Grit Hofmann: How long have you been in office?

Audrey Tang: Since October 1 last year.

Grit Hofmann: So it’s been a year?

Audrey Tang: More or less.

Grit Hofmann: I don’t ask more because I would love to have all this information on camera. If I now asked you everything then it’s already asked.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Grit Hofmann: Is it possible for everyone to go in flight mode?

Tobias Müller: What are we waiting for?

Grit Hofmann: The second mic. We waiting for the second mic to turn on, but it ran down again.

Tobias Müller: So you don’t got a mic, so we can’t hear what you’re saying, and that’s important, so we have to mic you. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Or I can practice my sign language.

Tobias Müller: [laughs] You can. So your radio setup is already working?

Audrey Tang: Yes. [writes on tablet and holds it up] That’s my sign language.

Fridtjof Detzner: Very good.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a sign.

Fridtjof Detzner: First I was at the ITRI, and I met a guy building an exoskeleton...

Audrey Tang: A what?

Fridtjof Detzner: An exoskeleton, for people...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I know that work.

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s really cool. I actually see him and I tried it on myself. It’s great. It’s not super-smooth yet, but it kind of works. Three minutes after you’ve put it on, you suddenly can start walking again.

Audrey Tang: The main challenge is the size and weight of the battery. Once they solve that, it’s...

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s true to different things, right? Batteries is kind of the limiting factor to a lot of things...

Audrey Tang: Everything’s exponential but batteries.

Fridtjof Detzner: They’re using normal e-bike batteries right now, which I think is acceptable. It was fun...

Fridtjof Detzner: And then I met... Do you know this team? You probably know?

Audrey Tang: No?

Fridtjof Detzner: They’re doing security cameras with artificial intelligence. What they do in comparison to normal cameras is, whenever you put them somewhere, it’s like tripwires on an image. Say there’s a security camera at a school, you have a fence, then you can kind of draw, whenever someone is going over a fence, it should do an alert. They can do it by being able to recognize humans on any...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m aware of that...

Fridtjof Detzner: It was really cool. They worked it out quite well, and I had a lot of fun there, in San Francisco as well, it’s really impressive.

Audrey Tang: We were just working here on the OpenCV recognition of post-it notes...

Fridtjof Detzner: Oh, nice.

Audrey Tang: ...so that we can paste on those whiteboards and have it all magically transcribed to online versions. They’re coding that right now. We were just joking because if you wear something like this, like an optical camouflage, OpenCV will see all these faces...

Fridtjof Detzner: Very good. Yeah, we weren’t so projector-friendly. We’re using a lot of Kanban to utilize our processes. At some point, we all worked on some paper boards where Kanban is. We wanted to keep it in sync with digital boards, as well.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s what we’re doing too.

Fridtjof Detzner: What we did is that we’re connecting office printers to the system. Just click a button, you would be able to print out a small piece of paper with a QR code, and then by moving it on the board, it gets updated. We open-sourced the whole thing.

Audrey Tang: Cool. But then if you add new cards, you still have to do it the digital way? You can’t add note cards the analog way. That’s what we’re trying to solve here. We do a lot of brainstorming, not necessarily in Kanban, but also in this realtimeboard where there’s a lot more structure going on.

Audrey Tang: It more closely resembles a real paper-like workflow, where we have our organizational goals, values and artifacts, and so updates are road mapped accordingly. While every part of this line becomes one of those core goals, then we map it back to the Kanban columns, which is reviewed weekly every Monday.

Holger Ernst: Do you want me to put your iPhone somewhere that...?

Audrey Tang: Somewhere that can film both of us?

Holger Ernst: Here?

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Holger Ernst: I’ll do some checks, so will you talk to Fridtjof like the way you would do when we record?

Fridtjof Detzner: How’s your day?

Audrey Tang: I think we’re about halfway there.

Fridtjof Detzner: Halfway only? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Halfway only. It’s a very long day. You know those 30-hour days. I love those a lot.

Fridtjof Detzner: I’d like some of these. [laughs] I do need more time.

Audrey Tang: It’s easy. You just delay sleep six hours every day.

Tobias Müller: It’s so nice that everybody in the world has the same amount of time every day.

Fridtjof Detzner: That is nice. The thing is, it’s a matter of what you do with it. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Actually, if we move to a larger planet...

Fridtjof Detzner: You would have more time.

Audrey Tang: You will have more time in a day.

Fridtjof Detzner: Actually, Albert Einstein found it’s not the case. It depends on your position in the world.

Fridtjof Detzner: How do you pronounce your name right?

Audrey Tang: Audrey.

Fridtjof Detzner: Audrey?

Audrey Tang: Audrey, or whatever.

Fridtjof Detzner: Audrey. Because mine is really complicated. Everybody’s struggling. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: How do you pronounce your name?

Fridtjof Detzner: Fridtjof. [laughs] See?

Audrey Tang: Fridtjof?

Fridtjof Detzner: Very good.

Audrey Tang: Fridtjof.

Fridtjof Detzner: Fridtjof. It’s not a German name, though. It’s Norwegian, but also only rarely in Norway. [laughs]

Fridtjof Detzner: What’s planned for this project, or you don’t know yet?

Audrey Tang: We run weekly deliberations based on people’s petitions, but also things that are really so advanced that no single departments or ministry know how to handle. For example, the UberX case were handled this way, where we have this online AI-mediated discussion, where people express what they want or don’t want from the shared passenger rides.

Audrey Tang: We use a machine learning algorithm to sort people into principal components and clusters, and then to have majority opinions gathered. Even though people may disagree on things, people still agree on things like insurance, taxation, and so on. Then we take those majority opinions and have a face-to-face deliberation.

Fridtjof Detzner: Only about the things people disagree?

Audrey Tang: Actually, only about things people agree, because people agree on those things as important values, and then we ask all the stakeholders, including Uber, and taxi drivers, and whatever, of what kind of regulation do you think are useful to address these people’s common feelings.

Audrey Tang: We also talk about contested points, of course, but we don’t usually spend too much time on it. We respect people have different feelings about the same basic fact, but the idea’s that addressed is people’s common feelings, is a win already, and then we turn it into regulation.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that when thousands of people participated online, watched the live stream, it creates a tremendous pressure on people to both show up, and also act reasonably. This is how we did, for example, things like sharing economy, right now social enterprises, and uncrewed vehicles, and all sort of new things that doesn’t neatly fit into one ministry’s endeavors.

Audrey Tang: We do it like this because we meet both in real space and also online, and we want to give people who practice this thing over live stream the same participation feeling as people here. We explore a lot using augmented reality, virtual reality, so that people can wear a headset and feel that they are part of the discussion place.

Audrey Tang: Also, so that we can project people’s consensus around specific points or a specific place in time as one of the objects of discussion, like if we’re talking about city planning, I can project the city right here for us to talk about it. It’s an interactive model of such. That’s the idea.

Fridtjof Detzner: You probably have to repeat all that while...

Audrey Tang: It’s OK. These are some of the scenarios that we’re trying to design, both in a room-based VR, and also in headset-based VR, and mix those two together.

Fridtjof Detzner: Sounds fantastic.

Audrey Tang: It’s making democracy fun.

Fridtjof Detzner: It sounds like you have the freedom to do a lot of things.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s an internal startup.

Audrey Tang: How do you review the footage?

Fridtjof Detzner: I’m about to see the first episode of Mongolia while I’m back, or maybe even before. The whole format’s told in a way that there’s no external speaker, or moderator, or something. They try to use all the different scenes for the voice and then underlaying on the pictures.

Fridtjof Detzner: I can’t really imagine what it’s going to be like. I think it’s going to be exciting to see what the overall message of it is, how the whole form is going to be received, and if people like it or not.

Audrey Tang: The Mongolia one is going to be your pilot?

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s the first one. It’s going to be the pilot, and it’s going to be aired on a weekly basis then. It’s 10 episodes. I elected to do this because it’s something completely different. It’s a challenge, as well, to do.

Audrey Tang: It’s only for German audience, or is it also going to be translated?

Fridtjof Detzner: No, it’s going to be in German, English, and stations are sending abroad to cover the German people living abroad. It’s going to be aired in English, which is cool.

Audrey Tang: Looking forward to it.

Fridtjof Detzner: You’ll be able to see it here, which is cool. I think I like it for the sake of meeting a lot of pretty interesting persons. It’s not so much about earning money. It’s really about the experience for me, so I’m doing something else.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

Tobias Müller: We’re ready to go.

Fridtjof Detzner: Audrey, it would be great if you could introduce yourself because I think I am not really sure there is an equivalent of your position in Germany.

Audrey Tang: I’m Audrey Tang. I’m Digital Minister here in Taiwan. As a digital minister, I don’t have a digital ministry, but rather work as minister without portfolio, meaning that when there is new digital stuff, like e-gaming, or things like that, that doesn’t really neatly fit into any of the ministries’ purview, then I help the Premier to make sure how exactly should each ministry handle this.

Audrey Tang: If one of the ministers think this is cross-ministry stuff, I also help the ministers to communicate to the Premier.

Fridtjof Detzner: You pretty much insert yourself wherever you’re needed, then? Is that true?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. While other ministers without portfolio have their specific ministries to worry about, because the digital transformation really covers all the ministries, so the participation offices come from, literally, every ministry in the administration.

Fridtjof Detzner: That, to my understanding, pretty much sounds like agile software development, where you do a lot of different things, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. We run on a weekly basis where we have stand-up meetings every day, and then, also, offline and online Kanban boards, notes, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We used to record our roadmap in business oragamis, so all those tools that people use in startup and on the weekly iteration cycle is mostly how I run this Public Digital Innovation Space.

Fridtjof Detzner: That sounds great, but I could hardly imagine with people that are not used to software development, that kind of working method, isn’t it hard to work with them?

Audrey Tang: Not at all, because the Public Digital Innovation Space works on a volunteer basis, so only people who volunteer to work in this space, currently about 20 people, get into this culture. We’re not forcing all the ministries to transform overnight into this digital way of working.

Audrey Tang: Rather, we’re working in a pre-figurative way of demoing how this work and maybe spreads gradually to the other ministries.

Fridtjof Detzner: Since when are you doing this?

Audrey Tang: Since last October.

Fridtjof Detzner: As you said, you’re pretty much dependent on how other people are working together with you. Could you give me an example of something which you have been doing and a lot of other ministries were involved?

Audrey Tang: Of course. We work on the e-petition case, where people who have the countersignature of about 5,000 people online gets a guaranteed response from the ministries. If the petition is just for one, single ministry, of course it’s relatively easy to handle, but sometimes we get those petitions that involves a lot of different ministries.

Audrey Tang: For example, there was just one about a southern part of Taiwan, Hengchun, which really lacks medical resources. The petition was to ask for the Ministry of Interior’s helicopters to be stationed there to work as ambulance so that they could be transported to medical centers...

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s a double use?

Audrey Tang: Exactly, so it’s double use. It’s actually involving the Ministry of Health and Welfare, as well, also the army, and a lot of very different stakeholders who everyone has a different solution to this problem of medical assistance.

Audrey Tang: What we did was we went all the way to Hengchun, the south most part of Taiwan, and held a about 20 to 40-people deliberation there. Then we projected this in live stream and allowed people all over Taiwan to both watch how we gathered the facts and check everybody’s feelings, but also provide their input as the deliberation is going.

Audrey Tang: The legislators also practiced their expertise on suggestion of how, exactly, to solve this problem. It’s not just from the administration, but some legislators, as well.

Audrey Tang: After a full day of this kind of deliberation, we finally settled on a few ways to improve their local medical situation by improving the hospitals, improving the transportation, and things like that. Then, just recently, the Premier visited Hengchun to make good on the promise of the deliberations held there.

Audrey Tang: I think it was pretty successful in both getting all the ministries lined up together, but also let people know that when they have a petition, no matter which ministry takes the petition, every ministry is actually the same government and answers people in a way that is equal, like peer-to-peer.

Audrey Tang: Instead of telling people what to do best, we are now trusting people to come up with ideas and their feelings of their local wisdom.

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s a more democratic way, a more agile and democratic way of running things...

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s really, really interesting.

Fridtjof Detzner: To me this sounds fantastic, and like a more agile and straightforward way to deal with these issues. I would imagine that some of people were not used to this method. Do they all agree with the method, or do you have voices of being concerned of dealing with issues like this?

Audrey Tang: Not at all, because the participation officers on each ministry vote every month on the cases that we want to be treated this way. It’s also democratic internally.

Fridtjof Detzner: Nice. That’s great. I heard you’re a software developer, or have been.

Audrey Tang: Still am.

Fridtjof Detzner: How do you balance these two different things?

Audrey Tang: It’s the same thing.

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s the same thing?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m rewriting the country’s operating system.

Audrey Tang: We start from the kernel.

Fridtjof Detzner: Very good. It’s, time-wise, no problem for you to balance the two things?

Audrey Tang: Not at all, because the whole idea is for me to act as a vehicle of radical transparency to people. All the interviews that I give I take a copy, myself, and publish it on social media. Also, all the meetings that I chair internally I take a full transcript and send to all participants who collaborated at it, to review for 10 working days, and then publish it to everybody.

Audrey Tang: Basically, my work here is like a bridge to the open culture, or free culture movement, and the government itself. I work on all the automation tools to simplify the transcription, to simplify the translation, to simplify the recording, simplify the facilitation.

Fridtjof Detzner: Building a CI process, basically. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Exactly, a continuous integration of people’s voices. That’s my main work. It is a software, actually, architect’s work.

Fridtjof Detzner: When does this role of minister got established in the first place?

Audrey Tang: There was always some minister without portfolio taking care of digital affairs. Before me it was Jaclyn Tsai, so-called Cyberspace Minister. Before her we have, for example, Simon Chang, and other people in the same position.

Audrey Tang: It’s interesting, because Simon used to be a director of engineering at Google. Jaclyn Tsai used to work in IBM Asia as a director of law, and I used to work with Apple. We all come from this world where we talk a lot about agile, of being responsive, of being user-centric, things like that, to put it into practice.

Fridtjof Detzner: It makes so much sense.

Audrey Tang: It’s been like that for years.

Fridtjof Detzner: What do you think is the biggest struggle for Taiwan? My understanding -- this week I’ve been here, and I learned a lot -- all this economic growth is due to the manufacturing of electronic devices. I also learned that all the big manufacturers are also in China right now, manufacturing there.

Fridtjof Detzner: This transformation from being just hardware-based industry to being more software-based is probably the big challenge Taiwan is facing, isn’t it?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Basically, we have a very good working relationship with machines, silicon, chips, and semiconductors, but now we need to work with relationships with people, with interaction design, service design, all sort of design work. That was not what Taiwan’s known for.

Audrey Tang: A lot of Taiwan’s younger generation are actually very talented in this regard, so a lot of things the government does is to mix the older generation, who are super good at doing semiconductors and stuff, and younger people who have a better working relationship with social value, with people, communities’ concerns, and things like that. Make sure that they’re working in harmony, instead of contradicting each other.

Fridtjof Detzner: You’re part of the government, but do you think they fully recognize that this is the transformation that has to happen for Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: We are working on the so-called Digital Nation Plan. It’s a eight-year plan. We know fully that the bureaucracy, or the professional career public servants were raised in a era where the fields have very delineated demarcations between the fields.

Audrey Tang: People were trained in one field or the other, and they seldom talked to each other. Now it’s very cross-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary. While we are changing our curriculum to reflect this fact, we can’t just change everybody who work in the pubic service overnight, which is why this is a eight-year plan, and not a eight-month plan.

Audrey Tang: We recognize the difficulty in tackling this, but we also recognize we’re not alone. All the governments everywhere is working on digital transformation. We have good friends to share notes and learn from each other.

Fridtjof Detzner: We’ve talked about the future. We think about how this transformation is going in five years’ time. Do you have goals where you can say, "Oh, I want these things to be changed?" How would you imagine Taiwan in five years’ time?

Audrey Tang: I would like the public service to trust people more. I think that’s my main mandate going in, because trust, as you can see, is mutual, and somebody has to move first.

Audrey Tang: There is a growing distrust in the idea of dis-empowerment from the citizens, because they are used to a lot of online communities where people have very close relationships, almost overnight, has caused swift trust, while the public service is still working on the month-based iteration cycle.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it feels that people are becoming more distant with public servants. On the other hand, the public servants also feel that there may be populism, there may be rumors, there may be a lot of things that sounds like noises, not signals.

Audrey Tang: My main work, which will take at least 20 years, not five years, is to get the government see that all the different dissenting voices and all the so-called noises are actually signals, and we have a good demodulator that turns the dissents into data and into something that people can focus on and have a conversation with.

Audrey Tang: When the public service trusts people this way, through transparency and participation, maybe some people will start to trust the public service as partners, but never more than how the public service trusts in the people. Somebody has to move first.

Audrey Tang: That’s my main idea. I think it will take a generation or so for the government to trust people by default.

Fridtjof Detzner: I would say so. It’s a great approach. I agree.

Grit Hofmann: I want to know...

Audrey Tang: Go ahead.

Grit Hofmann: Can I re-describe your double function, minister and...?

Audrey Tang: Hacker.

Grit Hofmann: You run from the ministry, back to your company? How does it work in your everyday life?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not like I’m part-time for anything, no. I meant that the previous ministers with that portfolio, working in this position, were also from international companies. They, of course, quit their job before becoming a minister. It’s not like we’re part-timers, no.

Fridtjof Detzner: You always wanted to do this, working in politics?

Audrey Tang: For me it’s more or less the same kind of work. I used to work in the Perl community, working on the new language, the Perl 6 language. It also involves talking to a lot of stakeholders, coming to a consensus, traveling all over the world to gather people’s imaginations and expectations of what the new language is going to be, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It is, actually, governance in a sense, just like people in IETF or ICANN. They are actually doing political work, without being in the UN or in a sovereign state. It’s what we call the multi-stakeholder governance model.

Audrey Tang: When I brought in this model here, as part of the vTaiwan Project and the other projects, it was explicitly modeled after the standard bodies’ multi-stakeholder model, instead of the old voting model.

Audrey Tang: We don’t vote. We reject votes and kings. You surely know this. We believe in rough consensus and running code. It’s just that the "running code" is not just algorithm in this case. It’s actually regulations and policies.

Audrey Tang: The fundamental idea is that anyone who can declare themself to be a stakeholder, we welcome them to show up and to have a focused conversation. That remains the same as the open multi-stakeholder model.

Audrey Tang: I think I’ve been more or less doing exactly the same work, but I’m very fortunate that we have a cabinet, where not only the Premier and me are independent, there’s more independent ministers than minister of any party, so we can focus on this policy-based work without being seen as betraying some parties, or things like that.

Grit Hofmann: I’m curious, have you ever, I don’t want to say dreamt of, but did you really want to be a minister? Why did you do this, to take political actions?

Audrey Tang: Why not?

Audrey Tang: To answer this more seriously, after the Occupy, the Sunflower Movement, the demands of people of radical transparency has really soared sky-high, so that everything that the government does not publish is seen as secretive and not to be trusted. There is a real trust crisis going on around that time.

Audrey Tang: As someone who specialize in designing such interaction, and social network systems, and social media systems, I see this as a very good opportunity of doing a demonstration in a national-wide scale. Of how exactly can digital tools help people, not just to speak freely.

Audrey Tang: We have so many tools where you can speak to millions of people, but we don’t have that many tools to listen to millions of people usefully, or have millions of people listen to each other.

Audrey Tang: Because that was my research interest, I think, why not? To have this kind of demo-field to actually develop a set of tools that can transfer across different contexts and cultures, to really get millions of people listen to each other at scale, this is my research interest.

Audrey Tang: My main boss is actually still research, [laughs] but I’m very fortunate to have this space where I can explore these ideas.

Grit Hofmann: Audrey, I was just thinking, you probably are in contact with a lot of startups here now. Is there anything you would say that is missing to startups in Taiwan that they need urgently?

Audrey Tang: It used to be that our company law was preventing some structures that the startups really need, such as not having their stocks diluted after a few rounds of investments, and things like that, which is why a lot of startups went to Cayman Islands or other places to setup a company.

Audrey Tang: Thanks to our previous digital minister, Jaclyn Tsai’s effort, and the vTaiwan community’s process, we actually fixed that in the company law, where you can now have a closely-held company where you have special voting rights, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, we’re still expanding on the closely-held company law concept so that people can have different voting ways in a closely-held company to make sure that startup people ends up realizing their mission or their social value, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: The company law, itself, while being a very fundamental law, I would also like -- and this is speaking personally -- to see, because in our act there is the first clause that says a company exist to make money, to earn a profit.

Audrey Tang: But if we compare internationally, there’s a lot of company laws that already allows people to allow different social missions, social values, or environmental values, and so on, without getting sued by their shareholders.

Audrey Tang: This shareholder-to-stakeholder shift as part of social innovation, I think is something that really needs to happen, because otherwise we have people who are just for the money and people who are in the NPOs who just care about social, environmental value. They gradually don’t speak the same language.

Audrey Tang: We have lot of, in the startup world, fights, even, over the related values, but they don’t have to be at odds. There could be social innovations that are sustainable, while taking care of environment and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think, personally, that’s something that really needs to happen. We’re reflecting that in the new company law revision that’s about two months from now.

Grit Hofmann: I was asking Fridtjof why he did found a company. We talked about does a company have to do the right thing or just the money-wise thing.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Fridtjof Detzner: My question is if you’re in for the money or if you are in for passion. It’s great if the purpose of the company is also by law not necessarily that you have to make money. To me, in my founding history, I didn’t care about the money. It was really about fulfilling passion and empowering other people.

Audrey Tang: There’s the enabling, the empowerment, the social purpose. It would be good if the company can declare it publicly to investors, so everybody knows what happens going in.

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s great to have that in there. It’s possible, also, to do it without, but it requires a workaround to it.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, and always, of course, when the next shareholder comes it dilutes, and maybe people who held a small amount of shares want to sue you, or whatever. It’s easier if the governance structure recognized this double bottom line or triple bottom line explicitly. I think that’s what really needs to happen now.

Fridtjof Detzner: I agree. Some startups really start off idealistic and might have these value, but then over time, when the more money gets added, and the more investors focus on return on investment, the more this gets diluted, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Fridtjof Detzner: I see, if it’s in the written foundation, it becomes another thing, because it’s written in there.

Audrey Tang: It also changes the investors, because they already see the corporate social responsibility, and things like that, but this actually locks them to a specific vision. They can also endorse this vision, in addition to the startup team.

Audrey Tang: One example is in the gaming industry. Of course you know the "id Software" company release as open source all the old games that they did two generations before. I think this is very good for the commons, for the whole ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: You can also see this as a social purpose, to further the understanding of the industry. I think that they are. Even if the game doesn’t sell, even if the company fails, it still has a contribution to the environment and to the society.

Fridtjof Detzner: It does. You make money with this concept for some time, and after a while you’re willing to give back and share that as part of something that happened before, and you’re willing to share.

Audrey Tang: We’re seeing that in software. It’s so natural now. Open source has already won, but in other industries, they’re still learning about this.

Fridtjof Detzner: I think it’s a great principle.

Grit Hofmann: Audrey, I have one last question. You said you work for Apple.

Audrey Tang: I worked with Apple.

Grit Hofmann: I was wondering, comparing, for instance, the American startup culture and the Taiwanese startup culture. Could you describe for me the Taiwanese entrepreneurial mindset?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. A lot of this generation of Taiwanese entrepreneurs, they really start with some social initiatives, with something that they want to solve, with some people they want to enable.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot more social mission in the Taiwan startup scene than in the Silicon Valley. That’s not surprising, because Silicon Valley is all about [laughs] the next unicorn nowadays.

Audrey Tang: This really reflects something about why people want to start a small or grow into a medium business. It’s because there’s a part of society that care, a part of the social problem they want to solve. There’s also talks about the relative lack of venture capitals on very high-risk companies.

Audrey Tang: It’s a double-edged sword. It both means that there is a very good supporting SME network, but this also means that for the next unicorn to happen in Taiwan, we really need to get people who want to take more risk into a position where they can take more risk without being seen as too crazy.

Audrey Tang: There’s a curve of people who want to take risk. Social entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs in general, are already people who want to take more risks.

Audrey Tang: I think we can structure the society and the market so that people don’t see failure matter as much; as people share their postmortems or their lessons learned during their failure, they’re still recognized as part of the community, in good standing.

Audrey Tang: If we can learn this part of the Silicon Valley culture, not the other parts, I think this will also grow Taiwan’s startup scene into something that is even more diverse than currently.

Grit Hofmann: That’s what I had in mind too.

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s great. I have to say, I’m really impressed. The approach is great. If I can think about, I would love to see these topics handled in Germany as pretty much like how you described.

Fridtjof Detzner: It’s familiar to me because it’s like you’re using all the software analogies. In software, and it’s happened in this industry, it’s about coordinating a lot of private people to accomplish one task, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Fridtjof Detzner: Accomplishing one task with a lot of people who all have the same mind, and also their own ideas, it is that you need systems where everybody gets recognized for their idea, but still you have to align then in order to work towards one goal.

Fridtjof Detzner: That’s pretty much what a politician probably should be about. I think it’s a natural thing to do it that way, but I’d never thought about doing it exactly like you described. It’s impressive.

Audrey Tang: We call that scalable listening. I think that’s politics in its forming.

Fridtjof Detzner: It is. In the end of the day, people want to be seen, want to be heard, want to know they’re recognized. That’s the idea of having a democracy.

Fridtjof Detzner: You vote for something you want, and that’s the thing, but I think it’s missing out on the return channel from the government, that you really see you make a difference by your contribution. This is something I don’t feel always recognized for whenever I do vote.

Audrey Tang: If you vote, it’s two bits every four years. There’s a lot of asymmetry. You download so much from the government, but you upload only two bits every four years.

Fridtjof Detzner: On the other hand, I see the concept of voting for people that are then in charge for me doing stuff. I think the amount of transparency you want to bring into the process, that, in the end, enables trust.

Fridtjof Detzner: That was also one thing I learned through running a company with 200 people. If I do transparency, and I leave around the numbers, and I tell them about the strategy, only then people can follow the way I think and the way I want to solve problems. I see transparency as a foundation for trust.

Audrey Tang: Yes, and in the startup world, even if they’re not open source, they all adopted open governance, where all the customers see what the priorities are, and even participate in a lot of structured feedback.

Audrey Tang: We’re, actually, now redesigning our tax-filing software because of a petition from a designer, that said Mac can’t really file taxes that well. We’re redesigning it so that we’re including telemetry and user experience research, things like that, so that the designers can have their input while we’re doing the tax filing software.

Audrey Tang: What’s important about this is not just one piece of software, but a fundamental rethink of government services into the startup world’s idea of working "with" the people, not "for" the people.

Audrey Tang: Because previously, in the shrink-wrap, proprietary software idea, it’s all about developing for the people. Redmond knows very well what personal computers should do, and people download one version after another every year.

Audrey Tang: Now even Microsoft have moved to collaborate with the customers, instead of for the customers. I think there’s the whole governance change that is happening just this moment.

Fridtjof Detzner: I think you can draw the analogy, as well, even if you are a commercial producer of software, and you have customers, you only can produce a great piece of software if you really know your customer. You have to collect data. You have to survey them. You have to really understand. The time of not listening to the customer is over, right?

Audrey Tang: Exactly, it’s so last century.

Fridtjof Detzner: That’s great. I was always saying it’s like the purpose of a company is to solve a problem for the customer. If they don’t solve a problem for the customer, why should the company even exist?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Fridtjof Detzner: You could adapt the same principle to the government, right?

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Fridtjof Detzner: Sometimes you don’t feel that.

Audrey Tang: As a conservative anarchist, [laughs] my ultimate vision is for the people who have the kits to run the governance system themselves, but of course it will take more than a lifetime.

Audrey Tang: The idea is to make sure that everybody knows, transparently, how government works, and this is the foundation toward a more anarchistic society.

Fridtjof Detzner: More like you can see the living government as if you would show a picture of how all the things are working together. You could zoom in and see this picture of...

Audrey Tang: Right, I used to use the metaphor where the politicians are, for example, steering a bus, and people are passengers. While, of course, skilled drivers save a lot of time, it would be best if they have GPS systems, and everybody have the same transparency map, where you can see where we’re going, what’s happening, and so on.

Audrey Tang: At some point, when people know how the governance system works, how career public servants work, it’s like the car itself, maybe, will move to semi-autonomous driving, where people can then know how governance itself works, without having someone to make decisions; or you make decisions only when the car is about to ram into something.

Audrey Tang: We’re gradually moving this way, as long as we have trust in the collective intelligence.

Fridtjof Detzner: You don’t want to do this all the time, get into the weeds, and really dive deep, and look at something, but you might want to do that once in a while. I would assume, if I take a weekend, and take a deep, deep dive, and really can see it, that’s going to lead to a lot of trust.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Fridtjof Detzner: I don’t want to do it on an everyday basis...

Audrey Tang: Not at all.

Fridtjof Detzner: ...but "the feeling that I could" is a game-changer.

Audrey Tang: With machine learning, as long as we get sufficient raw materials, of course you can adapt interactively to your inquiries or make useful infographics, according to your taste, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It used to be very expensive because people have to prepare them by hand, but now we have sufficient machine learning tools, so that we don’t actually have to prepare them by hand. That’s the idea on that.

Fridtjof Detzner: That’s great. Nice approach. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Grit Hofmann: Thanks so much, Audrey.