Audrey Tang: Masks are optional here.

Katherine Chen: OK.

Audrey Tang: Very nice to meet you. Chen-san, please, take a seat. Yeah.

Audrey Tang: As I said, masks are already optional in the meeting.

Audrey Tang: Can you all hear me without the microphone? Is this OK?

Katherine Chen: Oh, yes, very good. Yes.

Audrey Tang: Welcome. I already received the questions, and they are very thorough. I look forward to a fruitful discussion. How shall we proceed?

Katherine Chen: We actually don’t know each other. This is the first time I met them, this morning. We visited Taiwan Mobile this morning. The purpose of this visit is all three scholars want to see you, because you are famous in Japan.

Audrey Tang: I’m like a manga character. I don’t recognize myself anymore [laughs] in the Japanese popular culture.

Katherine Chen: They have their own questions, and then I have mine. I think we only have one hour to visit, because your time is so precious. I probably don’t have time to introduce them individually. I can’t pronounce your name well enough, so why don’t you just introduce yourself?

Katherine Chen: So, why don’t you just introduce yourselves.

Satoshi Narihara: My name is Satoshi Narihara. I’m an Associate Professor of Information Law at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Western Japan. I study information law, including legal issues of artificial intelligence and digital government. I’ve been reading some of your books and articles, and I’ve been interested in your discussion. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Koichi Nakano: Hi. Very nice to meet you. Thank you very much for your time. My name is Koichi Nakano. I teach at the Sophia University in Tokyo. My own specialization is political science, so I have questions to ask you in relation to politics.

Audrey Tang: OK, great.

Tokujin Matsudaira: It’s an honor to meet you. My name is Tokujin Matsudaira, a law professor at Kanagawa University, Japan. I specialize in constitutional law theory. In that sense I think that among the three of us, I’m the most old-fashoned scholar hanging out with the 19th-20th century things and know very little about the digital issues.

Tokujin Matsudaira: Today’s meeting reminds me one of my close colleague and my classmate, Prof. George Shishido, University of Tokyo, had joined an on-line talk with you, I guess it was held by a Japanese institution. He is known as an expert of new media and big data. I am excited to learn from you on something you may have discussed with your Japanese counterparts.

Katherine Chen: Professor Matsudaira speaks very good Mandarin, better than mine.

Audrey Tang: Oh really?

Katherine Chen: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: For that part, should we just use Mandarin?

Katherine Chen: Feel free to speak in Chinese anytime.

Audrey Tang: How shall we proceed then? Do we go through the question one by one, and you can ask follow ups in any order? Would that work?

Katherine Chen: For sure.

Audrey Tang: The first question I received is about the digital transformation, and the difference between a minister at large, 政務委員, versus a minister with a portfolio, a 部長. I guess I’ll just take a couple minutes to broadly outline the MoDA’s role and to then try to get some ways to solve the trilemma of participation, progress, and safety in the digital transformation.

Audrey Tang: Because usually, we hear about a lot of the top down authoritarian way of making the people transparent to the state, [laughs] and in nearby regimes. What they do is not entirely out of malice. It is out of a prioritization of safety, while keeping some sort of progress.

Audrey Tang: To work with the safety, they decided 10 years ago that retweet is a virus [laughs] that must be squashed. Retweet, social media in general, is one of the most direct participation methods available to the digital people. If you just ban the use of civil society, or essentially, ban retweets, then you don’t get meaningful participation, including journalistic participation.

Audrey Tang: 10 years ago, we decided on another way. We want to maximize participation while keeping the ideas of progress together, so that progress comes from the civil society.

Audrey Tang: For example, the mask visualization, the contact tracing system, and so on, are all innovations that came from the civil society, from the human right activists even, where the society adopted as a progress. This is what we call People First, PVP.

Audrey Tang: In such a design, safety is still very important. We need to guarantee safety through a at large minister. I was at the time the at large minister in charge, for example, about cybersecurity or about the Chief Information Office, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Now I’m the Minister of MoDA. We have permanent staff for participation that’s in our MoDA proper. The departments of MoDA are all about participation.

Audrey Tang: We also have a dedicated administration about the industrial progress, the Administration for Digital Industries. We also have a dedicated administration for safety. That’s the Administration for Cyber Security.

Audrey Tang: Internally, what used to take three different ministries and three at large ministries, so six ministries in total, in order to solve this trilemma can be easily accomplished by a internal conversation within MoDA. I still retain the CIO role. If needed, I can still work with the other ministries, deputy minister, who are CIOs of their ministries, to work across the ministerial boundaries.

Audrey Tang: That was two minutes. I hope that’s OK. Any follow ups or do we go to the next question? I’ll just go ahead.

Audrey Tang: The second question asks, what about the multinationals, the largest companies, the Meta and Alphabet of the world, and how the competition and cooperation?

Audrey Tang: I think across the world we have seen that journalism and its contribution to democracy is widely recognized. Whether it is through collective bargaining or whether it is through the copyright and neighboring rights, or whether it is through a dedicated way to resolve to dispute when it comes to competition or the digital service and market acts, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Everybody wants to make sure that journalism still thrives. The same in Taiwan. The MoDA is a platform on top of which the two global platforms can work with journalists. We’ve already held one round of talks with traditional journalists. The ones with published newspapers, with dedicated news channels, and so on. This is the easier part.

Audrey Tang: Now, next ones we will hold another round of talks with digital native journalists, which are harder to delineate whether they’re just selfie produced media creator or whether they’re actually journalists. The administrative culture and the National Communications Commission is helping us to get a working definition of what are journalists if they are digital native.

Audrey Tang: Once we have that, we will have the second round of talks to ensure that they receive the proper resources for digital transformation. Also, their messages can get maybe some priority in the global platforms. Especially nowadays, the short videos are very easily synthesized. The AI generated content is now indistinguishable from human generated content if it’s short enough.

Audrey Tang: To prioritize the content that has actually been produced with a journalistic standard is essential for democracy. That is one of the three focuses we have this year, next to cyber security and communication resilience. I hope that answered the question.

Katherine Chen: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK. Any follow ups or we’ll just go ahead? Yes.

Katherine Chen: How do you deal with those problems? Does MoDA also contribute policy making related to platforms such as content moderation? Will you join the talk with the platform businesses?

Audrey Tang: If they are held to a journalistic standard, then of course. The idea, very simply put, is that because the copyright specifically doesn’t protect factual reporting. In a sense, the large platforms is free riding on this problem because they cannot even sue for copyright violation if they do factual reporting.

Audrey Tang: We have pretty good consensus now that factual reporting, journalism in general, is the anti body against this information, against polarization and democracy, and so on. It’s probably good it’s not questioned.

Audrey Tang: But if the Internet celebrities produce essentially none of the journalistic output to make the case that it is a public good and need to be funded, it’s much harder to make the case. Instead of mixing everything together, we just focus on journalism.

Katherine Chen: OK. Good.

Audrey Tang: OK. We’re good. The next one. The Digital Service Act. Is the MoDA part of the Digital Service Act or as it’s called in Taiwan, the Digital Intermediary Service Act?

Audrey Tang: MoDA is not the authority of the DSA because specifically when setting up MoDA, we left out all the content moderation policy powers. These powers are still in the NCC, which is why we don’t, in our co-prosperity platform with Facebook and Google, we don’t say “This is news. This is not news. This is journalism. This is not journalism. This says it’s journalism, but it’s really not.”

Audrey Tang: All these decisions are the NCC decisions. NCC, when MoDA was founded, also expanded their content moderation and content governance mandates to that of the Internet based media, not just the broadcast based media. It is now part of NCC’s official mandate because the DSA basically relies on that mandate to function. We are not a party of the DSA.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, now that the DSA has hit some roadblocks from the NCC, we’re increasingly working to instead of taking anything down, we’re working to verify something that is real. It’s a different assumption. The old assumption was that if something is fake, maybe we limit its distribution. Maybe we take it down and so on. That was the more NCC point of view.

Audrey Tang: Now with deepfake and AI, we can say if it’s not guaranteed by a well reputed mechanism to be authentic, then we’ll just assume it’s deepfake. It flips the default. That’s the stance that we’re taking now in that we’re enhancing the veracity or provenance technologies instead of doing moderation related technologies with any takedowns or shutdowns or any top down stuff.

Audrey Tang: I hope that answered the question.

Katherine Chen: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: All right. Let me find the next question.

Katherine Chen: Can I have a follow-up question?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Katherine Chen: Actually, my question was about do you have any suggestions to when the NCC was in trouble for that Intermediary Bill? Just felt like MoDA is a governmental unit which is more familiar with how the platform is working and the mechanism behind the platform.

Katherine Chen: I was guessing if you have ever…your personal view or based on your past experience, that you thought that you should have a role to make some suggestion for TV institution.

Audrey Tang: Well, the thing is that the Intermediary Bill consultation was done during my work in the minister at large without portfolio duration, but that draft was never sent to the Cabinet. The draft was still in the internal consultation stage. Usually, the way we work is that the ministry or the commission sends a draft for the Cabinet to ponder.

Audrey Tang: Then the minister at large ponders it. In the intermediary service case, that was not the case. That was more like a internal consultation and the stakeholder consultation by the commission without a ready draft. It was just a general consultation, early general consultation stage.

Audrey Tang: Of course, I’ve read the consultation questions. The people who engage in consultation, especially the local social media, the smaller social media, they were worried that they will be tasked with too much of a burden.

Audrey Tang: They are not large social media, they’re not multinationals, but they are asked to do much more than what they used to do before. They were interested in ways to save some cost but still adhere to the regulatory transparency requirements and things like that.

Audrey Tang: During our conversations, these technical questions do come up. Because the EU has already done general consultation of that sort, there are some technical solutions, just like when the Digital Markets Act asks for interoperability between Google Meet and Zoom, for example, between iMessage and WhatsApp, or between type C and type C. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: When they asked that, there are already technical solutions that makes the lives easier for the developers to achieve that. That is my specialty, so I did provide some general opinions on the technical underpinnings, the infrastructure that will make interoperability, transparency, accountability easier for the implementers.

Audrey Tang: That was the extent of my conversation with the local business people.

Katherine Chen: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: It’s all on public record, by the way. [laughs] The fourth question, how to tell whether a digital policy is successful. How does multi stakeholderism enter the picture? That was the question.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, it’s easy to maximize participation, progress, or safety at the sacrifice to the other values. To me, it is only successful if we successfully find a overlap, a good enough consensus, things that all three values are satisfied to a degree, a good enough consensus. That is the success criteria.

Audrey Tang: For example, what was usually considered dilemmas was usually because of a lack of technological innovation. It used to be, for example, people think you either have a lot of privacy protection and to remove all the re identifiable material from your data, but then you don’t get good medical AI or something. You don’t get a lot of progress.

Audrey Tang: Or, if you can prioritize progress, then you must make some sacrifice to accept some risk for your personal information to re identified to a adversary with a lot of computation. Such safety progress dilemmas are easily solved if you ask for participation from people in the future. That is to say, if people in the future already live.

Audrey Tang: I was quoting this idea that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed. There are some people already living in the future. For example, in the Web3 world, they’re already living in a maximal scamming dangerous place where nobody can be trusted.

Audrey Tang: Already in this trustless world, they develop ways to authenticate nevertheless with just digital signatures and some proof state or proof of work and so on. If you ask these people what are the ways to do computation in a way that doesn’t sacrifice privacy at all, because if just a little bit is on the blockchain, it’s on there forever, so they don’t accept this tolerable sacrifice.

Audrey Tang: It must be zero knowledge, so they have developed a lot of privacy enhancing technologies, specifically zero knowledge technologies. If we use those ZK technology, then we solve the dilemma very easily because you can do computation without any knowledge of the personal data or the raw data.

Audrey Tang: Participation from people who already live in the future is the way to solve the trilemma. I would say a multistakeholder consultation is not a nice to have. It is a must if you want to overcome the dilemma.

Audrey Tang: I hope that answered the question.

Satoshi Narihara: Taiwan Government established the Ministry of Digital Affairs last August. You suggest Taiwan Government designed the Ministry of Digital Affairs, referring to the Japanese Digital Agency as its model. While the Japanese Digital Agency is considered the coordinator to make recommendations to other existing ministries and agencies related to digital policy, focusing on the digital transformation of Japanese public sector, the Taiwan Ministry of Digital Affairs seems to have a more comprehensive power of digital policy, including cybersecurity and digital industries, transferred from other existing ministries and agencies. What do you think about the pros and cons of these two models for the agile development of digital policy? [My question submitted in written form in advance]

Audrey Tang: The next question is in English. The Japanese digital agency is considered a coordinator to make recommendations. However, Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs seems to have more comprehensive power, including specifically cybersecurity and digital industries. What about the pros and cons?

Audrey Tang: The pro here is that, as I mentioned, it’s more agile. If you have your cybersecurity people, your industry platform people, and your participation and inclusion people all in the same room reporting to the same minister, then decisions are made quicker. That’s the obvious pro to it.

Audrey Tang: Another pro is that, as I mentioned, we are not taking away any existing supervisory powers from any other ministry. The ministry of transportation is still in charge for Uber, Airbnb, and iRent.

Audrey Tang: Then NCC is still in charge of the digital services when it comes to content moderation, take downs, and whatever.

Audrey Tang: By not taking away any existing power, we are like a servant leadership. We set the general direction and tone. We use ourselves to set examples, but we are not forcing any other ministry to do any transformation unless they feel safe and it’s useful for them.

Audrey Tang: This way, the con, of course, is that we cannot do a lot of top down stuff. We cannot say we think that, next year, everybody need to do X or everybody need to do Y. On the other hand, when a situation happens like the pandemic, there are capable, competent authorities like the Central Epidemic Command Center then can say this.

Audrey Tang: If we make sure that we work with their staff in a very close knit manner, and there’s a lot of mutual trust, then we only do top down enablements to the existing top down authorities when the situation calls for it and don’t do that if the situation don’t call for it.

Audrey Tang: What looks like a con, which is that we cannot solve things overnight, is actually a pro if you consider future better solutions in mind because we don’t foreclose those solutions. I hope that answered the question.

Satoshi Narihara: Thank you for the answer.

Satoshi Narihara: Next question. You advocate the attractive concept of radical transparency. On the other hand, under some circumstances, the Government may keep the operation and evidence secret in cognitive warfare, including countermeasures to foreign disinformation and cyberattack. How do you think the Government can reconcile the concept of radical transparency with the necessity of secrecy? [My question submitted in written form in advance]

Audrey Tang: The next one is radical transparency. The government, of course, may keep the operation secret, especially during a war, whether it’s a war that is on the kinetic space or on cyberspace.

Audrey Tang: Basically, what we’re saying is we need to work on a clear delineation between public information/open data on one side and secret, including trade secret and privacy, private health, information about privacy held by the government’s competent authorities, and so on.

Audrey Tang: The problem with radical transparency was that if, for example, we live streamed this conversation, then the delineation could be done in real time, [snaps] like every sentence I saw must be pre cleared, like this is confidential, this is not.

Audrey Tang: If we change the frame, for example for this conversation, everybody will be given a transcript in 10 days. If you what to redact anything, you can do that at your leisure. If you want to clarify something you said, you can also add that, hyperlinks and all, so that nobody’s taken out of context.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the day, what we want is not a show of live streaming. What we want is that everybody has the full context of the how of policymaking, not just the what of policies. Again, with digital innovation, we can foster this careful delineation of public data, open data, public code, and so on vis à vis the secrets. That is what we’re going forward to.

Audrey Tang: This also enabled the civil society to discover, “Oh, there are some thing that the government is pondering, even though it’s not yet policy.” They can then demand more, whether it is high quality data that we’re considering to do.

Audrey Tang: The citizens can say, “Oh, we want even better quality. We want higher resolution. We want it to be released in a way that is real time,” and so on. They can do so, but if we do not have this radically transparent catalog of our monthly ministerial meetings, they don’t even know that they can ask this, right?

Audrey Tang: This radical transparency during the policy making drafting stage, this is also essential in order to make the open data relationship a reciprocal one, so to speak. OK? Yes.

Satoshi Narihara: I think your points get right approaches basically. But, firstly, you require radical trnsparency especially at the stage of policy making. On the other hand, government may plan for example, countermeasures against foreign disinformation. These policy may depend on actual situation of disinformation.

Satoshi Narihara: However, under some circumstances, it is difficult for the government to reveal data related to decision making of countermeasures against foreign disinformation and the cyber attacks. What do you think about the point?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so, I think there are two different things going on here. Great question, by the way. One is that foreign disinformation based on a exaggeration or out of context interpretation, and so on, so it has some root in truth. It’s just misrepresented. Usually it’s called information manipulation, if that’s the case.

Audrey Tang: In this, contextualization is the cure. If everybody has the full context of what’s going on, and it’s easier to get access to this context than to share this misinformation, then, the problem is solved itself because it’s like you have a more viral vaccine than the virus itself. Maybe the viral vaccine is called Omicron…

Audrey Tang: OK, bad joke.

Audrey Tang: But a weaker form of virus that is nevertheless easily accessible can safeguard one against a toxic virus, is what I am saying. The point here is that if we make sure that the context is always delivered, for example with Twitter there is a function called Community Notes. It uses algorithm, it’s inspired by Polis, which is a algorithm I personally worked on and published.

Audrey Tang: The Community Note, if Elon Musk tweets something that is factually challenged, then, the Community Note is attached to the tweet. If you retweet it, you cannot do away with the Community Note.

Audrey Tang: The Community Note is crowd-sourced, and the top Community Notes are the ones that convince the people of polarizing ideologies. It measures bipartisanship, so the more people who disagree with each other can nevertheless see the insight in the Community Note that it’s more likely that this is journalistic.

Audrey Tang: It is journalistic. It means that it adds context to whatever exaggeration that Elon Musk announced. [laughs] I am just using him as a example. Like Elon Musk posted, in this case then, it will restore the balance of inoculation when people see this out of context tweet.

Audrey Tang: Something like Community Notes, crowd-sourced fact finding, crowd-sourced journalism, is part of what we call data altruism. People voluntarily donate their time to do fact-finding in Cofacts and so on, and In this sense, restore the contextual balance.

Audrey Tang: There is nothing secret about Community Notes, and there is nothing secret about Cofacts or other civil society endeavors in Taiwan because it relies on everybody participating.

Audrey Tang: In this sense, it’s not in tension with radical transparency, rather it is symbiotic with radical transparency, because when we are radical transparent fact finders easily take the entire context and visualize that as a Community Note.

Audrey Tang: Now, cyberattacks is sometimes another matter, right? If we let the people who do distributed denial-of-service know exactly IP addresses of our connection is as the radical transparency, then it makes attackers life very easy [laughs] and the defenders life very hard.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, radical transparency is about the policymaking contextualization. So of course, it doesn’t cover IP addresses. [laughs] It is not something that is adding context to policy making. It’s important to realize the goal of radical transparency. It is not a ritual that we perform on all IP network configuration plans. I hope that answers your question.

Satoshi Narihara: I got your point well. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Katherine Chen: Can I add a point?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Katherine Chen: Just a note, you mentioned a lot towards transparency and Community Notes, or something like that. That made me wonder, people don’t talk, they don’t contribute on social media, and they are called the silent public, then they don’t have any power in the policy making process.

Audrey Tang: I know people talk a lot to GPT. Don’t you think?

Katherine Chen: Yeah, of course.

Katherine Chen: I mean, some people just don’t talk. In a meeting, you know, they don’t talk. In Chinese societies, lots of people just don’t talk, but they have lots of thoughts. I just thought that your…I really like the idea of total transparency, but I just thought, maybe something, someone of some valuable source might be left out because they just don’t talk.

Audrey Tang: Again, I think this is a great point, which is why in meetings with asymmetrical power structures, for example, if another ministry is joining the meeting, usually their deputies, their DGs and staff and so on, will not just speak to counter the minister’s point. I don’t know why, but maybe they have their reason. We have a lot of such talks among ourselves in moda. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Not contradicting people in a position of superior power… I don’t think it’s just Asian, it’s just what people do. Usually, when we hold meetings such as this, there’s a site channel, maybe a Slido conversation, maybe a chat box, that preserves the pseudonymity or anonymity of the person, but still is limited to the people in the same meeting room or in the same town hall.

Audrey Tang: Still, they can use their phone to anonymously publish into our collective agenda. What is that we’re missing, the administers are missing? They can also like each other’s answers so that we know that of the 100 people in the meeting, 30 people feel that we really need to pay attention to this, without disclosing who was the actual person.

Audrey Tang: It makes it easier for people to raise their hand, so to speak, because there’s now 30 people sharing the responsibility and we don’t know which 30 people. Everybody is looking at their phone anyway. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Participation is a function of the space, not a function of the participants. This is what Kevin Kelly calls as a scenius. A scene is a stage. Instead of a genius, which is a person, in their genes, DNA, [laughs] a scenius is the genius of a certain space, a certain interaction pattern.

Audrey Tang: That is why participation, when it comes to a structural participation, can always serve as collective intelligence, even in cultures where a lot of agency is required for a person to raise their hand.

Katherine Chen: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Satoshi Narihara: Japanese students are very shy and hesitate to express opinions, so Japanese teachers and professors should introduce that kind of policy.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I had many conversations with students, including there was one with Tokyo University that was printed as part of a recently published book. Because it’s Slido, they’re all very active, but if you just look their webcams, everybody is like…

Audrey Tang: It’s very interesting.

Satoshi Narihara: Many people consider data protection a key factor of digital policy in Japan. In Taiwan, under the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA), the National Development Council is in charge of interpreting the Act and coordinating among relevant authorities. How are you involved in developing Taiwan’s data protection law as the Minister of Digital Affairs? How do you think data protection law should develop in terms of digital policy? [My question submitted in written form in advance]

Audrey Tang: The next one is about PDPA. Many people consider that PDPA…The NDC is in charge of interpreting the act, and the competent authorities is in charge of working with the actual businesses.

Audrey Tang: For example, the MoDA, through the Administration for Digital Industries, is working with the, for example, shopping malls online. The e merchants, if they are just selling groceries instead of Uber, Airbnb, which is transportation, then we are the competent authority when it comes to PDPA.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we work closely with them so that they can introduce the latest and greatest cybersecurity and privacy-enhancing technologies in their work and so on. The problem, though, was that there are sometimes new services that are not very clear-cut between competent authorities, leading to uneven regulation.

Audrey Tang: Like FoodPanda and UberEats, is it transportation or is it ordering grocery online? They’re now all selling grocery online. One way to look at it is the ordering part is MoDA, but the delivery part is MOTC. There are a lot of those emerging cases with new services where, to implement the PDPA, two or more ministries always need to work together because, by nature, these businesses are new business models that joins two or more ideas together.

Audrey Tang: There is increasingly a call, like Japan, to restructure the PDPA competent authorities so that there is one single commission, also to answer the GDPR. I think Korea also switched to a model like this. California also has switched to a model following a state referendum.

Audrey Tang: Personally, ever since 2016 when I first become minister, I always advocated for this particular transformation. I’m happy that the constitutional court also said that something like that needs to be done. I think the NDC already said publicly earlier this month that within a month they will have a road map to make this happen.

Audrey Tang: The next one pertains to political parties. What roles do political parties still play? How to overcome the bureaucratic resistance on open government? This is a great question because it’s about more forms of participation. Political parties are formed to continuously engage as parliamentarians, city councilors, and so on, to advance their party agenda.

Audrey Tang: They work on, I would say, a higher bandwidth, but also higher latency, meaning that the vote is once every four years or two years or things like that. In order to change a party agenda, in order to change a ruling party, usually, you need to wait a number of years before that happens. It’s for good reason, because of stability and so on.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, as I mentioned, there are many dilemmas, especially during the pandemic, that simply cannot wait for four years to solve. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The dilemma about how to get people’s anti vax sentiments, like how to lower their anxiety, if we don’t get one method right, we need to switch to that in 24 hours. We cannot wait for four years [laughs] to say, “OK, maybe the anti vax won the day four years ago. Let’s try something.” In four years, everything can happen.

Audrey Tang: In situations where it calls for urgency, then usually what we rely on instead is everybody calling into a toll free number, 1 922, and offering their best suggestions, which is also a direct participation. When the urgency calls for it, I think the latency need to shorten. When it’s as urgent as the pandemic, then the latency need to be 24 hours.

Audrey Tang: What we’ve been doing essentially is to create agile co processes to the existing parliamentary democracy, but we are not saying that everything is as urgent as these things. Maybe on things that are not as urgent, the original latency is just fine because it allows for higher bandwidth and higher deliberation between the fixed members.

Audrey Tang: There are also people who work on theories like augmenting these people with randomly drawn people’s rotations, and so on, citizen’s assembly like juries in policy making, which are very interesting theories, but that is not the main work that is MoDA, which is about agility and resilience.

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course.

Koichi Nakano: I was also fascinated by your earlier comments. If I understood you correctly, you emphasize the importance of offering contextualization against the potential problems of radicalization of democracy.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Koichi Nakano: I asked this question about political parties in some ways because that’s the old fashioned way in which context was provided by years and policies.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Koichi Nakano: In some ways, sooner they are breaking down, but then we still have to find a way to offer context so people can understand. I think you’ve been very much emphasizing participation as a way of providing that context by people helping out, even voluntarily, and so forth. That makes tremendous sense.

Koichi Nakano: I’m also worried, maybe not worried, but I also do wonder if there’s any room left for more traditional forms of authority being provided in that context. Of course, democracy doesn’t always get it right. Popular opinions may still be misguided, even when they were given with a lot of context information.

Koichi Nakano: Once you push through the digital agenda, then when you have to complement with the contextualization…I guess you mean, in some ways, it’s probably the difference between Taiwan and Japan, where I come from, because of course, Taiwan is a presidential democracy, and you are known as a genius. [laughs] You have authority.

Koichi Nakano: Whereas, in Japan, in some ways, we are a parliamentary democracy where the locus of responsibility or authority seems to be questioned. I think that was what accounts for the Japanese hesitancy in going further in digitalization. We can’t quite let go of the authoritarian approach.

Audrey Tang: I see your point. To check my understanding, there are two points here. One is that, in a sense, the citizens still want a figure of authority.

Koichi Nakano: Right.

Audrey Tang: Without this figure of authority, when it’s just community organizers all around, people, in a sense, lose political context. They’re anchored in the political context of strong people leading strong parties.

Koichi Nakano: Right.

Audrey Tang: That’s the first point. The second point is if I design a space, is the space functioning as a space of participation? I don’t have a constituency, because I’m appointee. People elect the president who appoint the premier who appoint me.

Audrey Tang: I can then say my constituency is the world, and people are, OK, fine, or anyone in the democratic world with freedom of speech and email address is my constituency, and I can get away with this.

Audrey Tang: In a parliamentary politics, if I do have a constituency, like in a district or so on, then whatever I say that sounds like a global, cosmopolitical constituency will be interpreted as a sort of betrayal to my primary constituency. Is that your second point?

Koichi Nakano: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: To the second point, that’s definitely the case, which is why in parliamentary systems, if the spaces for collaboration are clearly delineated out, for example, in participatory budgeting, sometimes the parliament meets and say for these particular budget items for a few percent of our total budget, we want to delegate it to a commission to run participatory budget.

Audrey Tang: Then since all the parties already agree to carve out this PB budget, it’s not a betrayal if all the parties do it.

Audrey Tang: Usually, we need to find some agenda setting power, whether it’s on budget, the SDG priorities, ways to encourage people to reduce carbon offset, not traditional zero sum gerrymandering stuff, and for these things, you carve out a PB, then it achieve the same effect as a double appointee.

Audrey Tang: I think that there is a theoretical solution to this.

Audrey Tang: The first point, I think that’s about peak experience, about people’s own experience of collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, before 2014, not many people believe in collective intelligence, but when people all experienced collective agenda setting, then it becomes cool to participate in the civil society organization no matter how minor you are, because all CSO support every other CSO for a while after 2014.

Audrey Tang: Then that creates a fruitful condition on top of which the people who are community organizers but not strong person, top down rulers or populists, to nevertheless gain agenda setting power through multi stakeholderism.

Audrey Tang: To design for such a peak experience where many people experienced that for the first time together, that is very important.

Koichi Nakano: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: I would add a point that for many people, the digital participation and community caring, especially during the pandemic when the civic function supplements the state function that simply didn’t work, that was the wake up call for many people.

Audrey Tang: In the US, I’ve got many friends who organized vaccination websites, precisely because the state one doesn’t work. Then they organized a lot of community relief and so on. The thing that we do in the cabinet, maybe they do on a community grassroots level until, of course, the state realized maybe it’s better to do things that way.

Audrey Tang: When people have that sort of experience, they will carry on to other topics, not just counter pandemic.

Audrey Tang: The next question is about inclusivity. I didn’t receive the full text of the question. Do you have the ninth question? I just saw that maybe I should introduce a little bit about equity and inclusion in digital opportunities.

Audrey Tang: Of course, I can talk for hours about how broadband is a human right, how we guarantee that people have full participation in the policy making process, how we make sure that the accessibility and inclusion, including our 20 national languages.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, we have AI that actually works to a degree. We can gradually make sure that it becomes natural for things to be transcultural by default. These are, of course, all the things that we’re working on, and if you have specific points, I’m happy to highlight on that point.

Koichi Nakano: I’m actually quite struck by the difference between Taiwan and Japan in many ways.

Audrey Tang: How so?

Koichi Nakano: Because, of course, Japan, in spite of the earlier image that it’s high tech, it’s advanced, it’s still very much stuck in the analogue age in many ways. In fact, quite often, people too are resistant. It’s not just the bureaucracy. The people too, because the trilemma that you talked about…

Audrey Tang: Safety is prioritized.

Koichi Nakano: Safety is prioritized because participation is not really considered to be one of the priorities in the perception of a lot of people from the government’s point of view. Because of the popular reluctance, progress is also not delivered very often. It’s like a vicious cycle in many ways.

Koichi Nakano: The conservative bureaucracy really holds on to the authority, because if everything is digitalized, if participation is broadened, then they’re going to lose power, and in the absence of the wider change of government, then the same older men stay in power. The picture is so different in fact, that it really hit home.

Audrey Tang: We have this existential urgency all the time, not just during the pandemic.

Koichi Nakano: Yeah. You’ll say that Japan I guess is much more complacent, but that’s also why it’s slacking behind, I guess.

Audrey Tang: I think safety is great. I call myself a conservative anarchist. I want to ensure that we don’t accidentally destroy possible futures when they were still a minoritized population, which is why this rough consensus collaboration across diversity is so important to my politics.

Audrey Tang: That resonates a lot with Japan. When I talk to Prof. Jun Murai before the digital agency was inaugurated, he talked about the デジ道, the way of the digital, how that in Japan is interpreted as leaving no one behind, of maximal inclusion, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s about emphasis on participation’s role in safety. Too often, people think of participation and they think chaos, destructive innovation, move fast and break everything, and people become afraid of participation, and so was the career public service 10 years ago. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We worked together to establish participation for safety, and to your point, I think that is very much possible in Japan.

Koichi Nakano: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: All right, we’ve got still 10 minutes or so, if there’s any questions.

Katherine Chen: I think we have about three minutes left.

Audrey Tang: It’s OK, I’m a couple of minutes late here anyway…

Audrey Tang: …so I’ll return the time to you.

Katherine Chen: You just mentioned that, during the pandemic, the government was thinking about the power to the people, so that you have room to develop those digital tracing apps for us.

Katherine Chen: That was a very good policy or measures for us. Just wondered, of course pandemic is another extreme, it surprises us. but during the normal time, who is the person who can define, now, who can give more power to people to participate to effect official results?

Audrey Tang: Well, I’m still the governmental co-chair for the Taiwan Open Government National Action Plan Taskforce.

Audrey Tang: The supporting work was already and always done by the NDC. In fact, when NDC first formed, it was specifically tasked to do this kind of participation. The Join platform, for example, despite being a digital platform, is still at the NDC; it’s not MoDA.

Audrey Tang: The NDC still maintains the entire infrastructure for participation. Now, specifically on the digital realm, when it comes to, as I mentioned, open data, data altruism, and so on, I’m still the governmental co-chair.

Katherine Chen: OK, good. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Thank you.