Anders Frick: This will be edited, of course. I will not use the film, as it is. Just for your information. What’s on here?

Anders Frick: Happy to be here. I’m Anders from Sweden. I work as a freelance journalist.

Anders Frick: I’ve been covering open data for pretty long time, writing a couple of books. I’m impressed by Taiwan in many ways, and I’m happy to be here to ask you some questions about it, especially your work with the government.

Anders Frick: We have been emailing and exchanging some questions and answers already through the web-based system, but here we can elaborate a little bit more I’m thinking. The first and most central question is how are you making the government more transparent?

Audrey Tang: Do you want me to get into the specifics, or do you want the overview?

Anders Frick: You have said that you do through radical transparency, just quickly the overview and then some details about it.

Audrey Tang: OK, sure. Which camera do I look?

Anders Frick: You can talk to me and the cameras will be here.

Audrey Tang: That’s a side-cam mainly.

Anders Frick: That’s the side-cam. I might use it or might not use it, and extra.

Audrey Tang: Do you read Chinese, or should I just translate everything?

Anders Frick: I cannot read Chinese, unfortunately.

Audrey Tang: OK, so I’ll just translate everything. That cam is recording this screen, so you’ll have the footage of the presentation also.

Anders Frick: Which camera is that?

Audrey Tang: That’s the camera, the one that’s shining green. Transparency for me is a instrument, it is not an end in itself. The end all of transparency, or radical transparency as you put it, is to rebuild trust between the civil society and the government, as well as between different stakeholders in a civil society.

Audrey Tang: That is our driving value. Everything that we do is centered around this rebuilding trust. On the civil society side of course, I’m the minister with a portfolio in charge of social innovation and use the empowerment. In that, we try to build a civil society that can look at new issues facing the society.

Audrey Tang: Instead of waiting for the government to fix it, instead take proactive action to solve it, and share the result with the government. This is a very different idea from this top-down approach of policy-making.

Audrey Tang: It enables a lot of agency from the civil society, especially when they see that they are also data producers. In many countries, the open data policy focuses on government open data. It’s as if open data just means government open data.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, it’s not like that. When we’re saying open data policy or transparency policy, we see the civil society -- the private sector -- as equals, as peers, as also data producers. One of the concrete example is the g0v movement.

Audrey Tang: The g0v movement takes the idea that any government website that should exist, but doesn’t yet, the civil society make a g0v.tw counterpart. Instead of the .gov government website, you go into the shadow government.

Audrey Tang: For example, this is what a civil society thinks the government should do, but doesn’t yet. This is the air pollution map of Pinyin, 2.5 as well as other substances in the air. At the moment, there’s only very limited measurement stations set up by the government, and so the resolution, the granularity of data is not so good.

Audrey Tang: This is basically citizen science, people donating their houses, their roofs, the kindergartens, or schools, or whatever, to set up a citizen measurement devices, and sharing the data under a radically transparent way. I think the distinction that we make here is that we see the trust is mutual.

Audrey Tang: If the government affirms this kind of citizen science, also uses this in our policy-making, and also commits to calibrate our data with the citizen-produced data, and essentially aggregates all the different sources of data into a supercomputer center. For example, allowing independent researchers to run models and whatever. This builds a platform on which the civil society people can make their own interventions.

Audrey Tang: Nevertheless, it’s based on the same factual data as the government policy makers. This is basically us saying we respect the civil society and private sector actors as peers. Then, we do policy-making by looking at the social innovations that’s perhaps done on a local level or on a smaller scale, and then we amplify those good ideas.

Audrey Tang: That’s the left side of my work, which is social innovation and used empowerment.

Anders Frick: May I just stop about with this air population thing?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Anders Frick: Of course, the quality of the measurements when you have the governmental devices, the quality of the data is probably pretty high while you have the data from the crowd, which have not be so accurate. We don’t know. It can be very accurate. It can be less accurate or good accurate.

Anders Frick: How can that be taken into part in what we just saw here? How can you help building trust by mixing the high-quality data with more uncertain data?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not by default that just because it’s produced by the citizens that it’s automatically lower quality.

Anders Frick: No, of course not. I’m talking about the technical device created. I made this myself, a device for â¬30.

Audrey Tang: The air box, something like that?

Anders Frick: Yeah, while a governmental device might cost 1 million or 10 million. I don’t know. A lot. You cannot make them equal to each other. That’s why wanted to hear.

Audrey Tang: That could be equalized. For example, our Industrial Technology Research Institute has been focusing for the past few months on making very affordable air pollution detectors for the citizens.

Audrey Tang: While at the moment it is based on, as you said, uncertain quality, because if the sensor gets polluted, or when it fluctuates a little bit, it actually relies on surrounding data to calibrate. It doesn’t always work.

Audrey Tang: If the ITRI produces such sensors in a way that doesn’t exceed the cost of the current off-the-shelf components, and nevertheless passes the BSMI testing requirements, then that’s the best of both worlds, because then the citizen scientists can use ITRI certified sensors. Especially, if they get to participate in the definition of its specification, its range, what to measure, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: What I mean by peer production or social production is the idea that we solve the problem of the problem solvers. If the citizen scientists report that their measurement device is not accurate enough, we solve that problem.

Audrey Tang: We’re not saying that, "OK, you’re automatically disqualified or of a lesser degree." We don’t think that way. Does that make sense?

Anders Frick: Yeah, got it.

Audrey Tang: That’s on the left side, which is social innovation, collaboration with civil society, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: On the right-hand side, I’m also working on automating the administrative public servants’ workflow. The idea is that, if data is produced specifically for open data, and it’s not part of the automated service delivery chain, then it essentially relies on the outside, a third party, to verify whether your open data actually works or not.

Audrey Tang: Because, it’s not part of the information flow of normal administrative function. If it doesn’t work or if it breaks the downstream would not notice. It’s only when the third party notices, then we get the feedback saying, "OK, this is broken."

Audrey Tang: The whole idea is that the data governance and the automated data gathering devices should first be part of the administrative workflow. Second, it should result in measurably less burden for the administrative functions.

Audrey Tang: For example, there is a project that we did called IoT for Public Welfare. This is a special budget project.

Audrey Tang: This broad project combines the air pollution data with the disaster recovery data. For example, shelters, and things like that, as well a typhoon and weather data, as well as water pollution measurement, as well as earthquake predicted. Anything that is part of the nature that doesn’t have privacy concerns is game for IoT for Public Welfare.

Audrey Tang: One of the end goals of the IoT for Public Welfare, especially when it comes to pollution, like air and river pollution, is that for the EPA, for the Environmental Protection Agency. At the moment, when they get some incident response saying that this particular factory or this particular field is perhaps burning something or smoking something that causes air or water pollution, they have to actually go there, measure, and do a lot of preparatory work.

Audrey Tang: Their staff is limited. If we don’t design the open data flow with their workflow, then they keep getting overworked, and they have also, the obligation to maintain the open data. This doesn’t really work.

Audrey Tang: We designed a KPI. We designed a Key Performance Index as how exactly does this save the investigators’ time, so that perhaps in a day they could only look at two or three incident responses, but with the IoT for Public Welfare they could check with much finer granularity. They can deploy drones or do other automated measurements, so that they can process 10 or 12 incidents per day.

Audrey Tang: That lowers their burden. That increases their work quality, because the repetitive work they don’t have to do anymore. They can focus on their domain knowledge work.

Audrey Tang: By basically selling open data and data governance as a way to reduce the governmental public servants’ workload, we try to ensure that they can be the maintainer of the system, instead of a higher-up, a CIO, whatever being the caretaker.

Audrey Tang: This integration with the government workflow is the counterpart of the civil society empowerment, which is ensuring that a civil society will keep us honest. These two are balancing each other.

Anders Frick: What you just mentioned here was very interesting because you...Sorry.

Audrey Tang: It’s OK.

Anders Frick: Having those not CIOs, maybe or not, because if we can come back to your own work in organizations, you appoint champions to every department.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, the Participation Officers. The POs.

Anders Frick: It makes the same feeling as what you just mentioned here. Why do you think this approach of appointing champions, either to your own, or every department, or what you just mentioned, why is that good?

Audrey Tang: As compared to what?

Anders Frick: As compared to having this, for say, formal, hierarchical structure. The boss is here, and then going down. Why is it better to have this champion?

Audrey Tang: Sometimes it’s better to have champions, and sometimes it’s good to have a hierarchical control. I’m certainly not saying that anarchy is solution to everything at the moment.

Audrey Tang: One of the reasons why we appoint champions is that we want to make sure that whenever there is a cross-ministry or cross-departmental case, the Participation Officers, they can talk to the same people across different ministries.

Audrey Tang: For example, the IoT for Public Welfare, that is essentially five, six different ministries. If you have different ministries having one-shot meetings, it doesn’t really accumulate the knowledge in their ministries. For each of them it’s a one-shot relationship.

Audrey Tang: If we have a stable participation officer, we call it a network or a community. Then, every time you’d go into a cross-ministerial case you meet with the same cohort of Participation Officers.

Audrey Tang: As any students of prisoner’s dilemma would tell you, if you know that it’s the same bunch of people for the next four years, then you better start building camaraderie and solidarity, because otherwise it doesn’t pay off in the long run. That’s the main reason why it’s champions.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is that it also is like a fractal, is like a tree in the sense that we also empower through regulations. That those ministerial champions can also appoint their agency-level, third-level champions, which can in turn, appoint fourth-level champions.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that, because they are, essentially the coordinator for their respective ministry, they can also build camaraderie between those different third-level or fourth-level agencies when it comes to public participation.

Audrey Tang: This is even more important than cross-ministerial team, because there are existing cross-ministerial communication mechanisms, but there’s actually quite few cross-agency communication across ministries.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that when it’s more than three levels of hierarchy usually people don’t communicate across silos at all anymore. When it’s just one level or two level people still find some way, but when it’s three levels deep there’s no way for a third-level, fourth-level agency in one ministry to contact the third or fourth level in another, far away ministry.

Audrey Tang: With a Participation Officer network, everybody is flat on the same Rocket.Chat channel, and it’s just one click away. That builds this camaraderie more easily than if we have just one CIO, and everybody reports to the same person.

Anders Frick: Besides those meetings, how are they communicating with each other? Which technical platform are you using, or which systems?

Audrey Tang: We use the Sandstorm system. The Sandstorm system is a free software design that is certified by our cyber security department.

Audrey Tang: It includes chat rooms, file storage, task management, documents, spreadsheet editing. Basically, it’s like Dropbox, plus Facebook, plus Wikipedia, plus whatever.

Audrey Tang: As you can see, it is quite varied. There’s collaborative bookmarks, there’s collaborative link sharing, there’s even an application for ordering lunch box together. That was designed by one of the public servants here.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that, because the basic platform is hardened against cyber security attacks, anyone can write applications very easily without worrying about its cyber security implications, and so people start innovating exactly what they can do to collaborate there.

Audrey Tang: My own office, the PDIS office, about 20-something people here, every day we start by looking at this comment board, and then we see what everybody is working on, what everybody’s current task completion is doing.

Audrey Tang: As we can see, for example, this is one of our websites. As part of this website we can see exactly who is responsible for which we redesign action, how complete it is, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Basically, this enables a culture, what we call working out loud, meaning that people who don’t have a direct reporting relationship nevertheless has this ambient feeling of what everybody is up to. When there’s a ad hoc group that needs to be formed, we can very easily form on a chat room, or on a shared mind map, or whatever here.

Anders Frick: To what extent is this used by other departments as well? Or, is it just your department or others?

Audrey Tang: No, and champions.

Anders Frick: Yeah, yeah, champions. Sorry.

Audrey Tang: Our chat room for example, the PO chat, which is the chat room of our Participation Officers, initially it’s just one person from each ministry, but now, because everybody can invite anyone from their ministries, it’s now 105 people. This is very cross-departmental as you can see.

Anders Frick: I should have rephrased it, because it feels like this could be used in the whole governmental organization, not only amongst the champions. What do you say? What’s your feeling? Could this platform or system...

Audrey Tang: This is basically a set of applications. What we know is that -- for example some departments such as our MIS department here, they only use the comment board. They don’t use anything else. Or for example, when we talk with the Taipei city’s DOIT, Department of Information Technologies, they’re mostly interested in this organized link-sharing, bookmarking system and little else for example.

Audrey Tang: I think the idea is that we set up this platform, and we make sure that anybody who has any email address that ends in g0v.tw automatically gets a user account. They can deploy their own applications. They can use one of the existing applications.

Audrey Tang: We don’t try to say that you have to use exactly the set of seven applications that we do. It’s OK, if you just use, let’s say Dropbox replacement for example. That’s one of the more popular ones.

Anders Frick: We started talking about this, making government more transparent. Every Wednesday you work outside the administration. It’s usually innovation lab. Why?

Audrey Tang: That’s one of the things that they asked. When we built the social innovation lab, we run a set of five consultation meetings. Basically, we just prepared the hardware, the building itself, but we don’t define any software.

Audrey Tang: The software was co-designed by more than a hundred social entrepreneurs, social innovators. They asked for a kitchen. We got a kitchen. They asked for a room with whiteboards and with no tables. We got this ideation room. They ask for a green screen and livestreaming equipment. We have that.

Audrey Tang: Software-wise, they ask for two things. First that they ask that it opens until midnight. Now, it’s open from 7 to 11 in the midnight. Then, they asked that for me and responsible ministries to send their window to social enterprise policy-making into the service office. They ask for office hours, because it’s also a accelerator or incubator for social innovators. It’s natural that mentors have office hours.

Audrey Tang: That’s what they asked, and so that’s what I deliver. Every Wednesday technically, if you look at the se.pdis.tw, which is our social enterprise portal, you can see that the social innovation lab actually has a Audrey is always here timetable which shows exactly when I’m here.

Audrey Tang: Technically, it says that every Wednesday from 10 to 2 PM. That’s actually the formal schedule. In practice for the past month or so, I’m practically from 10 AM to 10 PM there. It’s like 12 hours on every Wednesday. People gradually think that it’s not a big deal to just go and talk to a minister.

Audrey Tang: Aside from the fact that it’s all recorded, we also make sure that every other Tuesday, we go to the four different regional offices of Taiwan and bring the office hour results to those different areas as well, while the 11 ministries related to social enterprise stay in the social innovation lab, but we set up two-way video conferencing. They also have their office hour, but remotely.

Anders Frick: Interesting. You have been establishing your regulations for this PO network. You have done many good things. What are the biggest challenges? You mentioned trust, but how? Can you mention more details about how to build a trust?

Audrey Tang: One of the ways that social media is getting people closer is by essentially having people who meet each other through common keywords, or common causes, or whatever. This is what we call swift trust. People very quickly form rapport on the social media.

Audrey Tang: Due to the way the current generation of social media is designed, it’s easier for a message to go viral, if it makes people to respond within the first six seconds. Basically, engaging people’s enragement or in people’s whatever their negative feelings are. It’s actually easier to get people to press share before commenting or before reading everything.

Audrey Tang: It means that counter-power is easier to manufacture on social media than power, because for power, you have to actually understand what’s at stake for the stakeholders. For counter-power to assemble, all you have to do is point at one example and incite outrage among that photo or among that idea.

Audrey Tang: We have a e-petition system. For example, there is a petition saying we have a explosively user hostile tax reporting system. That’s perhaps not an exaggeration. Maybe, it really does take four hours or whatever for a Mac or a Linux user to finish their tax reporting online as compared to a Windows user which only takes maybe 20 minutes. Mac and Linux users are used to better user experiences. It’s doubly insulting for them.

Audrey Tang: It’s very easy for this kind of messages to go viral, because people all have the experience of filing taxes. Also filing taxes are not usually associated with a pleasant feeling. It’s very easy for people to feel for this petitioner, and for the social media to fill with counter-power messages that blames the vendor, for example.

Audrey Tang: To rebuild trust, the whole idea is that for people who are assembling and measuring their counter-power and petitioning and whatever, we have participation officers to contact them immediately. For this example, I think it’s within the first 48 hours that our PO decided to contact the petitioner.

Audrey Tang: It’s very interesting, because we watch the social media, watch the petition. Initially, it’s 90 percent negative, 10 percent positive, but soon as we did contact and saying that we’re inviting the people who complain the loudest into our workshop to discover how can we do better, then it becomes 80 percent positive, 20 percent negative. It’s just like that.

Audrey Tang: Then, within a couple weeks we actually invited everybody. We livestream this workshop over the Internet. Anyone who doesn’t like the tax filing system can all see how is it like for the participant to engage on what we call user journey mapping of all the touchpoints.

Audrey Tang: Soon as that happens, the ministries actually see the advantage, saying, "All those people who complained the loudest are actually UX experts, expert service designers, expert reporters and journalists," for example.

Audrey Tang: They actually know what they’re talking about which is why they’re angrier than other people, because they understand the problem on a deeper fashion, or has suffered for longer than other people.

Audrey Tang: The Participation Office of the Ministry of Finance organized five workshops. In each workshop, we have various stakeholders, not just citizens and users, but also facilitators, POs, contracted IT companies, and so on. We collaboratively redesign the tax filing system that’s last year’s. That’s this year’s system.

Audrey Tang: As soon as this is convened, and as soon as this is the consensus, all processes as well as all the transcript of any decision leading to this revamping of Mac/Linux tax filing system is published online.

Audrey Tang: People gradually started to anticipate a better solution. They also understand that their contribution is actually taken into account. Finally, anything that’s not so good with this year’s tax filing experience, they know exactly how it will be improved on the next year.

Audrey Tang: This is what we call radically trusting the civil society. We trust the people who complain actually have something to contribute even without any supporting evidence at the beginning. They actually are people who have something to contribute.

Anders Frick: If we shift a little bit to open data, what is the most important do in order to publish more and relevant open data? What would you say?

Audrey Tang: I think I did answer that. First, by making the data flow part of the administrative workflow, and then by changing the procurement rules, so that it doesn’t take a extra step of processing, but actually it produces structured data just as part of the procurement.

Anders Frick: Also I would like to add how can...Because sometimes when you publish open data, it’s not used. You publish something, but it’s not used, or it’s not used very much. How do you find which data that could be most relevant to publish as open data?

Audrey Tang: Our national open data portal...Again, we also accept citizen contributions. If the government doesn’t collect the data yet, we also have civil society and private sector contributing the data as you can see already with the air pollution thing. Of course, they also have their own issues to solve which the government can then play the role of facilitator. That’s one way of knowing it.

Audrey Tang: The other way of course is on the data portal, we also have an area where people can just simply request data. This is just like a Freedom of Information Act, if we have the data. We just didn’t know that people want it. Then, we just publish it. It’s that simple.

Audrey Tang: For things that the government already collects, but isn’t published yet, at the moment, we have a regulation that says it should be open by default. When people ask, it just gets published. That’s one thing.

Audrey Tang: For things that government doesn’t collect, we encourage the civil society to collect. If collection needs governmental help, like the sensor thing that from ITRI, then we have plans to improve the data collection activities of private sector and civil society.

Audrey Tang: What I mean is the open data is not exclusive to government. It’s not even primarily government, but the government can serve as a first try example or whatever, and is especially setting up a license that is compatible with all the data users.

Anders Frick: This open by default philosophy, how did you achieve that? How did you make it possible?

Audrey Tang: Our freedom of information law already specify that there’s only two things that shouldn’t be public or should be public only after internal deliberation. One is the decisional history of a policy before the policy decision is made. That is draft data. That’s one set of data.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is that when it’s collected, but it touches on privacy, or trace secret, or any other thing that people would reasonably only allow this data to be used for a specific purpose, then other purposes need to be deliberated before it could be published.

Audrey Tang: We don’t even encourage, if it’s purely private data like healthcare to produce this open data, because conceptually personal data and open data is entirely not overlapping category. In our FOI law, there’s already those two conditions.

Anders Frick: Even if it is...Sweden has more than 350 years of openness so say. There’s still though, if you need to go to the government and ask for specific data, then you can get it. That’s a different thing from having people in government proactively publishing open data.

Audrey Tang: It’s not that different. The traditional FOI flow is that you ask for data. The government redacts something and give a copy to you, and saying, "OK, you can read it," or, "You can use it for journalistic purposes."

Audrey Tang: Now, the only change is that in addition of providing it to you, the government also publish it on the open data platform, implicitly granting derivative work rights to pretty much everybody and also saves their time, because the next person doesn’t have to ask them anymore.

Audrey Tang: As I said, it’s part of the administrative simplification, that that’s how we convey the message to the public servant. It’s basically saying, "If you publish on the open data portal, we make sure that the legislators, the journalists, the data scientists, they all know where to look at. They won’t bother you again, if they want a copy of that data." I think that’s the main idea.

Anders Frick: The public servants, they are fine with that or are they thinking that data could be interpreted in a way that makes it, so to say not looking accurate? All data if it could be mixed, there could be some mismatch. Is this is a fear that you feel among the public servants?

Audrey Tang: Not really, because if they don’t publish the data, the civil society and the private sector nevertheless try to collect data anyway. If they are on a different factual basis as the government policy-makers, it actually creates more issues.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like after a meeting if the meeting doesn’t have a transcript or a record, journalists can still ask participants what happened in the meeting. The problem is that the three journalists asking three different participants, they get three different versions of what happened in the meeting. It’s not like there’s no confusion, if we don’t publish the meeting’s transcript.

Audrey Tang: To publish the meeting’s transcript on the other hand, make sure that the three journalists at least is basing their report on same factual basis. They can still provide their perspectives, but at least we don’t have to address the confusion and the rumors and whatever.

Audrey Tang: I think the idea is just to make factual data spread as fast as rumors. Then, we don’t worry about rumors that much anymore.

Anders Frick: Taiwan was ranked as number one in the global open data index. You said that it should be taken with a little bit of grain of salt. Why?

Audrey Tang: Because, it just measures the very basic data sets. It’s just like every household should have water, should have electricity, should have public roads leading to it. It doesn’t really mean much. It means that there’s some basic facilities. Beyond those basic data, the open data index doesn’t even say anything. For us, this is like primary school level exam that you pass, but it doesn’t really say much.

Anders Frick: Do you want to see any alternative? Do you want to see another index instead of this one?

Audrey Tang: The civil society is already doing their own research using the open data parameter, for example, or other qualitative or more impact-related assessments. We do look at those, but we don’t think that we should just fix one particular measurement. We look at all the different reports for the independent like Transparency International and Open Culture Foundation and then react accordingly.

Audrey Tang: We don’t think that we should just focus in on one particular index and base our policy on staying number one of it. Although it’s been two years running, we don’t place that much importance, because for us, it’s just primary school level stuff.

Anders Frick: You say that you don’t work for the government. Instead, you say you work within the part.

Audrey Tang: With the government, that’s right.

Anders Frick: The government only so to say pays your salary. Can you just elaborate, why do you have this approach?

Audrey Tang: That’s because the work that I’m doing, for example, the participation officer work and things like that, I relinquish any and all copyright to it. We actively work and publish papers and so on. For me, Taiwan is just one of the places of a global, pretty connected cities.

Audrey Tang: For example, people in Iceland, people in Paris, people in Barcelona, in Madrid, in New York City, and in other places, they are all experimenting with this transparency, inclusive participation, and things like that. For me, they’re my colleagues. We’re just working in respective labs, for example, and essentially sharing the best practice or better practices.

Audrey Tang: When for example Iceland has a petition system user experience redesign that works really well, within a month, you see Taiwan adopting it and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I think if I work just for the people in Taiwan, the influence or the participation base is actually pretty limited, because Taiwan after all is pretty new to this democracy thing. If we take into account the wider community of all the people working on participative democracy, then we get a much larger constituent base and can provide better constituency values.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think my work is limited to Taiwan. I actually get a lot of users of this system method outside Taiwan, even adopting faster than the Taiwan regional governments.

Anders Frick: This leads to a question about local, global countries, regions. How or maybe, I should ask why or if a national state should earn revenues and make companies stay in the country when the payment, labor, and trade will flow around and be more global? Let me rephrase. Let me ask you the question what’s opinion about so to say having a country or state view? How important is it?

Audrey Tang: For open data or open source or open culture in general, you don’t see many licenses that restrict its uses to particular countries. For things related to encryption, there used to be some regional restrictions, but they’re not very popular anymore.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, the creative common license, the major open data license, the major open source licenses, you don’t even refer to countries. They’re universal in this sense. For this work, I would say it is not at all important for nation-states or countries as artificial boundaries.

Audrey Tang: It may be more relevant for people who work on the same community to look at shared time zones, just because of whether you use email, or Skype, or shared computer languages, or natural languages. That still makes some distinction. That still makes some sense as the border to form community perhaps. I don’t think nation-states play any part in the open data or open source culture.

Anders Frick: As the world is becoming more global, do you see that people will be more equal? The poverty will be reduced. Will people be more equal in the world when this is happening? Or, what do you think?

Audrey Tang: Internet was designed with that in mind. That’s the Internet’s idea is a protocol that networks across different networks. That’s what the "Inter" means in the Internet. Of course, so far it’s been working pretty well.

Audrey Tang: There are of course, people who want to reinstall nation-state into the Internet with the idea’s called separate sovereignty, or things like that. So far, I think people who actively work on the core Internet protocols still have not adopted the separate sovereignty view. It still has this liberalizing or equalizing force as you said.

Audrey Tang: I’m also aware that there are thinkers and policy-makers who want to reign in Internet and its cross-country or even anarchistic, participatory nature, and try to reinstate the Internet as part of the state’s apparatus instead of something that is orthogonal to states. This trend and its counter trend both exist. I’m not denting that it doesn’t exist, but so far, this seems to be still working.

Anders Frick: Do you think that this and also automation in general finally will lead to basic income?

Audrey Tang: You mean universal basic income.

Anders Frick: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: As experiments or as smaller scale test fields or as referendum subjects, we see more and more of that popping up. If you ask this question in the idea of within a century, or within 500 years, or in one of the planets in the galaxy, I’m pretty sure that it will happen in one way or the other. I don’t really know where it will happen first.

Audrey Tang: I do know that we need to separate the idea of work and tasks in order for this to happen. If people identify with particular task and the skills associated with that task and take too much pride into it. Then, universal basic income will be seen as a attack on this proudness of working by really task-performing person.

Audrey Tang: If people used to work as completing life’s work, or doing something that has a positive social impact, then any automation is just fuel to this life’s work. Then, people will be much more accepting of universal basic income. There’s a cultural change that needs to happen before the economic change could happen.

Anders Frick: There has been recently a big talking about -- especially in Sweden -- the Me Too movement you call it. One question I got from the crowd to ask you was, how the Me Too has been in Taiwan from your perspective, and how Taiwan is handling sexual harassments in workplace and both physical world, but more importantly online.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is I would say pretty advanced, especially in Asia due to marriage equality and other very progressive views held both by the current President and the previous one. They’re both ahead of their parties when it comes to this kind of equality and also representation.

Audrey Tang: Gender fair representation is also constitutionally protected. That gives us some head start, because for each and every regulation, for each and every law, there need to be a gender impact assessment made for the regulation or the law.

Audrey Tang: There’s also a growing awareness of the idea that cyberbullying, or whatever has been given space by a blaming the victim activity for example.

Audrey Tang: I think all this has been pretty much dominant culture even on the youth or teenager culture in Taiwan. It gives a relative safe space, especially when we just talk about south of Asia.

Audrey Tang: As a transgender myself and have many LGBTQ friends, of course it’s not optimal at the moment as people just don’t care about gender anymore, or people just don’t have any Me Too moments anymore, but we at least when there’s a public incident, when there’s a public discussion, the social justice people are always the mainstream opinion.

Audrey Tang: There’s of course counter opinions, but they are strictly in the minority. Due to the marriage equality case, the conservative or I would say so-called conservative forces are mobilizing and are gathering. That is true. We see more overt expression of gender stereotyping and whatever that’s happening. I think that is just part of the storm working into the ratification process of marriage equality.

Audrey Tang: I think our administration’s strategy of dealing it as a right and privilege issue instead of a religious, spiritual, cultural issue has its merits, because then people see marriage not as something spiritual, but something that is just part of the rising privileges, basically a contract.

Audrey Tang: By reviewing line by line exactly what has been granted, what has been enjoyed, it’s secularizes marriage. It also makes it much easier for people with different ideologies or different religions to talk with this in economic terms. Once you get here, it’s much harder for gender stereotyping, for harassment to grow, because then it becomes an economic argument and is not very gender-based at this point.

Anders Frick: Because in Sweden, it has affected so many industries. The Me Too movement has a really huge impact, because I’m curious how it is in Taiwan. Did it also have a big impact here or was it just a smaller thing that passed by, because you already have...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because people generally trust that there is a systematic approach to report and handle sexual harassments. It’s like a para-court system that handles this workplace harassment and misconduct.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, in one of the sexual harassment cases happened in the university that doesn’t go through the usual arbitration channels. That becomes a scandal. People I think generally has some trust in this arbitration channels that’s been around for quite a few years.

Anders Frick: Also when we talk about this, how is it being a transgender in politics? Is it challenging in a certain way?

Audrey Tang: People don’t care.

Anders Frick: Also a question about the sustainability thing, what do you think is the next step that digitalization can take on sustainability issues? What do you think? How can digitalization help?

Audrey Tang: As the minister in charge of social innovation and social entrepreneurship, we do see that a large number of young people and also people who are retiring, as we call this cross-generational, start-ups and innovators, they start with the explicit goal of tackling one of the SDG, one of the sustainable development goals.

Audrey Tang: I think that that’s a very good sign, because that means that Taiwan sees the society as something that can solve problems, not just caused by poverty or regional disasters or issues, but also issues caused by technology, isolation, cyberbullying, rising inequality due to automation, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: There’s plenty of social innovators who start with the explicit goal of transforming how people look at handicapped people, how people look at blind people, how people look at people who deal on the street in a wheelchair. There are concerted efforts to make not just social influence, but social impact when it comes to those development goals.

Audrey Tang: It is also our goal in the national government to provide as much as possible regulatory leeway to those people, because when those people discover a new way to have social impact, they usually more often than not run into existing regulations.

Audrey Tang: Because, they share the government’s goal of furthering public good, of solving sustainability issues, we give them precedence in trying to harmonize the regulations in their favor and trying to redo our interpretations of laws, so that they can innovate or even designing sandbox laws where they can be illegal and run counter to rules for 6 months, for 12 months, and then writing a report.

Audrey Tang: Then proving to the society that this new approach actually is beneficial to the society. If it’s not, of course it just paid the tuition for everybody else as it was. If it does work, then they give us a very strong case for the regulators and the lawmakers to adjust laws in their favor. Purely for-profit companies doesn’t really enjoy this priority treatment.

Anders Frick: May I just change the microphone?

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Anders Frick: Because now...Swap this. It can still be hearing. It will not just be used.

Anders Frick: Now, I would like to ask a bit more about economy and more financial, economic news. Taiwan is sometimes referred to as the Silicon Valley of Asia. What’s the difference between Asia’s Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley in United States?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know where you got this Asia Silicon Valley idea. When I get into the cabinet, my first contribution is to rename [non-English speech] , Silicon Valley in Asia into [non-English speech], Asia.Silicon Valley, meaning that we’re a hub that links the Asia people and a hub that links the Asia people, and a hub that links the innovations from the Silicon Valley and innovations here in Asia. We see ourselves as a connector of talents, of resources, of regulations at times.

Audrey Tang: We don’t see ourselves as a Shan chai or a copy of Silicon Valley in Asia. That would actually be absurd. That’s one of my first country visions going into the cabinet, just renaming the Asia SV plan into the Asia.SV plan.

Anders Frick: How can the digital revolution affect the global and local economy?

Audrey Tang: First, there’s not just one digital revolution. There’s many digital revolutions, one riding on the wave of another. You just look at the life cycle, there’s a bunch of revelations coming up.

Audrey Tang: I think by far, the most important thing is that it enables people to think about equality, in a way that is currently imaginable, but a hundred years ago was unimaginable. When we talk about, for example, regional balance or equality of education, for example, people wait on high-speed rails or waiting on roads, going to their homes and so on.

Audrey Tang: All of this takes 5, 10 years, and it’s very difficult to take into the equality into every rural area and so on. Now, with a lot of education, services, medicine even, deliver over the Internet, in Taiwan, we actually have one of the highest percentage of Internet penetration rates, mobile use, and also gender equal use of services online.

Audrey Tang: Whereas before the promise of equality and the actual delivery through physical or analog ways always leaves something to be desired. At the moment, it’s actually very easy, or at least attainable, for our president to promise broadband as human right, access to AI as human right, access to basic education, ICT as part of the curriculum as human right, and actually delivering it in a matter of a couple years.

Audrey Tang: It would be almost impossible without the digital technologies.

Anders Frick: [non-English speech] Also, I know we talk about several digital revolutions, but from your perspective how is this shift affecting the business relations in Taiwan, the rest of Asia, and the European Union?

Audrey Tang: The digital services and digital grids, of course creates a harmonization issue between every different country’s laws.

Audrey Tang: For example, when Uber first came to Taiwan it classified itself as just another app, but for many other countries and other people they are a kind of rental car service. That creates a dissonance between people different interpretations of over-broad terms, such as sharing economy, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: First, that it creates confusion. From the confusion creates fear, because people will fear that their job’s getting displaced, automation taking people’s work away, their dignity away.

Audrey Tang: From there, people also creates doubts, because there are people who say algorithms are more efficient than laws, so we don’t have to obey laws anymore, and so on. It also corrodes people’s trust in the government, the governance system, and also legitimacy of any nation states.

Audrey Tang: We see all that dynamic happening. Uber is just one of the many cases.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan we try to address that by bringing the open multi-stakeholder system, which is the same system that how Internet governance has been working to govern issues such as cross-country protocols, security issues, and everything that relates to Internet governance without the idea of states or the without the idea of a sovereign control.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we ask people that...OK, we share the basic facts. We also crowdsource data from everybody. Then we ask people, "What are your feelings? What are the feelings that you see when you look at those numbers, when you have this Uber-driving experience, what are your feelings, really? What are your doubts, and fears, and joy perhaps?" Everybody has a different feeling.

Audrey Tang: The good thing about a feeling-oriented consultation process is that there is no right and wrong. Everywhere, in different parts of the country, people can participate just on their mobile phone and share their feelings.

Audrey Tang: Then, what we see is that with just right define, we use machine learning to cluster people’s feelings and we say that, if people can propose a subtle or a nuanced feeling that resonates with the super majority of people, then we give them binding power, meaning that we bring them into the political agenda and use it to talk with Uber, with our taxi drivers’ union, and so thousands of people contributed.

Audrey Tang: Finally, half a set of seven consensus items, which we can check one by one with all the stakeholders and then translate it into a law. This is what we call crowdsourced agenda setting.

Audrey Tang: This is one of the key things that really needs to happen, if we are to harmonize the digital services, the products across so-called nation or country borders, because people who are affected by any technology across different countries, they have more in common in each other than people who just happen to live next door, but is not affected the same way.

Audrey Tang: We see the same thing with climate change. People who live very close to the ocean and are seeing their households being perhaps destroyed within the next decade, have more in common with each other than people in the same nation, but doesn’t live in the same elevation.

Audrey Tang: We really do need ways to get more solidarity and more familiarity with people with the same feelings, and also a way for the existing regulatory system to take into account those stakeholder feelings and then translate it to regulations and laws that everybody can live with. That, I think, is digital revolution’s main impact on governance, and especially on cross-country or cross-border governance.

Anders Frick: Taiwan was very early with the semiconductor. Much of Taiwan’s wealth is built on semiconductors. There is still lots of semiconductors, but then more and more software. How would the future growth be for Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Semiconductor, of course, is still a very important part of Taiwan. We see it as the driving force, because there are many AI-related, or IOT-related, applications that does require a creative chip design, especially when we work very closely with people who are working closer to human beings -- The service designers, the Youth Experience designers. We don’t arbitrarily say, "OK, these are software people. These are hardware people."

Audrey Tang: My own experience, working with Apple for six years, is that everybody listen to designers, and designers listen to people. [laughs] Instead of shipping products or designing products, we are more and more in the civil society and the private sector in Taiwan seeing this just as a service design part of the ecosystem, and the hardware people and the software people are just there to respond to the demands of society.

Audrey Tang: If we see it as a product design, then we will worry about, "OK, there is a new technology. Why isn’t the adoption rate already 80 percent?" and those very arbitrary, competition-based views for particular technology. We did that with WiMAX and with other technology. [laughs] It really didn’t do us much good.

Audrey Tang: The idea is not just locking in to particular new and exciting technologies, but instead using symboxes, using social innovation hubs and things like that for every new technology to have a way to connect to existing software, and hardware, and service, and every other ecosystem, and collaboratively break some laws, break some relations, do some experimentation and try to figure out how the society can reconfigure itself to everybody’s benefit.

Audrey Tang: If it doesn’t work, then we design the way, so that the risk is absorbed, not by one single public servant or by one single innovator, but instead the whole ecosystem just takes the postmortem and then do something better. The idea in Taiwan is to have a more holistic, more integrated ecosystem. Taiwan, because of our absolute freedom of expression, you can’t say anything that gets you arrested, unlike many other Asian countries.

Audrey Tang: There are many other law-breaking ideas [laughs] that we still look forward for our local innovators to propose and combine different fields and different disciplines together, instead of just looking at one or two industry and say, "This should be our national direction." We’re now promoting a social innovation or different industry, especially merging those different disciplines.

Anders Frick: Thank you very much. I think I’ve asked all the questions I would like to ask. [laughs] Or, do you feel like there is something that you were thinking of that you should mention that you haven’t mentioned?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s good.

Anders Frick: No? Perfect. Good, I will stop here and will demount everything. I will do some editing. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’ll send you a transcript also. OK?

Anders Frick: Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much. Actually, could we just take some pictures?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Anders Frick: I noticed at the door, here, all other ministers...they have dark doors with small windows. You have very big windows. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah, and with lots of Post-it notes.

Anders Frick: With Post-it notes, yeah, exactly. I thought maybe I can just take some pictures with you...there.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Anders Frick: OK.