Keith Menconi: Minister Tang, thanks so much for joining us today.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for letting me joining you.

Keith Menconi: In your office, of course, so I would be the one joining you. Thank you for that. Just to start things off, let’s look at how you got here in this very nice office that we’ve found ourselves in the very first place. Of course, your life path brings you through Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and the private sector.

Keith Menconi: Quite a history there developing a lot of tech innovation, but then you took a very hard right turn into the realm of governance. That path led you through the Sunflower Movement, and then working with the last government, and now actually into the very halls of power themselves. I’m very curious on your thinking of why it was important to you to actually get involved in all of this.

Audrey Tang: Sure, certainly. My work actually has been more or less the same in the past 20 years or so. I was there when the Web was being invented and the Internet society, the Internet community at the time.

Audrey Tang: We worked very hard on some of those very interesting governance questions like, "How would we involve more private sector people without sacrificing the early freedom of the freedom of speech, of assembly online? How do we preserve the culture of an urban Internet, of Internet neutrality while allowing each telecom operator and each nation state even to claim their part of the interest in this, and so on?"

Audrey Tang: The Internet community is, while there is some room for improvement in areas like inclusivity, and so on, but it’s essentially remaining a very multi‑stakeholder, not dominated by any particular state, this kind of governing structure. It is actually the first governance structure that I learned from when I was only 13 at the time.

Audrey Tang: From the very beginning of my learning, I’ve always learned from the public domain works, from the early Internet pioneers, from the people working in the Gutenberg Project who digitized the early classical scholarships, classical authorships, and everything like that.

Audrey Tang: As these are the core of my learnings, I am, of course, very interested in preserving this. Some people would say anarchistic foundation of the governance model that governs the early Web and by extension, the entire digital innovations that have followed afterwards.

Audrey Tang: It is because of this that I want to preserve, or sometimes conserve, the early tradition of the anarchistic collaboration where people could only convince each other using arguments, using rational lines of reasoning because the Internet community doesn’t have an army. It doesn’t have a navy.

Audrey Tang: All we can do is try to communicate with people in the world, to convince people that letting us to become a neutral, collaborative, inclusive entity as to the benefit of the humankind. This is essentially what I am still doing now.

Keith Menconi: You don’t have an army or a navy just yet, but you do have a staff. That’s a step up. It sounds like what you’re saying is basically, you feel like there is something in that culture ‑‑ in that early Internet culture ‑‑ that was missing from governance here in Taiwan.

Keith Menconi: I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what exactly that is, what you were seeing that told you that there was something there that you wanted to add in?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. This is what we call a multi‑stakeholder model, meaning that when we are working on a law affecting the Internet, we don’t call them laws.

Audrey Tang: We call them Requests for Comments, meaning that we ask the entire Internet community ‑‑ anyone who would be affected by any of those changes in the code that we are doing ‑‑ to come forward and participate in consultative discussions, be it face‑to‑face or online.

Audrey Tang: There is three differences. One is that it’s completely transparent. Everything happens something on a list, on online forums, and everybody can see the whole record of how we got here in the first place.

Audrey Tang: The second part is that it’s participatory, meaning that the Internet really exists as a consensus of people running these computers agree on some protocol. Without the broad agreement of people adopting this protocol, there really is no Internet.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, every change has to be voluntary. People has to actually sign up on the new version of the Internet protocol before the protocol gets widely adopted. It’s because of this that the engagements of the stakeholder communities are put into the foremost prominence of the governance model. That’s the second part.

Audrey Tang: The third part, I think and even more importantly, is that everything is accountable, meaning that you can go back and look at every chance in the RFC, and every implementation details, and found who exactly where proposed that.

Audrey Tang: There is the audit trail, of sorts, of all the laws. When I’m talking about laws, this is laws of code. It’s more like physical laws. It regulates what’s possible and what’s not on the Internet. It’s not really legal code, but it carries even more force than legal code in some cases, like in Blockchain, and in other technological mechanisms.

Audrey Tang: The entire idea is that there is the audit trail to each and every code decisions. Now granted, there could be some technocratic elements in it. There could be parts that only an expert could look at and understand, and so on, which is why we need to work on inclusiveness, and accessibility, and more outreach.

Audrey Tang: All in all, I do think there are elements in this radically transparent community structure that a national state government structure can learn from, especially during the transparency and participatory crisis of faith in democracy that we’re currently facing.

Keith Menconi: You’ve thrown me a little bit off balance because, honestly, I was going to wait until later in the interview before we got real philosophical about stuff. Since you took us here, anyway, let’s hang out here for a little bit.

Keith Menconi: Now that you have an office here, I’m sure that you’re a little bit reluctant to get too critical, too negative, but clearly you’re highlighting this set of values that you have that you think are very positive and should be transferred.

Keith Menconi: The implicit statement that you’re making is that that wasn’t here before, and that what was here before wasn’t quite up to the task of what you think the government should be doing. Maybe you could talk about the ways in which you think the government has perhaps fallen short, and why this sort of new thinking, or not super new, but transplanted thinking, is necessary.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that it’s fallen up short. I would say that it’s mostly done by the previous generation of technology. Radio and television, they were invented long before the Internet. With radio, and television, as we’re working now on...

Keith Menconi: Let’s not get personal. Let’s not get too personal.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] With radio, millions of people can listen to the way we’re talking about it right now, but with this radio technology, there’s no way for both of us to listen to the millions of people who will listen to this talk between us.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, it’s asymmetric technology. It lets millions of people listen to one or two persons, but it doesn’t let one or two person listen to millions of people.

Audrey Tang: With the Internet, of course, this is what we call the mass self‑communication, meaning that people can select who to listen to, but still there is no way for the governance structure to systematically run a millions‑people consultative process and let these people listen to each other.

Audrey Tang: This is what we have done in the Internet community, especially in the Web community for ages now.

Audrey Tang: In the current political climate, it is not part of a democratic tradition for us to say, "OK, before a referendum, maybe we should listen to each other for much longer. Maybe before each voting, there should be a much more informative communication between the different parts of the stakeholder community," and things like that.

Audrey Tang: While the multi‑stakeholder deliberations, or deliberative democracy, is always part of political theory, there is not much room for it to grow if you work with only the previous generation of pen and paper, or maybe with radio and television technologies, because then the only way to listen to millions of people is to send millions of people to listen to each other one by one.

Audrey Tang: Now that we have a current generation of technology using machine learning and using a lot of other assistive technical tools, we can actually now listen to millions of people with some degree of success.

Audrey Tang: It’s because of this that I’m experimenting with this, as if in a laboratory, on various public governance topics. It’s because we’re early in this new, what I call, scalable listening technologies that we need to tailor‑make it to each different specific policy issues.

Audrey Tang: There is always room for improvement. It’s always better already than the previous generation of technology.

Keith Menconi: Still a place for radio, guys. I promise you, there’s still a place for radio. Maybe our fans can broadcast to us one day, and we can listen in.

Keith Menconi: Let’s get even more specific. You’re talking about some of the deficiencies that we see in any kind of democratic system. I’ve been hearing this sort of idea applied to democratic systems around the world.

Keith Menconi: Basically, we’re using a 19th century technology, or even an 18th century technology, to fix 21st century problems. It isn’t quite up to the task, given the complexity of the world that we live in.

Keith Menconi: Expecting one elected representative to actually understand, and two political parties to actually understand and represent so many people, it gets somewhat absurd at a certain point.

Keith Menconi: Let’s get even more specific, in terms of how you think this could change things. Let’s look back to your first taste of getting really involved in Taiwan politics, the Sunflower Movement. Of course, that was sparked by the government’s moves to pass forward a service trade agreement with China.

Keith Menconi: Let’s do a hypothetical situation. Do you think that if some of the tools that you’re talking about were at the disposal of the government at the time, would that have turned out differently? Do you think that they would have been more responsive to the concerns of people, and perhaps the Sunflower Movement wouldn’t have been necessary? Is that what you’re getting at?

Audrey Tang: The Sunflower Movement is a demonstration. It’s not a demonstration only in the protests in the streets sense, but it’s also a demonstration of the technologies that we’re talking about. It is a demonstration because the MPs at those time ‑‑ the Members of Parliament ‑‑ were on strike, essentially, because they said it’s not their job to deliberate that particular trade service agreement.

Audrey Tang: The occupiers ‑‑ what they did essentially ‑‑ is to deliberated on the MP’s behalf. Because the MPs were on the strike, of course the occupiers could go there and deliberate on exactly the same topic.

Audrey Tang: What I did at the time was not taking any particular sides, but rather developing the kind of listening technologies that let anything and everything that happened within the occupied parliament, and also in the streets surrounding the occupied parliament, each one was basically populated with people in a very different view of the trade service agreement.

Audrey Tang: We have the green, ecologically‑minded people here. We have the labor‑minded people there, the left wing people, and also the separated independence people. Each street held their own deliberations. The occupied parliament also held their deliberations.

Audrey Tang: As the ICT Geeks, we also built with Eight Mons before. We worked for Eight Mons to build one particular app that lets you enter your company’s name, or the trade that your company’s doing, and look at exactly the part in the cross‑trade service trade agreements that affects you. You don’t have to read through 500 pages of PDF files.

Audrey Tang: There is these kind of factual, evidence‑based tools that lets you make informed decisions. Now we also, during the occupy, not only videotape all the deliberations that happened, but also worked with stenographic transcript people to type it down to those online documents, which are collaborative edited, and then translated to various other languages.

Audrey Tang: What this does is essentially a cross‑pollination between all the different occupy side streets so that people begin each day, not over the same topics but picking up of the consensus items that was left the previous day, that was undecided the previous day, and then do a deliberation for entire day, involving as much as half a million people on one particular day. The next day, although it was different people, can pick up where the previous day has left.

Audrey Tang: This is basically the scalable listening technology that we have deployed during the occupy, with help with professional deliberative democracy facilitators to make sure that ‑‑ be it an ordinary citizen, be it someone who feels concerned about democracy, whichever side of the street they went on ‑‑ there is some deliberative space for them to join, and to participate their part in the collective intelligence about the cross‑trade service trade agreement.

Audrey Tang: It evidently works, because toward the end of the occupy, there is a set of consensus that people could not 100 percent agree on, but at least could live with. These are the kind of consensus items that the head of the Parliament at the time eventually agreed on, which is why the occupiers left the building. It’s not because they were evicted, but their main demands were agreed upon.

Keith Menconi: Basically, you’ve just turned my question around on me. I asked, "Would things have turned out better at that time if this sort of technology, this sort of thinking was available?" What you’re saying is, "It was available, and it did turn out better because of it."

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Keith Menconi: Let’s move forward in time just a little bit to the projects that you’re working on now. I guess, since we’re on the topic of digital democracy, and how we can communicate better with the public, and how the public can communicate better with the government, let’s perhaps start right there.

Keith Menconi: You’ve already outlined a couple of projects that you had going while the Sunflower Movement was happening to help facilitate that sort of process. Maybe you can bring us up to date, because I know that that’s one of the things that you think about, work on a lot here, is ways to make the government in power work better.

Keith Menconi: There’s no possible way that we can go into detail in all of the various programs that you’re working on. Maybe if you could, just pick one to highlight and explain A, how it works, and maybe B, how it fosters some of the ideals that you’ve been talking about so far.

Audrey Tang: I’ll just pick a tiny, tiny case because it’s very self‑contained. It only contains maybe one public hearing, and three meetings. We did get a broad consensus out of it. I’ll talk about very briefly the eSport case.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, for eSport electronic competitions, for a very long time there was no ministry willing to claim the ownership of it. The result being that those large scale competitions of LoL or other electronic eSports cannot, for example, rent the Taipei Dome, or for example, get the foreign visitors an athlete's visa, and things like this.

Audrey Tang: There’s a broad misunderstanding on the society. It’s almost like a generational gap between the digital natives, who generally understand eSport as contests of skills, and something that’s just a lot of fun, versus people who did not have firsthand experience, and see it as some kind of video games, and waste of time.

Keith Menconi: What’s your game?

Audrey Tang: What’s my game? XCOM 2, and then Civilization, in all...

Keith Menconi: Civilization, yes.

Audrey Tang: All its versions. The Battle of Wesnoth and NetHack. I’ve played NetHack for a very long time. In any case, what I’m trying to aim to is that this is a classical issue out of the misunderstanding of the basic facts.

Audrey Tang: People couldn’t really agree whether electronic eSport is a sport, or whether it’s physical education, PE, or whether it’s a skill, or whether it’s culture, and things like this. During a public hearing...It’s different from other public hearings, not only because it’s hosted by three different parties and the members of parliaments, but also because it was stenographed.

Audrey Tang: Everything was transcribed used Sunflower‑like technology. Everybody speaks, knowing that whatever they say will be entered into this binding space, where I would coordinate with all the ministries to look at each of the words the athletes said, and try to find a resolution to some of the issues that they have raised.

Audrey Tang: Primary around that is, of course, whether they could be...There’s a military draft in Taiwan. If you are a professional athlete, or if you’re a professional Wei Qi Go player, then you can go and serve at alternate draft, working to further your game, basically.

Audrey Tang: ESport, because there’s no game status of it, it’s not subject to it. On the other hand, there is also some schools who want to open the special classes, specializing or attracting people who are more into eSport gaming, and then teach them maybe about general Internet media, and communications strategy, and all those related digital production skills.

Audrey Tang: Before, it could be classified as one trade or the other, there is no such class possible, afraid that parents would probably oppose to it.

Audrey Tang: What I have done is, essentially, do a coordination meeting that assembles all the facts that the ministry have so that we understand eSport is not a physical education, because it’s much more intellectual than physical. On the other hand, it is a skillful competition, and it is a kind of a culture, and the Minister of Culture is OK with it.

Audrey Tang: We release whatever we have at the factual level online, because all the meetings that are held is published in its entirety as transcripts online. Because of this, the athletes, the professional eSport gaming leagues, and so on then went to my public Q&A site to provide me with a lot of information that was missing.

Audrey Tang: If we are policy makers in this meeting room, even though it’s a pretty good meeting room, we still lack a lot of evidences and hard facts that could be observed by the civil society and by the private sector.

Audrey Tang: After their contribution, we held a second consultative meeting between all the ministries, basically just checking those inputs from the PTT BBS, from all those Internet online discussion boards, and fact checking whether these are factual.

Audrey Tang: People would say, "If you follow this kind of regulation, you could have actually an alternate pass for the people getting drafted who are professional eSport athletes," and so on.

Audrey Tang: After checking this and making sure that people’s feelings are generally covered, we move from the facts to the feelings stage where I ask all the ministries to share their feelings of those facts, and whether they are OK with it.

Audrey Tang: It turns out people are generally OK with it, with this kind of new arrangements with the schools opening up new classes catering for eSport athletes, and having eSport athletes classified as intellectual skill, instead of a physical education athlete, and enjoying the same protection, or the same alternate drafting plan in the military, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We released that, also, to the public, and then the leagues, the associations, specializing in eSport would join us on the third meeting to work out the details of how exactly they can help in this kind of implementation plan that the government is planning on having, and which we just had. By the time you listen to this, it’s probably also published in its entirety.

Audrey Tang: By the end of each meeting, we used the same color‑coding technology we used during those deliberations, by saying, "OK, this is now green light," meaning that everybody can agree with it, "It’s yellow light," meaning that we have to agree on it after some external factor has happened, or "It’s red light," meaning it’s not legally or physically possible.

Audrey Tang: Fortunately for the eSport case, every yellow light has, since then, turned into green light.

Audrey Tang: The MPs, the ministries, and the stakeholders behind these ministries, and athletes themselves all contributed to our final decision. It’s done in the open and it’s completely transparent. Now, we have a good classification and a legal basis for the eSport community to move forward.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very small case. It’s one public hearing and three meetings, but it shows the essential idea of not having any meeting go to waste by having each meeting recorded, and having the camera representing the meeting stakeholders that couldn’t make it here.

Keith Menconi: Maybe to help those of us that weren’t actually a part of all these meetings and all that understand, what would you say is the essential thing that’s really different from the way this issue may have worked through the pubic system before?

Keith Menconi: Because part of what’s happening here is you, as a minister, see an issue that you care about and you feel like isn’t getting enough attention. You bring in the stakeholders. You get them to talk about it, and you work it through the system.

Keith Menconi: Nothing about that is new, but you did highlight a number of ways that you were using technology to move the process along. I’m wondering if you could maybe highlight a little bit, even more clearly, what you feel is essentially new about the way that you managed to get this through that wouldn’t have been possible without the technology or without this way of thinking about digital democracy.

Audrey Tang: One main difference is that when I’m talking about stakeholder input, I mean stakeholders that I don’t personally know, because when this is published to the online discussion boards, I really don’t know who exactly is going to provide their input back.

Audrey Tang: Previously, without this kind of online consultational mechanisms, there is no way to talk to nonspecific people. What ends up is that heads of associations or heads of representatives who claims to speak on behalf of the stakeholders ends up getting all the input into the policymaking process.

Audrey Tang: Most of the decisions that we make at this iteration of the eSport consultative process are actually the input from individual athletes. Those individual athletes are sometimes pseudonymous. They’re just one nick or one handle on the Internet, but they provide insight that are otherwise not possible or are not going to be represented by the heads of associations, for example.

Audrey Tang: The only difference here, and the primary difference here, is that I’ve added inputs channel for nonspecific people who don’t have to reveal their real identity, but providing hard facts and their feelings toward whatever process that we’re making.

Audrey Tang: This is a trust to people who does not trust us enough yet to reveal their real identities, because trust, you see, is mutual. If the government doesn’t trust its people, there’s no way for the people to trust the government.

Audrey Tang: Even if we trust the people fully, there’s always people who don’t trust the government yet to show up in‑person in public hearings. They would rather remain pseudonymous.

Audrey Tang: Even for those people, if they have something new to say, if they have some constructive opinions, there’s now a systematic way to include their opinions into the final policymaking process, and for them to track that, actually their input has been made into this particular red or yellow light indicator.

Audrey Tang: This part is new. We wouldn’t have arrived to this workable conclusion this quickly, with this kind of efficiency, if not for the input for those pseudonymous input sources.

Keith Menconi: I actually think it’s really interesting what you’re talking about, in terms of the government trusting the people and the people trusting the government, because another area that you’re clearly also very interested in is government transparency.

Keith Menconi: That is shown by the fact of all the documentation that goes into the deliberation process. Some people might question the wisdom of making government hyper‑transparent, because sometimes, for very sensitive issues, perhaps, you do need politicians to have that space to make the difficult decision behind closed doors.

Keith Menconi: I’m wondering if what you just had to say there about the government trusting the people has anything to do with that dilemma. Perhaps if the government can trust that the people will not freak out every second, perhaps it can be more transparent.

Keith Menconi: That’s what I’m thinking about it. I’ll throw it back to you. How do you get past that issue of, on the one hand, the government needs a certain amount of space to make sensitive decisions, and on the other hand, the people need a way to provide oversight.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like we live stream all these meetings. We don’t. What we did was we do a full recording, or we do a real‑time stenography, and then we make a full transcript.

Audrey Tang: We let everybody who participate in the meeting to edit the transcript. If they feel that they have said something that could be taken out of context, they can change it to provide a full context. If they feel like they have spoken something that would violate a third party’s privacy, perhaps ‑‑ although we haven’t yet run into this case ‑‑ they could take that part out.

Audrey Tang: Of course, all those edits are also seen by everybody else attending the meeting, so you can’t put words into mine, because I would know about it. It also provides a safe space for all the participants to know that they are able to come up with supplementary materials and additional context before it was published, 10 days after the meeting.

Audrey Tang: It is a kind of a bridge. It’s not completely saying that there’s no closed room for deliberation for the participants. Also, after 10 days, the participant feels safe enough to ask the entire general public, not necessarily people who are stakeholders, just random passersby, for information, for input, for anything.

Audrey Tang: What this does is establishing a connection between one meeting and the other, because one of the most avid readers of our public records are not the general public. It’s the staff of the heads of office. It’s minister who participated at this meeting, because they would go back and assign those tasks to their staffs.

Audrey Tang: It’s very important for the staff to know, not only the conclusion of the meeting, but how we get there, what was the alternate pass that we tried and then discarded during our discussions so they would not have to try it again.

Keith Menconi: It’s not necessarily the guy getting off his 9:00 to 5:00 job that’s going to be wading through hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes. You’re saying, even within the government, this level of transparency can also be very important?

Audrey Tang: Right, because it facilitates trust between ministries, between departments, because then every ministry and department see what objective, what key results other ministries and other departments are doing, what are they optimizing for, so to speak, so they could try to find synergies.

Audrey Tang: In the previous generation, it was pen and paper. Only the key results after each meeting is recorded, but not the entire process. You can maybe reverse engineer between the words a little bit about how we got there, but there is no foundation of trust between the different ministries who would participate in the same meeting.

Keith Menconi: Taking the US example, imagine if the Founding Fathers had left that kind of a paper trail. We could finally know what they meant by "Right to bear arms," for example. It could be a total game changer.

Keith Menconi: Let’s switch gears entirely right here actually, and look at another area that you’re very focused on, that being more the industry side of things, the infrastructure side of things, making sure that Taiwan has the tech resources that it needs to prosper in a number of different ways.

Keith Menconi: Let’s start with a program called the DIGI⁺ program. Am I saying that right, DIGI‑plus?

Keith Menconi: This is a multi‑billion dollar program that’s going to take place over several years to help boost Taiwan’s digital infrastructure. Here I’m reading from the published material. It will "Create an innovative, friendly environment for the digital industry and increased Internet usage penetration."

Keith Menconi: It seems like the big idea here is keeping the Internet moving at a faster, and faster, and faster rate. Making sure that Taiwan’s Internet stays modern, stays up to date.

Keith Menconi: Interested in hearing your thoughts on how we get there, what sort of work needs to be done to make sure that Taiwan stays on track, but also why this is an area that does need special focus. All of us living in Taiwan, it’s remarkable how good the Internet works already, especially coming from the US.

Keith Menconi: I lived for a time in Beijing. There’s no comparison. Taiwan is head and shoulders above everybody else, so why is this still something that really needs to be a focus to make sure that it continues getting even better and better?

Audrey Tang: We’re switching gears. I was ready to talk about "Federalist Papers." [laughs]

Keith Menconi: If you want to go into that, we can go into that. Go ahead.

Audrey Tang: No. About the DIGI⁺ plan, according to the World Economic Forum, what you just talked about, the ICT readiness, meaning that people who want high‑speed bandwidth can get high‑speed bandwidth and so on, Taiwan has been on the second place in the world for two years running now. It’s Finland, Taiwan, and Iceland in this particular rank.

Audrey Tang: What we mean is that the infrastructure, the broadband, even the mobile broadband, is in a very good shape because Taiwan is a small island with a lot of people. As a small island, it is easier for us than many other countries to get the basic 4G and mobile Internet stations set up. That’s something that we intend to continue.

Audrey Tang: As part of President Tsai Ing‑wen’s campaign, what she promised is that we need to make this mobile Internet, or broadband Internet, but mostly just access to Internet as a basic human right.

Audrey Tang: This is saying that if there are more disadvantaged households who would prefer to spend their daily money on something else than the Internet access, we should at least guarantee maybe 10 megabits per second broadband access so that they have a chance to hook into the digital economy.

Audrey Tang: Also, because the government digital services we’re going to provide, it’s going to be over, not pen and paper, but over the Internet mostly from this point on. It is very important that we don’t create an artificial division or a gap between the haves and the have‑nots in the society.

Keith Menconi: Maybe you could tell me ‑‑ this is probably, pretty clearly, a blind spot on my part, because everywhere I go in Taiwan everybody has a phone ‑‑ how big of an issue is that? How big of Taiwan’s population right now is cut out from the kind of Internet, the speed of Internet, that most of us enjoy?

Audrey Tang: If you disregard the remote islands, like Taiping Island, and so on, then it is about two percent in Taiwan who doesn’t yet have 100 megabits access. It’s not a lot of places, but it is some number of people.

Audrey Tang: As I said, it’s socially disadvantaged households who would not, even given the chance to pay for broadband Internet access, because they have much more pressing needs to pay for. This is subsidizing a certain level of Internet access, more so than getting broadband to all the physical places, which we’re already almost there.

Audrey Tang: This is Dr. Tsai Ing‑wen’s idea. We’re implementing this in maybe three years to get all the socially disadvantaged households some basic broadband Internet access.

Audrey Tang: If you look at the World Economic Forum ratings, we are really, really good on the readiness, but not so good at the actual usage and impact. The environment, meaning the regulatory environment, is actually declining.

Audrey Tang: What this means is that, while the basic ICT infrastructure is pretty good in Taiwan, Taiwan doesn’t have a very good regulatory environment in which that if you do some trade or some activity over the Internet, there is no reliable way for a judge to look at this and connect it to some sort of ruling in the civil code.

Audrey Tang: Two different judges at this moment may judge differently, because...

Keith Menconi: What kind of case would this come up in?

Audrey Tang: A lot, like what kind of speech is infringing on, perhaps the rights of naming what kind of libel it is online, what kind of communication over the Internet is...

Audrey Tang: For example, radio. Radio is a very good example because, using the old communication law, there is one broadcaster and there is many receivers. On the case of Internet radio, currently there is some kind of radio environments where you can listen to the radio, but still type something, so that a host can see what you’re typing.

Audrey Tang: In this case, is the person typing this comment also a broadcaster? Is the broadcaster now suddenly the receiver? The law isn’t very clear on this.

Audrey Tang: When a strictly one‑directional communication mode has switched to the Internet, this is what we call OTT, Over‑The‑Top of the Internet infrastructure. It enables not only a broader bandwidth, but also different kinds of modes of connection.

Audrey Tang: The listeners are now also able to broadcast not only their own voices, but also provide real‑time connection via a chat room, or whatever, between themselves. Whether they’re now still the audience or they’re also broadcasters isn’t that clear from the perspective of a legal code department.

Audrey Tang: What this does is saying we need to reconcile what’s actually happening over the Internet through not only the emulation of radio, but also augmentation and supplementing the traditional radio format, and try to make sure that everybody is a peer in this peer‑to‑peer network on the Internet.

Audrey Tang: To regulate it in a way that says, "OK, maybe the government doesn’t want to regulate Internet radio broadcasters the same way as traditional radio broadcaster because, after all, there’s no scarcity of spectrum, and things like this.

Audrey Tang: If we try to regulate this, still, in a way that reflects the old regulatory regime when there was a scarcity of spectrum, then we would end up in some very convoluted legal cases that doesn’t exactly apply to Internet radio and things like this.

Audrey Tang: It’s important to have a basic, what we call, the Digital Telecommunication Act that defines exactly what it is like to provide, and listen, and interact with radio on the Internet so that people know exactly what to expect from the legal code.

Keith Menconi: What you’re saying is I need to find the online forum that you set up for this and start giving my two cents?

Audrey Tang: Exactly. We did run the Telecommunication Act before, and the new draft is coming up any day now.

Keith Menconi: I got to get on that, I don’t know. This is very interesting, because when I look at this bill, this shows the low level of understanding that I’m coming into this with.

Keith Menconi: When I look at this bill, I see a big pot of money. My image is that it’s going to all go towards the infrastructure, making better fiber‑optic cables, or whatever. I don’t know anything.

Keith Menconi: What you’re saying is it’s actually a whole lot broader than that. There’s a whole range of issues that you need to think about. To not just make the speed of the Internet meet some number. It’s also about making a healthy environment, and that is a tricky thing to do.

Audrey Tang: To have a healthy environment, it also helps to bring up people in this idea that the digital economy, the digitization of everything is turning what we call the artificial distinctions between the industries and between the trades, between the fields, all but disappear.

Audrey Tang: Radio and television was different industries, not because they are naturally different industries, but because they require different equipments.

Keith Menconi: Some of our faces aren’t quite built for TV, as well.

Audrey Tang: There’s virtual reality and you can synthesize your models very easily with your voice, and the mouth and hand movements matches what you have said. This is what I do. When I do video interviews, I send my avatars through.

Keith Menconi: I could have Brad Pitt reading the news with my voice?

Audrey Tang: Exactly, yes. As I said, as everything becomes digital, and the artificial lines between the previous difference in hardware of radio, and television, and all those different communication modes all but disappear.

Audrey Tang: It’s now bits over the Internet. How those bits in the Internet are arranged share that same basic infrastructure. If you have a basic infrastructure for Internet TV, you have the same infrastructure for Internet radio. It is the same thing.

Audrey Tang: People who train for different trades, people who receive different trainings through university or through their high schools are now facing a world in which those arbitrary distinctions between the industries are blurring and disappearing.

Audrey Tang: Another part of the DIGI⁺ plan is what we call DIGI⁺Talent. It’s to get people to think outside of the disciplinary box. It’s not getting everybody into computer science, but with this kind of digital thinking people can major in many different things.

Audrey Tang: People can major in majors that didn’t exist four years before. They could create their own trades based on their understanding of the digital arrangements and combinations with any of those creative vehicles that they may want to experiment with, be it fabrication, or clothing, or augmented reality, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: This is a kind of education regime that we had not yet tried before, especially in this examination‑oriented Taiwanese education. Starting 2018, we’re trying to switch track to a new curriculum design where we put autonomy, and communication, and the common good first, and discard everything else, because we stopped predicting what the world will be like.

Audrey Tang: When the seven‑year‑old enters the school system this year, what the world would be like 12 years in the future, we don’t know. What we think is important is still that they remain autonomous, they were able to learn whatever trade that comes up in the next 12 years, and there they keep communicating and keep working for the common good.

Audrey Tang: This is also part of the DIGI‑plus plan that changes the relationship between the education system and the learners. It’s now mostly the learners dictating what they want to learn, and for the education system and the entire society to provide the resource that they need.

Keith Menconi: I want to switch tacks to another program that’s coming up in Taiwan currently, the Asian Silicon Valley project, which is a scheme to build what it sounds like.

Keith Menconi: A Silicon Valley in Taoyuan would be the focus of this. What we’d be hoping for here is to see a number of tech startups, potentially with foreign talent, obviously with local talent, as well, growing up in that area.

Keith Menconi: This is something that you’ll be advising on, but won’t be directing. I’m sure that there’s a lot of individual complexities to this plan and ways that people are going to try to make it work. I’m interested in asking a broader question, because we hear about Taiwan’s potential for startups all the time. We hear about Taiwan’s potential to foster tech talent all the time.

Keith Menconi: We’re still not seeing the kind of explosive Silicon Valley‑type growth that we would like to see. What is it that you think is between Taiwan and reaching that, just in a very broad sort of way?

Audrey Tang: What you just described, the Asian Silicon Valley as an objective was the 1.0 version of that project. I got invited as the Digital Minister exactly because I redefined that project by introducing a dot between Asia and Silicon Valley, making sure that the program is now called Linking Asia, and Connecting to Silicon Valley.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like we’re trying to “shanzhai”, or to copy Silicon Valley here in Taiwan anymore because Silicon Valley is not just a place. It’s not just a place. It’s a connection between those universities and this huge NGO community, who are themselves successful entrepreneurs, who then go forth and mentor the next generation, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It is impossible to replicate the Silicon Valley ecosystem, and we should not, because it’s a different ecosystem here. Again, our relationship with other Asian, or ASEAN, countries is not a winner‑take‑all thing.

Audrey Tang: It’s an ecosystem where each place is trying very hard, very similar ways, like a regulatory sandbox, like a much more friendly way for foreign people to enter what we call startup visa, or permanent residence of those people who want to start a new company here in Taiwan, and things like that. Countries all around us are doing the same thing.

Audrey Tang: What we’re trying to aim here is a broader and also a much more tighter connection between all those different Asia places who are also looking toward more or less the same ICT and startup ecosystem and try to find our ways to fit ourselves into the ecosystem as a way to linking with the other Asian countries, and then connecting to the Silicon Valley.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that it’s specific to one particular city, or even one particular site. Taoyuan is of course exciting because it’s less densely populated. If you want to try some smart logistics, and things like that, it would provide plenty of trial fields for you to experiment with.

Audrey Tang: We’re not saying that we’re cloning Silicon Valley in Taoyuan anymore. This is my main contribution before I joined the cabinet.

Audrey Tang: What I would say, the cultural change that’s needed for Taiwan to have the same kind of culture in Silicon Valley are manifold. The primary one is to not be afraid of failure, not afraid of losing face.

Audrey Tang: This is partly because setting up a new startup in Taiwan currently is a very involved process. We’ve tried to amend that a little bit with the so‑called Closely‑Held Company Act a year before, but still there is a lot of hurdle to jump through if you try to start up, as we like, a startup in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: We’re trying to lower that threshold even more because then you can very quickly startup one thing. If it doesn’t work, fold it and start up another thing, and so on, without incurring too much loss to your family network, or to your own pocket, even.

Audrey Tang: Even with this kind of culture setup, we also need to work on inclusion and diversity, because one of the primary strengths of Silicon Valley is that it’s very inclusive. It’s not hostile to any new contributions from the Asian communities, from different communities, from input of all the different parts of the world.

Audrey Tang: They go to Silicon Valley and pursue something that they would look, and amplify, and change the world, essentially.

Audrey Tang: What Taiwan does previously is more of a "do one thing and do it well" kind of industry building, There’s less respect for this kind of integration between the diverse cultures and diverse background of hardware, and software, and kind of humanities, even, and so on, and try to make something that really amplifies and changes the world.

Audrey Tang: Before we get there, we still need to get the cost of staring a startup and hiring some expert foreign workers much easier, before we can get to this inclusive culture. This is also why this is a multi‑year plan. We are not looking at a culture change overnight. We are doing what we can in the first one or two years.

Audrey Tang: This is what we call agile governance. We look at what happens, and then we change our governance structure to try to make things easier for the new startup that then sprouts because of our earlier work. We change our governance structures around the actual ecosystem, change is brought up by the previous stages of our program.

Keith Menconi: This sounds like a pretty big challenge. A lot of the things that you’re talking about are pretty fundamental to the way that Taiwanese companies currently operate.

Keith Menconi: I come from a fairly small vantage point, because I haven’t worked at too many companies, but I’ve seen a fair amount of, "We do it this way because this is the way we’ve done it, and anybody who doesn’t want to do it that way..."

Keith Menconi: This is not exclusive to Taiwan. You can find this in countries and in companies around the world, but it is certainly the case that this is a view that’s very ensconced in Taiwan in particular.

Keith Menconi: You’re up against, as you mentioned, a broad set of cultural norms that are not 100 percent in line with the sort of startup culture that you might want to foster. What do you see your role as in working with that and seeing what works in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: My role is this, I’m actually a pretty good listener. I work with many people who are born before Taiwan’s democratization.

Audrey Tang: Basically, everybody who was born before me remember how it’s like before Taiwan was a democracy. This, more than access to Internet or to personal computers, which is roughly the same year, shapes people’s habit, as you just described, because if you are brought up in a regime that’s not democratic, of course there’s no payoff for innovation.

Audrey Tang: There’s maximal payoff to do and work with the system, and follow whatever that has been in the place before you, because that’s the safest and the least risky to your life, perhaps, way of doing things.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to do here is to listen to the wisdom of the previous generation, who worked on the authoritarian regime before, and who has come up with a lot of wisdom on how to run a country very efficiently, and do their industry and their trades, especially like semiconductors, extremely well.

Audrey Tang: They’re good governors in their respective trades, but what we need to do is to take some of those wisdoms, some of those early, even prescient, reading of the global market, and so on, and share it as open knowledge to the younger generation who thinks very democratically and very innovatively, like the teenagers and tweens in many other democratic countries, but they didn’t have the same perspective.

Audrey Tang: They didn’t have the same connection to the market as the older generation. What I am trying to do is as a bridge of sorts, who speaks both the language of the older generation, because I was born and I remember the martial law era, but then also connecting to the young generation who is unconstrained in imagination.

Audrey Tang: They could do, but they could really use some of the wisdom and resources that the older generations have. What I’m trying to do here is more as a channel or as a bridge between those two generations.

Keith Menconi: When we look at what a Silicon Valley.Asia would mean in Taiwan, what do you think of that as meaning? You’ve already mentioned the fact that thinking about this in terms of a place is not necessarily the right way to think of it.

Keith Menconi: What exactly are we working towards here, if not hyper‑developing Taoyuan and building all that infrastructure as big as can be? As you mentioned, obviously, if you have a Skype connection, you can contribute your ideas from anywhere in the world. That’s not necessarily the way forward.

Keith Menconi: If this actually becomes what you’re hoping it becomes, what does it look like, and how does it contribute to the future of Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: The dot in the Asia.SV, I usually read as “connect”. What we’re looking at is a connection that enables more flow, so to speak, of knowledge, of talent, of those regulatory innovations, and also, of course, of capital between the various parts of Asia, and between Taiwan and Silicon Valley.

Audrey Tang: Those parts are not strictly under my purview. There’s two other ministers with the portfolio who are in charge respectively, for the national investments, and also NGO around investments of the Taiwan, and Asia, and Silicon Valley funds. I’m not managing that.

Audrey Tang: The other minister with the portfolio is managing the development parts of this. The parts that require some physical constructions to further our, for example, a national exhibition center, or things like that.

Audrey Tang: These are not, strictly speaking, making a Silicon Valley clone. It is the bare necessities that are needed for this kind of connection to happen internationally.

Audrey Tang: What’s left for me, it’s mostly two things. One is what we call standard building, because a lot of this connection for the “Asia · Silicon Valley” plan is going to be centered around what we call the Internet of things, meaning that we’re going to have those tiny, tiny computers that’s built into the fabric of whatever we’re wearing, or the watches that we’re wearing.

Audrey Tang: Everything is going to be connected to the Internet, and then share whatever they have on the environment. Of course, this has benefits, because then all the computers and all the devices that we carry have what we call contextual information.

Audrey Tang: They know where they are situated in this space, so you don’t have to keep talking to your GPS navigation where you are and where you’re going to. It’s going to know. It’s more or less a very good thing if it’s personal computing, meaning that you know exactly what’s being shared and what’s being communicated.

Audrey Tang: Of course, there’s many different standards and there’s many different cities who are working with different vendors on these kind of technologies. One of my contributions is to what we call open API.

Audrey Tang: API meaning the application programming interface, meaning that there’s a basic mission readable language for those things to talk to each other. Those languages, they need to come with their dictionaries, with their lexicons.

Audrey Tang: This has two benefits. One is that a different vendor can look at the lexicons that this product is speaking, independently improve this communication, so it makes the entire ecosystem more vendor‑neutral and less tied to one particular vendor.

Audrey Tang: What this does is essentially people in a township or in a city can come up with the demands they want to ask of the technology instead of having technology vendors dictate what is to happen in the city. Having this way to negotiate with technology vendors is very important because if we don’t reflect what we want as citizens, technology is not going to do that for us. That’s the first thing that I’m contributing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that there’s one part in “Asia · Silicon Valley” plan related to me. That is what we call a virtual reality academy.

Audrey Tang: As you know, there’s already some massively online courses where people teaching maybe physics, mathematics, or philosophy, even history are recording the best speeches they have given and have people who are like me, drop out of high school, to still have some sort of high education by just watching those videos.

Keith Menconi: Benson Yeh is one of the best interviews I’ve ever had. He’s obviously the guy who developed PaGamO in Taiwan, and now he has also made some of the most popular ever massive online courses for Taiwan in the Chinese language.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. We drew a lot of inspiration from Benson’s work, but two dimensional screens has its limits. You cannot really teach the art of motorcycle repairing over a two dimensional screen because, obviously, there’s no motorcycle for you to repair.

Audrey Tang: Some of those knowledge, especially in the mission maintenance or interpersonal relationships and things like that, does require a kind of face‑to‑face or hand‑to‑device connection. This is where virtual reality comes in.

Audrey Tang: In the virtual reality, we can already have photo‑realistic models of motorcycles and of you and me to bring our hands and everything basically that we care about into the virtual reality space where we can construct a social circle around a virtual motorcycle in which you can still teach the art of repairing that virtual motorcycle, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This not only lets us to convene classes in a much more economic way ‑‑ even for people in remote islands to enjoy this kind of participation ‑‑ but also, it makes the lectures much more convincing. When people are looking at screens, they get distracted by their phones, by their whatever notification that happens to pop on their screens.

Audrey Tang: If you put on a VR goggle, and start to see Benson speak, and assigned in one of those six person rooms, virtual rooms, out of 6,000 participants...It’s not packed in one 6,000 person auditorium, but rather just six randomly assigned students in one room, watching the same virtual Benson talking.

Audrey Tang: When he is assigning homeworks and so on, those six persons get to virtually collaborate in this virtual classroom.

Keith Menconi: You’re saying fostering this kind of classroom is going to be really important for successful "Silicon Valley in Taiwan"?

Audrey Tang: I’m saying that cultivating this kind of remote collaboration habits, whether it’s through virtual reality or not, is going to be very important for Taiwanese people to learn in the environment where they can draw directly from the wisdoms and the collective intelligence of people around the world, not necessarily just in Silicon Valley.

Audrey Tang: It just so happens that those VR environments are primarily at the moment from Silicon Valley. From having firsthand access to the technologies behind those virtual reality tools, and so on, yes, I think it is a very important part of the skill‑building to know not only the effects of movie‑like VR worlds, but how exactly it is built, and what open source systems there is to build those components, and to tweak it to your liking.

Keith Menconi: We’re going to switch gears one last time, and just take a forward‑looking approach to this next part. Maybe we could just finish some of the thoughts that we’ve already introduced, whether it be about the digital infrastructure, or whether it be about digital democracy, anything there.

Keith Menconi: I’m curious to hear ‑‑ you characterize yourself as an anarchist in some interviews. I’ve heard you say that. Now the anarchist is in government, which is a conundrum perhaps we can put off for another day.

Keith Menconi: In general, you clearly are somebody with a very different image for what government can be, should be, will be in the future. From what you’re saying, the same goes for the way that industry should develop over time.

Keith Menconi: You clearly have a different image for how that could all work. This is just a very open‑ended question. Maybe you could give for our listeners some of the things that you would like to see on any of the various topics that we’ve already covered today.

Keith Menconi: What are some of the trajectories, some of the targets that you would like to see in the mid, medium, long‑term in Taiwan. What does Taiwan look like in Audrey Tang’s science fiction version of it?

Audrey Tang: The best way to predict the future is to invent it. I’m going to list some of the concrete ways that I’m living the change, so to speak. As an anarchist, there’s no dilemma for me. What I mean by anarchism is to not obey commands, nor do I give commands.

Audrey Tang: This is interesting, because during the negotiations that I have with the Premier, I entered the cabinet as a bridge between the civil society, and the private sector, and the government. Meaning that I do not look at confidential information, I do not look at national secrets, so anything that passes through my eyes is, by definition, Freedom of Information Access compatible.

Audrey Tang: It is on this ground that I can live this autonomous team‑building, that everybody in my team is not really listening to my commands. They decide their own objective, their own key results, and things like this.

Audrey Tang: This is a radial change of the governance because, previously, in many government structures, it is the boss who dictates the key performance metrics, and it is the underling who delivers those results, and so on.

Audrey Tang: In my office, it doesn’t work like that. It is a collaborative space where anybody is free to propose, to pitch some idea that they see needs doing, and then to call for collaborative help from any of those, 15 now, collaborators, and soon the be joined by the Principal Officers of the open government in each ministry to try to make it happen.

Audrey Tang: This is almost a collaborative syndicate way to run a team. This is not that unusual in the Silicon Valley startups. Many startups started this way. GitHub started this way. Valve, in many ways, is still running in this way.

Audrey Tang: What is different, perhaps, is that there is now a room in the national administration for this kind of governance structure to happen. What we do is that we share the rules, the playbooks, the tools that we use to make this happen on our website, pdis.tw. PDIS for Public Digital Innovation Space.

Audrey Tang: What we are trying to do here is to have other ministries to look at the tools that we’re using. They were going to be certified in the government cloud, so unlike Dropbox, or Google Drive, or whatever other external tools, these are safe tools that are open source and free to use within the government cloud.

Audrey Tang: If and when they voluntarily, because I don’t give commands, find those tools and this collaborative culture interesting, then they can take it and use it with no cost whatsoever.

Audrey Tang: This is how we’re trying to get this, maybe a meme, a virus of the mind, to spread, that sometimes it is more efficient if you work in a transparent way. Sometimes, it is more useful if you trust the collective intelligence to provide input to your work.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes it is really a good idea to engage machine learning and some artificial intelligence to help you to transcribe your audios, or to schedule your meetings, or to help you in whatever other way, and leave the valuable work to human beings, instead of having the human beings repeat the work that we can now delegate to machine intelligence to do.

Audrey Tang: All these are the demonstrations that I’m doing in the administration. I wouldn’t say it’s the science fiction of culture, because we’re living it right now.

Audrey Tang: What we are not doing is to directly order any other administrative agencies to adopt this because, first, we’re still experimenting. We’re not sure, 100 percent, it’s a good idea yet.

Audrey Tang: Second, it has to be a cultural change from the department itself. It doesn’t work if we command people to not obey commands. It doesn’t work like this. They have to be a voluntary culture change.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say it’s something that we would be seeing, it’s rippling out in a few months’ time. If you give it four years, five years, then I’m sure that the new generation of digital natives who enter public service would then prefer to work with the same kind of tools and kind of spirit that they have grew up with.

Keith Menconi: How hopeful are you? Obviously, you’re saying that it’s still very experimental. It’s in the mad scientist phase. Hopefully people will see it, and like it, and adopt it.

Keith Menconi: Any government, especially governments, are notoriously difficult to reform, and culture runs deep, and all that. We’ve certainly touched on that earlier in this conversation.

Keith Menconi: How hopeful are you that you might have the opportunity, or the folks that you work with might have the opportunity to spread this to the rest of the government, and it really could make a significant dent in the way people think about government, and the way that Taiwan’s government operates in the future?

Audrey Tang: Whenever I talk about this to our international friends, they get very inspired. Part of this is already making its way to the Madrid City Council, of all places. What I’m saying, when I’m talking about the meme, it doesn’t have to be a local thing.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like a traveling virus of the mind. Whenever some part of our team goes on a conference, and so on, other digital systems counterparts in other governments, here are some of the tools and methods we are using, and then just work it into their team’s culture. There is a very similar team, the GDS team now in Australia, and New Zealand, and Singapore, in every places that we’ve been to. We’re not pioneers on every regards. We learn also our methods from our counterparts around the world.

Audrey Tang: I would say this is a collaborate network of innovators inside the government around the world. We make mistakes. We sometimes get some success stories. What’s important is that we work in the open, and share the tools internationally, so that people can pick up and run with it.

Audrey Tang: When there are more proven cases from Taiwan of those tools actually effecting a change, then it makes it much easier for us than to work in Taiwan’s context saying, "You see, these places have already made it work. Now we can work on a much more mature set of construction of technologies."

Audrey Tang: Vice versa, there are people in the UK who look in Taiwan and say, "Hey, they are looking at this process. Even people in Taiwan can do that. Of course, people in UK can do this, too," and so on. This is a very good cross‑pollination that we’ve been always working in the society of the Internet and web makers. We’re just trying to do this in the public service context.

Keith Menconi: The last question I’m going to throw at you, and this one is very self‑serving, just because I have you right now. When else will I have this opportunity to ask this question? Some of the answers ‑‑ I’m going to be honest ‑‑ that you’ve given me today have made me a little nervous.

Keith Menconi: You’re talking about in the future, we can have avatars that can look whatever we want. We can give them voices like whatever we want. We can crowdsource the things that they’re saying. It sounds an awful lot, like you’re saying, we’re not going to need radio broadcasters anymore in a few years. That’s making me a little nervous. Is that what you’re saying?

Audrey Tang: No, I’m not. I noticed that you’re a very good listener. Machine doesn’t replace listening any time soon. To listen, you really have to be authentically yourself, and merge your feelings and your horizons with another person.

Audrey Tang: There is always the room for authentic dialog and conversation between people. Whether it’s through radio, or through Internet radio, or through virtual reality, that’s the worries of the medium. This kind of authentic communication between one person and the other, that’s going to be relevant for a very long time.

Keith Menconi: That helps some of my concern there. Thank you for that point. We have, of course, been speaking today to Digital Minister Audrey Tang. Audrey, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much.