there’s a rumor, we just made a joke about it.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Can I take a picture of this one?

Audrey Tang: Of course. This one is online, too. Yeah. I can send you the link.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: OK. I have a question about technology. Is it used to improve the consensus process?

Audrey Tang: Yes. A lot of what we call here consensus is just common understanding. Like things people can live with. Not necessarily totally agree on. In Internet governance, it’s called rough consensus, but I usually just call it common understand.

Audrey Tang: We use quite a few technologies. For example, Polis which can easily show that actually aside from the few divisive issues that the media tend to amplify, people actually agree on most of the things most of the time with most of their neighbors.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, we can take those low hanging fruits which is a rough consensus of the public will around a specific topic, and then make working regulations based on this while bracketing these from these sandbox experiments or from this temporary regulation, or just from something that people can live with, and then consider these issues when people have a much more clear picture for what this imaging technology is like.

Audrey Tang: It could be fintech. It could be self-driving vehicles. It could be 5G. It could be platform economy.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Can you give a specific example for what the media captures, and what’s your consensus about this topic?

Audrey Tang: Sure. For example, in 2015 when we first used the term rough consensus, and Polis as a civic technology, at that time, the topic was around UberX or people who don’t have a professional driver’s license driving to work, picking up a stranger that they meet from the app. Taking a detour to take that stranger to their destination, and charging them for it. Like what do you feel about this?

Audrey Tang: There are quite a few divisive issues. For example, there is one that says Uber’s service is so good that even when taxis are wishing past me, I will still use my phone to call a Uber. That’s very divisive.

Audrey Tang: Media tends to capture these anecdotal statements, and make it seem like a polarizing dialogue. Actually regardless of whether they’re Uber drivers, or Uber passengers or taxi drivers, or other passengers, everybody agreed that insurance is important. That registration is important. That some sort of mutual feedback mechanism is important.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, you can still use Uber to call cars in Taiwan anywhere, but all the cars that arrive, you will see a red plate. These are multi-purpose taxis which are designed by the people’s rough consensus, and the existing taxi fleets are also rolling out apps that are more or less just like Uber with such pricing and all that.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Is Polis used only for vTaiwan, or other…?

Audrey Tang: No. We also use it for diplomacy. We have four digital dialogues. One is ongoing around talent circulation was the AIT which is the de facto US Embassy. The first one talks about how to promote Taiwan’s role in the global community.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of people participating. Again, there’s a divisive statement, but there’s also rough consensus, and just like vTaiwan, we get the stakeholders to sit down, and consider only the rough consensus, the top 10 for each topic.

Audrey Tang: This is about Taiwan’s role, and second one was about trade relationships, and the third, security cooperation, and the current one is around talent circulation.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Is there a minimum stakeholder number required in order to work?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Usually, we have what we call seed comments in the sense that we first try to collect like from at least three different stakeholder group, three statements each, but it’s a heuristic. It’s not a hard requirement. It’s useful because then it’s not seen as something polarizing from the very beginning. Like there’s at least three viewpoints.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: It’s the minimum. Three groups.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Because if it’s entirely bilateral, then it could be framed as a zero sum game. Like a tag of war, but if there’s at least three stakeholder groups, then some sort of common value is usually easier to form.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Basically one coming from the government, and two, other stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: Usually, the shape is one from the government, and two from opposing sides of advocates.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: It’s not necessarily the opposition.

Audrey Tang: Not necessarily. Sometimes, it’s like the Uber apps. The initial statements came actually from three different ministries which all have very different views.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Is the goal to implement this into every ministry or?

Audrey Tang: To make every ministry aware of these tools. Their advantage and limitations, and use them whenever they feel they could, and also improve upon these tools, too.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: What could be improved?

Audrey Tang: A lot. Like for the additional dialogue for example, we deployed for the first time bilingual because it’s between the Taiwan and US communities. Everyone needs to be able to comment in Mandarin, or in English, and have the other side, CA accurate translation of their statements in order for this voting to work.

Audrey Tang: Just internationalization or localization is one improvement we made on Polis. The other one is to make sure that it can run in our service security audited data sensor instead of a public cloud.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Is it a bigger budget? Does it cost a lot, this kind of technology?

Audrey Tang: No. Not at all. It’s open source, so it doesn’t cost anything to start using it. To improve, of course, you need dedicated technology personnel.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: For example, in your ministry, how many people…?

Audrey Tang: I don’t have a ministry. In my office, there’s five full-time people from the Institute of Information Industry working on the various sites of civic technologies. Five, four time.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: OK. If the president is reelected, is there any goal to make this thing bigger ?

Audrey Tang: The president has indicated that she would like to have a council or ministry, or responsible agency for digital affairs. That’s her kind of platform for the reelection.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: About vTaiwan, Fiorella told me that a law has been passed, and the idea was to implement a kind of vTaiwan, but on the local level.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s a directive. It’s not a law, but to be very honest, the directive is currently only used in the Tainan municipality.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Tainan.

Audrey Tang: The Tainan municipality. We have indicated that if other municipalities would like to use this system, we would help, but we have not actually received like calls for help from other non-Tainan municipalities. On the other end, we also learned a lot in our design from the 2015 design of participation committee from the Taipei City.

Audrey Tang: The Taipei City is one of the prototypes that we learned from, but aside from Taipei and Tainan, both mayors in 2014 promised open government as their core platform. We don’t currently have institutionalized designs in other municipalities. There are some around say youth engagement and so on, but it’s not as comprehensive as the participation officer.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Currently Tainan and Taipei.

Audrey Tang: Tainan and Taipei have institutions designed for that.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: There’s no national will to implement this?

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say there’s no national will. There’s certainly public will. It’s just each mayor has different political priorities, and in our relationship, the cabinet and the mayors are not one of a commanding relationship. We can build best practices, and share them with the municipality, but they are equal members on the cabinet meeting.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: For vTaiwan, do you see anything that could be improved? Some have the feeling that the number of people using this platform is quite low. Anything you can do to make it more popular?

Audrey Tang: It’s not really low. The meet-ups stay more or less the same amount of people since 2014. The community is larger, but if you are saying that the kind of cases that vTaiwan processes is not as politically visible as the petitions, that is the case.

Audrey Tang: That has always been the case because when I was a part of the vTaiwan community in 2015 before I joined the cabinet, the JOIN platform started at that. Yes. vTaiwan maybe starts late ‘14, so maybe five months before JOIN launch.

Audrey Tang: As soon as JOIN launch, there was a petition about immunology therapy for cancer treatment, and the petitioner was a cancer patient already quite advanced. That’s like his wish. His will. To bequeath a better treatment for other people, and that petition alone maybe mobilized more people than all of vTaiwan combined at that point.

Audrey Tang: It’s always the case that petitions are mobilizing more people than vTaiwan.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: I see.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: I think this is back to the first question. How does this platform improve the democracy?

Audrey Tang: I think it improves democracy on two dimensions. First is the time dimension. If people think democracy is only something that you do every two year or four year, and only three bit or four bits of information, then it’s a lot distance from every day people’s mind.

Audrey Tang: If democracy is something that you can literally do every Wednesday or every Saturday, or meaningfully through participation and petitions like every day if you want, then it stays close to people’s minds.

Audrey Tang: Democracy is a living social technology that’s still evolving, and everybody can improve on that. The first is about everyday democracy. Continuous democracy as they call it. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second is about space. Instead of saying only the voting booth is the space for democracy, we are more like anyone can set up a co-creation space if you want, and gain binding power of political decisions by inviting, for example, one of our reverse mentors in our use council.

Audrey Tang: Each of the 12 social-innovation-related ministries have around two social innovators as reverse mentors. They are young, but they lead the direction of that ministry. If you invite one of them to convene the meeting in your local town hall, in your…

Audrey Tang: We had a meeting in a clam farm. Like when there was an issue about sustainability of clam farming. We actually had a meeting there. Just bringing democracy to where people are instead of asking people to come to the voting booth. That is the main space difference.

Audrey Tang: If you can convince a young reverse mentor to convene the meeting, or if you can convince one of the 12 ministries to convene the meeting, or whether you can invite 5,000 people to sign a petition, any of these three ways results in we having a meeting in your place in your vicinity, and your stakeholder groups can have the full representation of your views without their representative.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: Then, if the government has no obligation to listen to what…

Audrey Tang: Oh, the citizens have no obligation to listen to our explanation either. Either…

Anne-Sophie Labadie: I mean, people can have discussions on social media.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. In this way, the social media, which is fragmented, is another issue, but in our design, whatever people say in these town hall meetings, or virtual town hall meetings are recorded, published, and each of the commitments that the career public service make there is tracked, aligned very publicly.

Audrey Tang: It also gives the career public service a chance to meet like-minded citizens. If they run into a political willed issue, then they can collaborate on. For example, the Presidential Hackathon which is a design that every year, the president chooses five such cross-sectoral teams, and bless their idea into the national policy.

Audrey Tang: Whatever they have prototyped in the previous three months, the president commits to implement that in the next 12 months. We get for example telemedicine for remote islands, and indigenous places, many cases based on the design of Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: That couldn’t happen if the career public service didn’t learn about a similar like-minded civil society that they can work collaboratively together.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: That’s it, I think.

Audrey Tang: OK. Thank you.

Anne-Sophie Labadie: It’s OK.

Audrey Tang: OK. Thank you. Cheers.