James Bray: I’m recording it.

Audrey Tang: On your side? That’s great. Just send me whatever you’ve recorded afterwards then.

James Bray: No problem. I’m just going to stick to the script that I sent you a couple of weeks ago. It’d be pretty straight forward. Let me just pull that up.

Audrey Tang: I might want to use the whiteboard, so let me figure out how to share a particular window.

James Bray: There is a button for that. It’s that...

Audrey Tang: Like screen sharing?

James Bray: Yeah. It’s the top left of that window, the play button. That shares the screen.

Audrey Tang: The top level?

James Bray: Yeah. You’ve got that control panel? Have you?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but you’re the presenter, so I’m not sure how to share my particular...

James Bray: Let’s see.

Audrey Tang: You can make me presenter.

Audrey Tang: All right, it’s your screen.

James Bray: OK. What we want, is it? Let’s have a look. Oh, OK. I can make you presenter here.

Audrey Tang: Yay.

James Bray: Yeah. Now, you should have it.

Audrey Tang: Oh, here we go. Here we go, yes. Let’s see. Choose a window. Click on player, and...

James Bray: There we go.

Audrey Tang: This should work. Just a second, let me make sure that... can I both share my screen and my face?

James Bray: I think.

Audrey Tang: This isn’t working...

James Bray: There you go. Now, I can see it all. Cool.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. Yay. Let’s get started then.

James Bray: Well, just to recap then. Sorry, I have a bit of a chest infection.

Audrey Tang: No, that’s fine.

James Bray: The premise of the fourth industrial revolution in general, and so this whole series, is that we’re going to live through an era of revolutionary change as a result of various technologies. This episode is specifically focused on democracy and how the infrastructure of democracy and our norms are likely to be changed by new technologies.

James Bray: The first question is, I assume that you would agree with the premise that that will happen.

Audrey Tang: It’s already happening and it’s already happened, so it’s difficult to disagree with something that’s already happened.

James Bray: Could you elaborate on how you see that trend developing?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think it’s a single trend, to be very precise. I have this screen sharing. Is it still working?

James Bray: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: I think, for example, currently in Taiwan, citizens’ expectation is already at the time where if they get 5,000 people to go to this e-petition site. Now, many of the other countries’ e-petition site, if they’re above a certain threshold, they get a guaranteed response from a certain minister or director of that office. That’s the end of the expectation.

Audrey Tang: Or if they want to build a Death Star or something, they get a very humorous response, but it’s still just a single written response from an office.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, people’s expectation is that this e-petition will be put to a vote by our ministries’ representatives. This vote is actually after a very thorough discussion process of the merits of the petitions. This discussion and vote itself is radically transparent. People can read the whole thing on the public website.

Audrey Tang: After voting, if the petition is nominated for collaboration, if it’s a regional petition -- for example, in one of the rural areas in Taiwan, the south most part of Taiwan or one of the south-of-PengHu islands and so on -- they may petition for, they already did petition for a station of the helicopters as ambulance, because their closest large hospital is 90 minutes away.

Audrey Tang: For cases like that, where we’re flying, where we take high-speed rails, everybody here, all the relevant ministries, the local county people, and everything to their region, and have a regional forum, in which we use a lot of AI, or mission learning, or alternative technology. Together, the 8,000 people’s sentiments into a rough consensus.

Audrey Tang: This is a collective fact-finding process, where we try to get the sense as data going, so that people can see a shared whiteboard what all the different ministries and all the different city-level counties have on this particular case, and collectively find a decision. All this is not only published as a transcript, but it’s also live-streamed and there’s also an online whiteboard of the mind map.

Audrey Tang: After this is done, this is, for example, Friday, the next Monday, I will bring this to the Prime Minister, and then for the Prime Minister to ratify one of the accepted solutions that we achieved rough consensus, and declare it national policy.

Audrey Tang: This whole process takes a few weeks to complete. People take it as granted now, after a year of doing this. Now, we’re ratifying this whole process.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that the future is not evenly distributed, but in a sense it’s already there. That is what I’m saying.

James Bray: That is amazing. 5,000 is all it takes? That debate is taking place at the national level? That’s not a local level?

Audrey Tang: Right. Although it’s a regional case, yeah, the debate is taking a national level.

Audrey Tang: We also have national cases like people complaining there are AI-based chat box on Facebook scamming the most vulnerable people into buying things at a discount, but actually are not delivering the goods and it’s impossible to return it.

Audrey Tang: This is a very simple problem statement, but it actually spans like seven different ministries. That debate always has to happen on a national cross-ministerial level.

James Bray: What is the involvement of the responsible ministers in this process? Are they...?

Audrey Tang: Basically, the ministers work on the policy. I work on the process. It’s very different.

Audrey Tang: I ensure that instead of each minister replying to the petitioners or the protestors, saying, "You know, I can only handle five percent of what you want. The other 95 percent is outside my purview," we get all the participation officers, who directly respond to the CIO of each ministry, to the same place, and basically make sure that everybody knows what their responsibilities are.

Audrey Tang: In the process, contribute what they know about this particular process. The minister is for both discovering the initial facts, for appointing the participation officers, and for, of course, implementing the policies once it’s declared feasible by the other stakeholders involved, so that they have many roles in this. My primary role is to make sure everybody’s on the same page, so to speak.

James Bray: You’ve seemed to have been able to achieve a lot in a short space of time. I would expect something like that here to encounter a lot of resistance at the ministerial level. You can obviously interpret it from that point of view as a diminution of their power, can’t you?

Audrey Tang: No, not at all. It’s a diminution of their risk, because their risk is spread, all the responsible ministries in this regard.

Audrey Tang: The time they could have taken to explain that it’s mostly not their job is, instead, taken to actually solve the issue. For example, on the Facebook automated con-bot case. This is the RealtimeBoard. Can you see it? It’s mostly Chinese, but...

James Bray: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: From the left, we have the Customer Protection Agency, the Ministry of Transport, because it involves the delivery of trucks and whether they require the Center fully have authentic contact details, and the taxation belongs to Ministry of Finance.

Audrey Tang: Of course, there’s also the Ministry of Economy Affairs, because it’s about e-commerce, about fair competition, about the Ministry of Interior, in charge of police, and the Central Bank.

Audrey Tang: Instead of all seven of them taking a little part, we actually get it into many different sub-topics, which every minister can act fully responsible. We now let everybody know that it takes all the parts, but for every part, they’re actually really responsible.

Audrey Tang: For the career public servant, it actually refuses their work, because, otherwise, they’d have to respond to individual MPs repetitively. They have to respond to individual protestors repetitively.

Audrey Tang: Now, because there’s 5,000 people e-petitioning, it’s essentially 5,000 people subscribing to our newsletter. Once we publish this picture, at least 5,000 people get the same picture.

Audrey Tang: If we charge, for example, that Facebook should be more diligent in joining the local business association of e-commerce, and making sure the verified merchants gets a better advertisement placement, or at least less chance as being flagged as inappropriate advertisement.

Audrey Tang: They actually, now, have the mandate from the people that says, "OK, now this is Internet governance stuff. The minister can talk to Facebook, demanding this, knowing that is what people want on this particular regard.

Audrey Tang: Actually, last week, Facebook did join our local business council on this particular reason. They joined, saying, "OK, we’ll look into this."

Audrey Tang: This is a semi-diplomatic way of dealing with semi-sovereign entities like Facebook also for cases like this.

James Bray: I’ve spent quite a long time looking at this now. Your approach seems like the most advanced one in the world. Is that fair to say?

Audrey Tang: Absolutely, yeah.

James Bray: Have you had a lot of interest from other governments in what you’re doing?

Audrey Tang: To be completely fair, a lot of the tools and thinking we used actually originates from the UK. The idea of development, we took from the Policy Lab. There’s a lot of insights we took from the e-petitions in UK and also from the GDS, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s not that we are particularly innovative on any component. We mostly use the component that’s well-developed and even proven, by people in Iceland, people in Madrid, people in USDS, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Our contributions are two-fold. The first is we make it regular. It’s not something that a prime minister wants, not something the cabinet office wants, but something genuinely to create public servancy as reducing their risk and saving their time.

Audrey Tang: This is a approach that involves more simplification of administrative work, instead of the highlighting of a certain prime minister. Our first contribution is a reposit of this AI stuff, of this augmented reality stuff, all this collaborative ideation stuff as time-savers. It’s actually welcome, and so that’s our first contribution.

Audrey Tang: The second is that we see ourself as a fact-finding, essentially, consultancy, not just for the administration, but for everybody including the MPs, local city counselors, and local city government. That solves an issue where always in cases like this...It’s actually not necessarily found in national government level, but from the MPs and the local governments, who are even more likely to think about this as taking their power away.

Audrey Tang: Because we focus on the fact-finding and the reflection phase, it does not at all move into the positional power. There’s no e-voting. There’s no showing of hands, or whatever, so this is seen as a welcome addition to the normal process that they do to their job.

Audrey Tang: During the WCIT, during the CivicTechFest, I think those two process improvements are the thing that the other, like F11 and other organizations, see as the most compelling. It’s not that they have to learn or do something new. It’s just their position could be different.

James Bray: Just to be clear. Is the long-term vision in your mind...could you imagine doing away with the parliamentary body?

Audrey Tang: I still think we need to have full-time people, working to make sure the legislation doesn’t contradict each other. Of course, on the long term, it will be a co-creation model.

James Bray: Are they the right people to do that in a system such as you’re building?

Audrey Tang: Why not? We can save a lot of their time by gathering the consensus and the public fact-finding. Because they already have a place to debate in the public and also a well-accountable system of doing the proceeding, I don’t see anything should really change in the way that they do things.

Audrey Tang: Maybe there will be people who say, "But I want to vote for this person only for these matters," and so on, and argue for liquid democracy. Maybe people will argue that for certain cases, it makes more sense to have a random sampled people instead of elected officials who are not that representative on the variety, and so on.

Audrey Tang: These are valid arguments, but I think a empowered place for doing debates like this, whether we call them MPs or not, I think it’s still very valuable.

James Bray: The chief distinguishing feature for them being that they have a mandate that stems from the ballot box?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm, right. The ballot box could be in any shape though. In a liquid or delegative democracy, you essentially have 10 different ballot boxes, one for each area of interest. In participatory budgeting, you essentially have the ballot box in the sense of dollars on programs, and so on.

Audrey Tang: The ballot box, itself, is just a information-gathering device. Of course, you can argue that by having a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all design, there’s not so much efficient bits, there is no sufficient bits for the positions.

Audrey Tang: I would agree with that, but all the other ways are essentially variations on the same theme.

James Bray: Looking outside Taiwan -- you might feel that you don’t want to comment on outside Taiwan -- but I’m interested in what you see as the most immediate flaws in other Western democracies, systems?

Audrey Tang: I would include Taiwan in that. It is as the WEF report, itself, said. It’s the "(dis)empowerment." Disempowerment is like "(mis)trust." Let’s take a variation on that idea.

Audrey Tang: There is now social media. There is a very good way to find like-minded people, even if you feel alone in your own neighborhood caring only about senior care. Chances are, you will find a community, no matter what, online.

Audrey Tang: That leads to what we call "swift trust," meaning a quick trusting of strangers, just because you share the same keywords or the same the meme, or wear the same badge, whatever. That leads to a sense of empowerment.

Audrey Tang: The reality is, of course, that to actually effect change and social production, it takes much more than the superficial connections. The lobbying and whatever, if it doesn’t connect to the decision-making process, then the empowerment turns into a sense of helplessness and disempowerment.

Audrey Tang: That engenders this feeling that the government is so far away from the actual needs of people, although the distance hasn’t really changed, but the distance between people has reduced so much that the subconscious are overlapping. It’s like negative distance.

Audrey Tang: In this sense, the feeling between the citizen and the government are felt to be so large that the mistrust is now very easy to happen. This is just a side effect. I don’t think Taiwan is exempt from this.

James Bray: Of the various things you’ve implemented, what do you consider to be the most successful remedy for that?

Audrey Tang: The most successful remedy is that we systematically reduce the fear, uncertainty, and doubt to the words "civic participation."

Audrey Tang: For many career public servants -- even in the administrations that have a civic participation and social innovation office -- the career public servants not necessarily see this and think, "Hey, this can save me time and this can reduce my political risk."

Audrey Tang: Mostly, the career public servants see it very differently from elected officials, they see it as something that’s time-consuming, that’s potentially risky, and that engenders: Fear, meaning that "My power could be taken away?" Uncertainty, meaning, "This technology, could it really work?" Doubt, meaning that "Culturally, this is not the way we do things."

Audrey Tang: Over the past few years of our work here in Taiwan, now at the national level, career public servants see civic participation and think, "OK, this is just something that happens every Friday," or they think that "OK, this is just part of the administrative process."

Audrey Tang: Instead of achieving any specific achievement, I think the general culture of the public servants... honestly it’s about their perception. There’s now a much lower level of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I think that’s our main contribution.

James Bray: Of those things you’ve tried so far, if you were to write a playbook for people, innovators out there who want to implement that technology in their democracies, what would your headlines be?

Audrey Tang: My headline would be: "Before expecting the people trusting the government, the government needs to unconditionally trust its people." That would be the headline, because it’s reciprocal.

Audrey Tang: Someone has to move first. Certainly the government is the one that has the worse track record compared to other civil society actors. The radical trust needs to start from the government and the government needs to start from career public servants.

James Bray: Can you talk through...the example I’ve read most about is your approach to Uber. Is there a reason why that’s been so high profile or do you think...?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course, I think the Uber case is really interesting, because it’s not about the consensus that we eventually reached. Any academics that researched this TNC stuff can write more or less the same recommendations.

Audrey Tang: The main difference is that the Ministry of Transport acting on this consensus now knows that it has a better PR angle than Uber, itself. It’s a remarkable success exactly because in many other jurisdictions, Uber is decidefully on the upper hand when it comes to PR.

Audrey Tang: Through this process, we were able to show that we’re more transparent, more accountable, and respond faster than a Silicon Valley company, which is why it’s made a flagship case. But if Uber only upgrades in Taiwan, and not in other jurisdictions, there’s no comparison, then I don’t think there will be this much international interest.

James Bray: Can you give a brief positive version of exactly what you did with Uber?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Just a second. You can see this, right? This starts at the end of 2014, after the city-level election that put the occupiers into mayors, the previous prime minister resigned, and the new prime minister at the time, engineer, says from now on crowdsourcing open data is going to be the national policy.

Audrey Tang: Starting from the national policy, the new prime minister enlisted the help of his deputy minister, a director of engineering at Google, Simon Chang. Also Jaclyn Tsai, previously at IBM Asia. These people speak the language of civic tech people. We’re the same kind of people.

Audrey Tang: They were able to reach out to the civic tech community that was very active during, not just the occupier, but actually the mayoral election staff was insane. We have a issue here in Uber and we would like to crowdsource a solution.

Audrey Tang: It really takes a political will at the national level that want to make this a prime example of effective crowdsourcing in order for this to happen. They also said in a hackathon, the Minister at the time said, "We have no idea how to run this, so you’re going to come up with the process. We agreed to bring all the ministers onboard, if you can come up with the process." That’s the political will.

Audrey Tang: The special thing about Uber is that it’s what I call semi-sovereign, meaning there’s actually very little a national government can do about an app, because it’s an app, and also it’s a meme. It’s a belief that algorithm is better than law, can supersede law when it comes to dispatching cars.

Audrey Tang: Once a driver believes this meme, they become a spreader of the meme. Maybe they have driven just a week and decided it’s not actually their job at all and quit, but during the course of the week, they would have spread this meme already.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of memes and PRs, and whatever during the time, which makes the factual discussions very difficult. We believe that only a deliberation can inoculate people against such divisive, like sharing economy is always good, or whatever, these kinds of blanket beliefs.

Audrey Tang: We introduced the focused conversation methods. An important thing about that is this process is pre-agreed by other stakeholders, including the taxi companies, the associations of drivers, Uber itself, as well as potential competitors in the co-ops, and whatever.

Audrey Tang: The process is basically four stages. It’s about the collection and publication of all the facts and data that are relevant to this case. Then, a way to automatically gather people’s reflections and sentiments about the same data.

Audrey Tang: Then, a way for people to come up with ideation, with possible solutions, and the ones that are ranked highest are the ones that takes care of most people’s feelings. Finally, the ratification of the suggested solution.

Audrey Tang: When we introduced this methodology, what we are looking at is essentially a translation problem between the professional language that’s used by professional lobbyists on the industry chain, on the academics or individual counselors, scholars, as well as the administration itself.

Audrey Tang: Because of the one government idea, the government doesn’t tend to say much when they’re still deliberating. It doesn’t prevent the people on the street from talking about this, so eventually people have come to different ideas about facts.

Audrey Tang: Once people in this kind of environment, when the same word doesn’t even mean the same thing, like sharing economy, it seems to mean anything in Taiwan’s public discourse, then ideas become ideologies.

Audrey Tang: Once we were infected with ideology, you lose access to new facts. You lose the ability to empathize with people’s feelings.

Audrey Tang: On the deliberation, we started with the collective fact-finding, it eventually evolved into this RealtimeBoard thing that you’ve just seen. We did a crude version of using shared bookmarks, directories, and whatever. Still, it’s very useful, because people are able to see there are collective facts.

Audrey Tang: Then, we run a three-week online sentiment gathering for the feeling part. We present people with facts and ask them a few yes or no questions. We ask all the different ministries to provide with us one question that they care most. Like the Minister of Finance wanted to ask about insurance and the Minister of Transportation wants to ask about requiring a professional license, and so on.

Audrey Tang: People can answer yes or no, one of those questions. Once they answer, two things happen. First, their avatars moves on this two-dimensional component map and the second thing is that they see another question in the same place, and they will keep pressing yes or no, yes or no. Their position moved.

Audrey Tang: They also see their Facebook and Twitter friends all on the same map. It removes the antagonism because they see although people initially have just clustered in the corners -- literally, like four different sides -- still in each corner, there is friends of yours. They’re not really faceless enemies. They’re reasonable people, it’s just you didn’t talk about this over dinner.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is that the positions can change, because after answering a few questions, maybe you want to chime in, and your sentiment becomes other people’s voting methods, their topics. As people deliberate on each other’s opinions, we see that they cluster to the center by proposing more and more resonating sentiments.

Audrey Tang: One of the reasons is because we say if you convince a super-majority of people, 80 percent or more, we agree to use that collective sentiment as a way to negotiate with Uber on their ideation stage, so people competes for higher score that resonates with more people across the stakeholder groups.

Audrey Tang: Then we run in live consultation, live-streaming and transcribing in real-time, that have the stakeholder basically checking in with people’s consensus. Like, "A majority of people professional driver’s license is required. What do you think about it?" and so on.

Audrey Tang: Of the seven or so rough consensus, we also get the people to commit and support. They know that by not showing up, they will be seen as essentially villains in this in this story.

Audrey Tang: So everybody shows up. Everybody looks like heroes then, because they all agree with what the sentiments have agreed over the course of three weeks, and they’re very nuanced as well. Now, after we get everybody’s commitment, we can now say, "OK, now we ratify this commitment into legalese as long as this accurately represents the things that people have committed to."

Audrey Tang: They can’t really take back their words. Then it was ratified knowing that everybody would be onboard. Everybody is onboard and Uber’s good with that. A large part of this is that we are OK with lobbying, but all this is radically transparent and even 360 recorded.

Audrey Tang: All the stakeholders get to see every other stakeholder’s points, even if they come to visit me personally. This increases trust over time instead of decreases trust over time. By the end of it, Uber agree to play by the new rules.

Audrey Tang: They only apply to professional driver licenses, and also the existing texting company get to make their Uber alternatives. They are now competing on the same legal framework and so on. It’s a happy ending, I guess. That’s the story.

James Bray: It’s extraordinary. That ratification process, how does that take place?

Audrey Tang: The point here is that for each of the commitments, the ministry now, knowing that it’s their business...Because one of the core issues in the Uber case was that administrative transport of economy, of finance actually have very different idea at the beginning on how to approach Uber.

Audrey Tang: There is actually internal dissent as well, but after this process, they were like, "OK, so this is what people want." Now, the texting, the insurance, the professional driver license, they all have something to do.

Audrey Tang: Instead of working against each other, after the deliberation, they now work with each other in order to bring their relevant parts into the regulatory wording. Now, the wording is, of course, sent to the parliament for ratification.

Audrey Tang: It took some time. To be perfectly honest, it took, because of the transition period... After the consultation, they finished the first draft, I think, by the end of that year, but then the election happened.

Audrey Tang: During the four month transition, nothing could happen. We only ratify it after the transition to the new cabinet, which took another three months or so, but it’s essentially the same version. It really did not change, because whether it’s the KMT or the DPP, it’s not the party making decisions. It’s people’s collective decision.

Audrey Tang: It really passed unchanged to the parliament. It just took a few months, like seven months or so.

James Bray: The obvious risk, I suppose, is people who are not very digitally engaged or literate being left behind. You must have thought about that.

Audrey Tang: Of course. We actually checked the distribution of citizen population, and the distribution of people who participated in this online process. We’re happy to report they correspond almost exactly right.

Audrey Tang: If there’s no city, like urban/rural difference. The reason is, this is unfair, because Taiwan is a small island. On the WEF network readiness in terms of broadband accessibility, we’re tied for the first or something.

Audrey Tang: People who want broadband access get broadband access. Our current president campaign was Internet is human right. There’s less excuse of we don’t have Internet access. Now, of course, it’s possible that they have Internet access, but they don’t prefer the textual way of engagement.

Audrey Tang: Now, that’s actually a cognitive mode. That’s the argument, instead of a network access argument. For this, which is why we adopted ARBR. We adopted a real time board that posted notes, which is why we adopted this ambient computing idea, where we take all this reporting environment into a town hall, but for the citizen, it’s just working into the same town hall and having a real discussion.

Audrey Tang: We do a lot of assisted civic technology to try to make it much more inclusive for people with different cognitive modes than purely textual and PowerPoint.

James Bray: Can you just explain rough consensus and working code?

Audrey Tang: Sure. This is one of the tenets of Internet policymaking. It’s written in an RFC, the Tao of the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. In a sense, that’s the political system that I was raised in. I’m bringing this tribal innovation into the larger scheme of things.

Audrey Tang: The idea of rough consensus is that, because most of the discussion happens with people with very diverse backgrounds, and especially when it’s online, if you seek fine consensus, what will happen is that first, it draws out the process very long. Also, people with the most free time, leisure time, actually always win the argument.

Audrey Tang: The argument is not worth winning anymore, because people have already left. They run out of patience. The idea of rough consensus is that it’s better to be roughly right than be precisely wrong. As long as people roughly agrees, "OK, this is more or less the case," then it’s OK for people to start implementing, to start working on technologies that embodies this collective rough vision.

Audrey Tang: Central to this idea is the idea of iterations, or iterative development. The idea is that like in Wikipedia, you publish, and then you edit. It was the other way around. In many crowdfunding sites, you first get paid, and then you do the work. It was the other way around.

Audrey Tang: All this idea is about "release early, release often." It’s OK to have some rough policy out, and we co-create, or we have a sandbox. Then we experiment together for six months. Then after six months, we promise to go back and look at the data, look at the evidence, and saying, "OK, we need to adjust the policy whichever way."

Audrey Tang: This iterative process itself rebuilds trust, rather than particular wise decision at any given point. That’s the main idea of rough consensus, is just try something out, go back, and then iteratively refine it.

James Bray: What I’m hearing is, I guess if you were trying to define, 20 years from now, there’s been a revolution in how our democracies look, it sounds like you’re saying it’s really the values revolution is around trust, and the process revolution is around a much more iterative approach to making law?

Audrey Tang: That’s a very good summary.

James Bray: Good. It’s fascinating. Let me just see if there was anything specific else that I should...Oh, maybe I should just ask you to just give a brief explanation of what is your actual role in government, how you came by that role, and what you see as your responsibilities?

Audrey Tang: My role in the government is called digital minister without portfolio, meaning that I don’t oversee any particular ministry, but I work cross ministry communications, mostly. My role is pretty varied.

Audrey Tang: There is an eight-year plan called DIGI⁺. I did the cover of that plan, which I’m trying to bring up here. The idea is this. Previously, the government would take care of all the different parts of the plan, but we now explicitly say, "We take care of disabled infrastructure," 5G and whatever.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, we’re just going to improve our own government model to co-creation and stuff like that. Now, for the innovation, we are asking the private sector to show us what regulations to change through sandboxes, through co-creation processes.

Audrey Tang: Just this week, the parliament is working on a FinTech Sandbox Act. We’ll at the end of year do a Driverless Car Sandbox Act. Then will be many sandbox acts like that, basically saying for a limited time, a limited place, let’s co-create a regulation, for that private sector to drive the digital economy, and for the government to work alongside it instead of on top or on the bottom.

Audrey Tang: "Bottom-up" or "top-down" really only makes sense when you’re in a military or highly bureaucratic organizations. When it comes to cross sectoral collaboration, there’s no bottom-up or top-down. Those words doesn’t even make sense.

Audrey Tang: Then the other part of my work is I’m also the minister in charge for social innovation, social enterprise. The idea is that for the last mile delivery of the inclusion, we also say, actually the local civil society, the co-ops, the NGOs, the social enterprises know better than the government to do inclusion.

Audrey Tang: For example, instead of just providing accessibility services to the disabled people, there are social enterprises in Taiwan that trains the disabled people, empower them into urban designers, and who sell their service to the places that actually needs accessibility design.

Audrey Tang: Through empowerment for accessibility needs of people, they encourage the whole society to co-create stuff. This is much better than the model where the government simply contracts a few inspectors, because they may not have the firsthand experience to speak with the stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: We try to use social innovation methods and social enterprise on the civil society to deliver government services. The government focuses on improving the governance model iteratively. My role is both to oversee this whole paradigm shift, and also to take care of this very specific small part of how exactly the government internally conducts its business with the help of digital tools.

Audrey Tang: I’m not directly involved in the innovation or inclusion part, per se, but I’m also just working on the process to ensure that the multi-stakeholder model happens. This is the digital enablement part, and then of course, there was also all those e-petition and open government participation stuff that I’m working on, that’s the main role that I’m having.

James Bray: What does anarchism mean to you in the context of this conversation?

Audrey Tang: Anarchism just means doing away with any top-down, bottom-up, any hierarchical things. It also means doing away with the idea of representation. Anarchism is the idea that people should re-present themselves directly to each other, instead of representationally having somebody speak for anyone else.

Audrey Tang: My work as an anarchist is just to dispel the myths that all this process require a government apparatus to happen, because the process itself is also free software. It’s open sources and in the commons. Anyone in any level can just take our toolkit and run it, which means that eventually people will see that it really doesn’t take a government to run this process. That’s the long-term goal.

James Bray: That’s probably the end of my questions. Just to be clear, when you say there’s no government, that would terrify a lot of people. Maybe you could elaborate, because you don’t actually mean that there’s no government?

Audrey Tang: I mean the government maybe can be distributed. For example, if you are one of those crypto-currency believers, it doesn’t mean the end of currency. It means the end of hierarchical, top-down central banks, which is why we wrote "governance" instead of "government" in DIGI⁺.

Audrey Tang: It is the idea that people can participate in governance, whatever their sector is. Now, the government, the state still runs a lot of governance stuff. But we’re not saying we’re the one with exclusive right on running governance stuff.

Audrey Tang: This is more like a -- I wouldn’t say decentralized at the point -- multi-central thinking of governance model. It’s not simply abolition of state; it’s having people who are much better to run this multi-stakeholder process to design and run the process than just the state itself doing it. That’s all.

James Bray: Final question. You’ve been able to run a lot of, I guess, experiments over the last few years. Also, it’s been an experiment for you personally moving into a government role. What has most surprised you?

Audrey Tang: I run this process explicitly to reduce the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. I run the idea of radical transparency, which basically means all the meetings that I convene, even internal meetings, we make a full transcript, and have all the participants on the all the ministries or whatever edit for 10 working days. Then we publish everything on the Internet.

Audrey Tang: As far as I know, there is no other national ministry-level people doing this. The results really surprised me. I did it to show accountability, and also to show that there really isn’t that much to it, and there’s nothing to fear. There’s no need for uncertainty or doubt around publishing the work that we do.

Audrey Tang: Once I do that, there is a side effect that I did not anticipate. It makes me a very rare kind of politician that is blame-seeking and credit-avoiding.

Audrey Tang: In traditional public administration theory, a non-career public servant, an appointed politician, is supposed to be credit-seeking and blame-avoiding, meaning that if things go right, it’s the minister’s credit. If things go wrong, the media or the people has a way to pinpoint the contractor or the career public servant that actually carried, misstepped.

Audrey Tang: In a radically transparent environment, it’s the other way around. This is an entirely new idea of policymaking, open policymaking. If anything goes wrong, it’s of course Audrey’s fault, because this is a whole new system of making things.

Audrey Tang: When things go right -- and they did go right -- people, the journalists, and so on go back to the transcripts and see that this is actually the director-general’s idea, or a very low level career public servant’s idea. They get the credit.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that what we are seeing now is that people become very innovative. They raise points and propose plans that maybe only has 20 percent of working instead 99 percent, because they know that the blame gets absorbed by PDIS, and especially by Audrey.

Audrey Tang: If it actually works, then they get the credit. What we are seeing is a lot of the same dynamics as when similar programs were adopted by private enterprises or large NGOs, is that people become much more innovative and much more willing to engage in risk-taking behavior now that we absorb the risk.

Audrey Tang: This is very surprising, and it’s not in any of the public administration textbooks I’ve read. That’s what I’m also learning.

James Bray: Brilliant. Thank you, unless there’s anything else you wanted to say?

Audrey Tang: No, that’s pretty much it. Again, we can either publish this whole video recording, if you’re OK with it, or we can make a transcript, if you want to edit it for 10 days.

James Bray: No, no, just publish what you like.

Audrey Tang: OK, so just send the video to me, and it will be on YouTube soon.

James Bray: Thanks.

Audrey Tang: Cheers, James. Bye.