Audrey Tang: Please, how can I help?

JiaChen Jiang: You might have seen me at a couple of the g0v meetings.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Yes.

JiaChen Jiang: I’m a student from the US with an interest in civic tech. Specifically, I wanted to ask about two things. One is because I’m a junior in undergrad, I’m trying to make plans to do a thesis project for my fourth year.

JiaChen Jiang: For my thesis, I want to be able to focus on a research topic that I actually care about, or might actually make a difference in the world in some way.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

JiaChen Jiang: I’m inspired by a previous thesis that was done by a student at my school, which it was in the news a couple years ago. It was about the algorithm that was used in criminal justice courts.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

JiaChen Jiang: Yes, that one. I was just really inspired by how that thesis project could lock onto this problem and raise a bigger discussion about it.

Audrey Tang: About algorithm bias and all that.

JiaChen Jiang: Right. Specifically, I’m excited about using tech to change the world, and all of that...

Audrey Tang: For the better, hopefully. [laughs]

JiaChen Jiang: ...but specifically how to make it do that without leaving behind the most marginalized communities.

JiaChen Jiang: Sorry, [laughs] I was reading through a couple of the interviews that you’ve done before and you’ve spoken a little bit about indigenous rights, and especially in compliance to technology. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about specific projects or areas in civic tech or tech for social impact, in general, that I could focus on.

Audrey Tang: That connects to indigenous and/or other marginalized communities?

JiaChen Jiang: Right. I’m particularly interested about indigenous rights. Both in the US and both in Taiwan, that’s a really big issue, but I think in marginalized communities, in general.

Audrey Tang: Do you plan to do your field study in Taiwan or in the US, or...?

JiaChen Jiang: Oh, in the US.

Audrey Tang: In the US?

JiaChen Jiang: Yes. I’m American born and raised, so I’m kind of...

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’m less connected to the First Nations in the US.

JiaChen Jiang: Definitely.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there’s quite a few pretty high-profile cases. For example, the Amis community, which is really powerful here. Our spokesperson, Kolas Yotaka, is Amis.

Audrey Tang: In g0v, we have quite a few Amis-related projects, such as the collaborative dictionary. The Moe Amis dictionary, which is completely through optical character recognition, not software, but through humans. What we call Otaku Character Recognition, people reading the online dictionary -- it could be Mandarin, or Hakka, or Taigi -- they are asked to also help digitizing indigenous dictionary for the indigenous people.

Audrey Tang: We are quite connected to the indigenous language community here in the Social Innovation Lab, also. For example, we have a Green Room where every morning the indigenous communities connect through the Internet across Taiwan to practice their indigenous languages, as well as culture. It all emanates from the Social Innovation Lab. Those are the language related.

Audrey Tang: The Mozilla Foundation started a project called the Common Voice. They are also working with us so that the toolkit will be available to the indigenous language’s community so they can read aloud their various different takes.

Audrey Tang: Because previously Siri, Cortana, or so on, they devote very little to those "under-resourced" languages, but that creates a effect where people are completed to learn Mandarin because they want to drive their personal assistants. Common Voice project says, no, if we get people reading in their local, regional languages we eventually will build up a large enough corpus.

Audrey Tang: It’s all free of copyright, anyway, and so people can all use it freely. If it’s free, I’m sure that the Google and Microsoft of the world, and Amazon, will take it.

Audrey Tang: That is all about language technologies. There’s quite a few others. Later this year the Tao people in the Orchid Island is planning on issuing their own cryptocurrency called the Tao Coin. It’s like a local currency. It could only be used in a way that is sustainable and aligning with the Tao philosophy on the Orchid Island.

Audrey Tang: If you’re interested, I can also put you in touch with people who are working on those sovereign currencies. That is also one of the interesting civic tech projects. There’s many, actually, depending on your interest.

JiaChen Jiang: My main issue is since coming to g0v I’ve been learning a lot about these very different and very broad, interesting projects, but I’m not sure how to formulate research questions surrounding them because in some way a thesis is trying to solve a problem in some way.

JiaChen Jiang: For example, in the algorithmic bias. A couple years before ProPublica had issued an article that made the claim that these algorithms were racially biased. That thesis took that claim and proved it in a computational way.

JiaChen Jiang: I was trying to look for something like that, where there is something that is an existing problem for these projects and would benefit from having someone with computational background and a year’s worth of research resources to tackle.

Audrey Tang: You’re looking at a quiet quantitative thing?

JiaChen Jiang: Yes, if possible. I’m more interested in the social aspect, but because my major is computer science my department is going to push me into doing more computational work.

Audrey Tang: We have people working on human-computer interaction, but it took the word HCI and design in entirely different dimensions and basically phrased the democratic participation, the governance system, as a human-computer interaction, which is quite stretching.

Audrey Tang: If you like, I can send you the paper. They still get published. [laughs] That depends on your preference, really.

JiaChen Jiang: It also depends on the kind of professors I can find at my school who will support my project.

Audrey Tang: What school is that one?

JiaChen Jiang: I’m going to Dartmouth College. It’s pretty small, and there isn’t a lot of computer science professors who are doing works other than pure algorithmic theory.

JiaChen Jiang: There’s one professor who I’m really gunning towards. He does social media in conjunction to the 2016 US election, for example, and with political polarization in general. I think I can convince him to also advise me on any work that is related in this way, which is taking data and looking at them in a computational way.

Audrey Tang: The central thesis behind the Mozilla Common Voice, the MoeDict project, or so on is that as digitization comes, and if the indigenous languages and culture is not fairly reflected on the everyday digital apparatus, the assumption, axiom, is that over the course of a generation the cultural heritage is gone because of the digital’s addictiveness.

Audrey Tang: It shapes a new reality to the next generation of indigenous people and culture. That’s so taken for granted, I don’t think there’s much to add to it. [laughs] Maybe your research question could be is the language and cultural revitalization project really helping. Is it just a feel-good project?

Audrey Tang: Having the indigenous language Wikipedia, is it actually working to revive the shared identity or is it actually just a feel-good project and all the cultures still die anyway? That is one of the things that could be quantitatively measured.

JiaChen Jiang: I’m trying to think about any other possible fields because indigenous rights and also language connected to that is something I’m very interested in.

JiaChen Jiang: The criminal justice system is something that I’ve been looking at a lot because the previous thesis had focused on that. Any time government and technology gets talked about it’s always using technology to improve the government, but especially in recent years for the US a lot of citizens have realized that using technology to help the government can be very morally ambiguous if the government itself has ulterior motives, for example.

Audrey Tang: There’s a book called "Surveillance Capitalism." It puts forward a pretty good thesis that says behavioral prediction is the new thing that is being sold in futures market.

Audrey Tang: When we think about futures market we think of oil and things like that. Through predictive advertisement placement or behavioral shaping through social media precision targeting and campaigns, which are all very hot topics.

Audrey Tang: What the market is really doing now is not just to predict people’s shopping, but actually using behavioral prediction patterns to influence people’s behavior through gamification and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Its counterpart, of course, will be surveillance authoritarianism, which is the state with ulterior motives doing exactly the same thing, except trading in the future markets of control and power rather than for capitalistic gains.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan isn’t quite the best place to study this because our civil society is really strong. The civil society resists anything that the government does that’s even slightly touching this line.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we have a neighbor jurisdiction that’s really good at doing that. [laughs] If you’re interested in that, that is actually a good field to study, maybe remotely.

JiaChen Jiang: May be a dangerous field to study.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Dangerous field to study. Literally, a minefield.

Audrey Tang: The surveillance behavior prediction and whatever, that is also a thesis could be quantitatively added upon, either the market side or the state side. There’s a lot of open research questions just by putting forward the hypothesis that there is a new form of capitalism called surveillance capitalism.

Audrey Tang: That is also something. If you are interested in social media, then whether the social media is actually trading in such behavioral shaping, or is it something that sounds like a very ominous thing, but is actually not backed by science.

JiaChen Jiang: Out of curiosity, obviously you don’t have as much of an understanding of the US field of this, as opposed to the Taiwanese field, but now that we’re talking about surveillance capitalism I was wondering if there are any, I would say, feel-good projects that the US government or well-funded organizations have put out that you personally see as having some underlying design issues in terms of inclusiveness.

JiaChen Jiang: You were talking about before whether its gamification is doing what it wants to do. If there are any names that come to mind I can go and look into them more and see if there’s any specific problems I can jump on.

Audrey Tang: There’s a paper that I read about the problem with justice in the design of nudges. I don’t have the DOI in mind, but I can look it up. The point being that the nudges are ostensibly to make people live more healthily because you put nutrition labels on food, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s not purely feel-good. There’s evidence that says people’s behavior do change if you include nudges, but it also creates a justice inequality issue because for people who do have time to care, they’re relatively more well-off anyway to respond to those nudges.

Audrey Tang: For people who don’t have the cognitive resource, and so on, to care about those nudges, those nudges make them feel bad about themself a little bit, but their behavior still doesn’t change. It actually widen the injustice if you don’t design your nudges with the concept of equality or justice in mind.

Audrey Tang: There’s a line of research in that. I can send you the DOI that I read.

JiaChen Jiang: Definitely. I’m definitely trying to get this huge database of reading to get through.

JiaChen Jiang: I was also wondering, I was looking a previous interview you’ve done. You speak a little bit about the issue of accessibility when it comes to getting everyone to participate, because part of a digital democracy is the idea that once everything’s digital everyone can participate. The question then becomes what if the stakeholders are people who don’t have access to technology and the digital.

JiaChen Jiang: I know that in Taiwan you’ve set through the motion for broadband for all.

Audrey Tang: Broadband as human right.

JiaChen Jiang: I was wondering, apart from Internet access itself, if there’s any other things that you think is really important.

Audrey Tang: Yes. There are Digital Opportunity Centers, or DOCs. That is a Ministry of Education project, but many other ministries are in it as well.

Audrey Tang: It’s as important as having the raw broadband, because we all know that even if the libraries provide tablets, even if there’s guaranteed 10 megabits per second, it doesn’t mean that the local people actually use this for good or for benefit of the society. They could be addicted, playing online games. Not to sound like games are bad, but to be addicted is a real mental health issue.

Audrey Tang: The DOCs are ways to connect the relevance of digital resources with the local vision of the sustainable development. We’ve been running DOCs for decades now, and so there’s a literature of how the DOCs change, especially indigenous and more rural communities.

Audrey Tang: Now there’s a line of design called the Regional Revitalization, or [non-English speech] . Regional Revitalization explicitly says for the places where the road doesn’t quite go into them we are going to use the broadband as human right to the advantage of, for example, autonomous vehicles for delivery, both aerial, on the ground, and on the sea.

Audrey Tang: Also, as I often mention, that I tour around Taiwan and use teleconference to bring the central government’s ministries’ likeness, avatars, to the local people so that they don’t need to go to a website and write in the language that they don’t quite understand. They can gather around, town hall style, and automatically have 12 different ministries’ people’s avatar join their conversations.

Audrey Tang: It’s digital, but it is assistive digital technology, rather than the more traditional elite enhancing digital technology. That is accessibility, not just in the broadband or the technology level, but rather in what we call social technology and social interaction design level.

Audrey Tang: There’s quite a few key words that I can give you and you can google and find relevant material.

JiaChen Jiang: Definitely. That’s interesting because in the US when people talk about Internet accessibility it’s all the big profile -- Facebook, Google, whatever -- projects about making hot air balloons that provide Internet access and all of that. I’ve always gotten the sense that it’s not entirely thought out.

JiaChen Jiang: The idea is that access is given an everything follows from that, when what you’re talking about has been implemented in Taiwan is these centers that...

Audrey Tang: The central paradigm we’re running with is human geography, which is like cultural anthropology but puts the place or the space as the main spot. The Social Innovation Lab is a place where it’s co-designed and every week through office hours people can change the setting of this place. It coevolves to whatever people feel like is more conductive to the sustainable goals and things like that.

Audrey Tang: This kind of human geography puts a lot of emphasis on how welcome a first-comer feels, how more likely people are going to use this as a gathering place, how likely people can talk to strangers, and things like that. That kind of accessibility, I think it’s much more important. It builds on broadband as human right for sure.

JiaChen Jiang: That’s a really good point. Thank you. I have a second part to what I wanted to ask, depending on time.

Audrey Tang: It’s good. We have half an hour more.

JiaChen Jiang: OK, great. I was a little bit alarmed.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine.

JiaChen Jiang: I’m in a process for applying for a source of funding from my school. It’s a very open-ended kind of opportunity. It’s for experiential learning, and I want to direct it to this entire field of how to make technology that is better for the world, that is truly better for every part of the world as opposed to just...

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

JiaChen Jiang: I don’t know if I’m going to get the funding for sure. My question is if I want to be putting myself into places to learn a lot, or organizations or different opportunities for participation, if I had $10,000 to do it, what places would you recommend? What would you recommend doing?

Audrey Tang: There’s various fellowship programs that does exactly that. I’m sure you know some of the more high-profile ones.

JiaChen Jiang: Like Mozilla.

Audrey Tang: The Mozilla fellows. Google has been running Summer of Code for decades now. It really depends on the core curiosity and core feel of injustice. What upsets you the most? [laughs] What would you most like to know?

Audrey Tang: When we talk about technology, it is never just the application of technology itself but rather who appropriates the technology and how are the technology considered appropriate when integrated into the society?

Audrey Tang: I remember meeting a gentleman in Edinburgh. He was interested in helping out people in Botswana. He just randomly went to Botswana with some funding, no idea what they’re doing. [laughs] The first thing he met was a people who is deaf but in need of a more rechargeable kind of hearing aid.

Audrey Tang: He and the person, a young girl, co-designed a solar-powered hearing system called the Solar Ear. The great thing is that the design-to-spec and even the assembly is performed by people with deafness. It turns out they’re very good at hand-and-eye coordination.

Audrey Tang: This kind of thing, they also translated into other languages, so they bring those people as teachers to Brazil to co-design their own hearing aid and so on. This kind of social entrepreneurship, I think there’s a large network.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re now inviting, as of this May, all the various network like the AVP, the Asia Mentor Philanthropy network, and the Social Enterprise World Forum to Kaohsiung as a annual summit. Then we will give out partnership awards to people who have successfully bridged different sectors in doing this kind of social entrepreneurship.

Audrey Tang: It’s a long-form answer to your question. It’s just there’s existing networks. If you start with a core curiosity, there’s almost guaranteed that you’ll find a good kind of people. If you can join and be humble and respond to whomever you meet’s needs without a preset agenda, I think that is actually a better state of mind to begin with.

JiaChen Jiang: That’s true. Would you say most of these communities exist mainly virtually over the Internet, or would you say that there’s any physical conferences, physical organizations, or places to be where it would be really important to get a good start?

JiaChen Jiang: For example, before I came to g0v, I was on the Slack. I was more or less hearing about what people had to say and what it was like to work here. Coming here and participating in the community was an entirely different kind of sphere.

Audrey Tang: This is the summit that I mentioned. If you look at the sponsors and speakers, you get a pretty good idea of who the intermediary organizations are. I think most of the communities start face-to-face, start local. Maybe they have a regular monthly-by-monthly, weekly eating together. In g0v, food is everything, which does quite transmit over the Internet. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They started that way, but then the international network is also important. The Code for All network starts with Code for America, but then connects g0v and various other -- Code for Japan, and so on -- community to make sure that there is a healthy bi-directional flow between all the different sub-chapters.

Audrey Tang: That, of course, almost all is online because nobody lives in all the time zones concurrently. Otherwise, we don’t get time to sleep. [laughs] The artifacts of exchange and those kind of bi-directional flows, all the digital trails are online.

Audrey Tang: Look online if you are looking for mobility, if you are looking for the place to parachute in. Once you’re in, prepare a long time, at least half a year or so, to build the local connection while also reflecting their work on the international digital community.

Audrey Tang: I’ve never really met a purely digital, purely nomadic...Even Wikipedia, they rely on the local chapters and meet-ups and so on to maintain the active editors or the cabal. Well, there is no cabal, but the active editors of Wikipedia.

JiaChen Jiang: Something you mentioned there, it might be a little bit of an aside, the idea of many different civic tech organizations across countries and across societies and cultures working together. I was wondering, in your experience, has there been any interesting things about civic tech and technology for social impact across cultural boundaries?

JiaChen Jiang: At least off the top of my head, I would think that cultural ideas of what’s important or what is needed for government would really change based on the country.

Audrey Tang: Even within a country, with a large enough country like The States, [laughs] there are actually various different cultures. I do know that there is programs designed specifically to bring people into uncomfortable zones [laughs] and to cross those cultural boundaries.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, I just met with this interesting kind of travel agency that plans travels for people in the US interested in entrepreneurship or in impact generation. They designed a soft landing and programs so that they tour around all the various partners in Taiwan. Basically, they make sure that they visit all these people and then connect their missions, but translated into a Asian perspective.

Audrey Tang: They invite people all over Europe, the US, and so on, and ask them to check their notions at the door, [laughs] but proceed to find their counterparts, translate their ideas locally, and find them local innovators that can share their vision, but also make it in a way that is more convenient for the local culture norm to accept.

Audrey Tang: There are bridge-makers like this all over the civic tech world. This is just one of it that I recently met.

JiaChen Jiang: If any more of them comes to mind, definitely send them to me because I want to know how they do it. I think, especially in the US, there’s a whole lot of, "Let’s bridge the gap. Let’s bring the two sides together." It’s always interesting to see what ways they succeed and, more often than not, what ways they fail.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Actually, all their partners all have their own partners. Impact Hub is a international network anyway. They started as a UN thing, but now they’re literally everywhere. Each network has their strength and weakness, their methodologies, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think what’s important is that they are open about it. Some of them, they organize the Nights of Failure or things like that and ask these people to honestly do a postmortem of a project, why it doesn’t work, and how the ecosystem can help each other so that it works more.

Audrey Tang: Taken alone, I think most of them don’t quite thrive by its own, but it’s the network itself that just pivots one case that doesn’t work into another supporting ecosystem that they may fare better, and creates a culture where there’s no failure. There’s just experiments.

Audrey Tang: That is the key thing that makes the Taiwan start-up ecosystem that actually work. We care about common values, and we’re not afraid to fail.

JiaChen Jiang: I’m trying to think of what else I was going to ask. There’s the cross-cultural piece. Are there any specific names that come to mind either of prominent researchers in the field or conferences that are especially international?

JiaChen Jiang: While in Taiwan, I’ve seen a lot of conferences and meet-ups that are connected to civic tech pop up. Most of them are very East Asia-focused, for example, or East Asia and Europe. Which I find really interesting, but in terms of what I need to find, I need to connect it to the US in some way.

Audrey Tang: I’ve been personally to Personal Democracy Forum. I think it’s a pretty good starting point. If you look into the previous speakers, organizers, and so on, I think they’re really well connected internationally. It’s the PDF.

Audrey Tang: I’ve been to two of the PDFs. I think it’s a pretty good starting point. If you do a depth-first search, [laughs] on the topics that you care about, then I think most of the civic tech people have their, at least, third-degree connection to the PDF folks.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like a spirituality. One of the running joke in ’17 when I was in PDF was that there’s a Google auto search suggest how to convert to various religion, and there’s PDF, how to convert to PDF. [laughs] I think it’s a good starting point.

JiaChen Jiang: There’s a gazillion tech-for-social-benefit organizations and conferences in the world. I’ve been looking through a lot of them. Some of them are very self-congratulatory, where everyone shows up and...

Audrey Tang: Celebrates the most successes. [laughs]

JiaChen Jiang: Right. I definitely am trying to look at the ones that are more critical or the ones that are more introspective.

Audrey Tang: Very much so. The PDF, I think, is quite reflective of the thing. It also is more what we can honestly call civic tech, and not just tech for social good. There is a difference after all.

JiaChen Jiang: For sure.

Audrey Tang: Because in the various sustainable goals, I think only the 16th and 17th explicitly talk about accountability, democracy, a reliable system for participatory governance, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: While every other SDG goals are important, only the 16th and 17th explicitly talk about kind of bootstrapping the governance system, so that we can be truly multisectoral, and also accessible across the region.

Audrey Tang: PDF is quite focused on these things, so you don’t hear as much about how to solve like water sanitation, or people with deafness and blindness. There’s some of that, but most of them focus on the governance issues.

JiaChen Jiang: Right, the core political issues.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

JiaChen Jiang: Have you been to, I want to say it’s called TicTec, or how would you say it?

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah. I think we had a TicTec here, the WCIT, Tic Tac Taiwan.

JiaChen Jiang: Would you say that it’s pretty...?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s pretty similar.

JiaChen Jiang: How does it lie on the spectrum of...

Audrey Tang: I think Tic Tac is mostly making the branding of civic tech very well-known. Civic tech, and not just tech for social good. The thing that I just said could be a Tic Tac banner. [laughs] It is kind of positioning itself as not just in tech investment, not just tech for social good, but rather bootstrapping a new kind of democracy kind of thing.

Audrey Tang: That is definitely on the same axis or the same part of the spectrum as PDF. On the governance side, of course we also have the Open Government Partnership, the OGP, which has a kind of summit. I think this year it’s in Ottawa. I will be there, too.

Audrey Tang: You go there if you want to meet a lot of government ministers, [laughs] who can also be self-congratulatory. I think all the OGP, TicTec, PDF, and so on are all on the same line, but the multi-stakeholder ratio is different.

Audrey Tang: OGP has much more people from the public sector. TicTec has more of the private sector, although the civil society is still quite strong. PDF is almost all civil society and fewer private sector.

Audrey Tang: It all depends on comfortable with the language and the mindset of the stakeholders.

JiaChen Jiang: It definitely sounds like TicTec is a bit more front facing in a lot of ways.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

JiaChen Jiang: I’m going to really quickly make sure that I’ve asked about what I’ve wanted to ask about. Something I’m interested in is trying to find connections with the connections I already have.

JiaChen Jiang: I realize that in civic tech and I guess the broader field of computational social sciences, all of that, everything’s connected. I was wondering off the top of my head if you know of any significant research or projects going on at Microsoft, specifically.

JiaChen Jiang: You mentioned a little bit about Mozilla. I would like to hear more about that, because I have connections to both organizations, but I want to know which ones to specifically ask for.

Audrey Tang: I think Microsoft really is doing a lot of civic tech. There’s a specific engagement group that’s relatively new. I think it’s new as of 2015 or something like that. That means that they have a lot of cases and lots of projects, but they’re still in the early days in terms of proving the impact.

Audrey Tang: I think Mozilla starts as an open-source project, and has been in social enterprise for as long as there’s a term "social enterprise." So there’s a more natural affinity to the more social science part of things.

Audrey Tang: Because people, when they see the Mozilla research brief, they’re more likely to associate it with a grassroots participatory kind of research agenda. More often than not, you will find their research are kind of crowd-focused. Like Common Voice is literally asking everybody to read.

Audrey Tang: You don’t see as much from Microsoft, or if you do see from Microsoft, like the AI Chatbot thing, which was quite short lived. [laughs]

JiaChen Jiang: Oh, yeah.

Audrey Tang: They don’t quite get the same embrace [laughs] from the civic tech community as the Mozilla people do, fear or not.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, Microsoft has a much stronger connection to special and municipal governments. When it comes to "smart city," then you can find a lot of arguably gov tech, not civic tech anymore project that Microsoft does in conjunction with a municipality.

Audrey Tang: If you’re interested in "smart city," I prefer Smart Citizen, but anyway "smart city" initiatives that are quick to deploy and if you’re quantitative research method, you can see results easily quarter-by-quarter in a year or two, then Microsoft has a wealth of such available projects to choose from.

Audrey Tang: While Mozilla is more critical. It funds things to look systemic biases, systemic problems with AI, with disinformation, with things like that, that are less likely for Microsoft to fund directly.

JiaChen Jiang: Would you say there is any interesting questions or projects that are related to the topic of security for both of these companies or both of these organizations?

Audrey Tang: You mean cyber security?

JiaChen Jiang: Cyber security, information security, I want to say. The connection I had with Mozilla was we were working with data security when it comes to Firefox. I was wondering if any of that has connected to civic tech, or if there isn’t enough with civic tech or going broader tech for social benefit in your experience.

Audrey Tang: A open, transparent, accountable apparatus, of course, depends on that. The underlying substrate is secure, right?

JiaChen Jiang: Mm-hmm.

Audrey Tang: There is a natural affinity. You’ve been in g0v for a while. There’s quite a few cross-pollination with the HITCON community, with the white hat hackers, and cyber security researchers. It is quite overlapping.

Audrey Tang: The OCF actually has a program to work with nonprofits, to work with them on basic cyber security literacies, and best practices to do good anti surveillance, and things like that, and do encryption in nonprofit workplace.

Audrey Tang: I would say that they’re not the same field. They’re only slightly overlapping, but there’s a lot of affinity in both communities toward each other. You’ll find most white hat hackers very sympathetic to civic tech, and vice versa. There’s a natural affinity.

Audrey Tang: If you’re interested to work on cyber security, but not as a cyber security, I think Mozilla is a pretty good starting point because it really do run into persistent adversaries, and so on. [laughs] It’s not practice. It’s in the field.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, you’re kind of at arm’s length with real crypto stuff, which happens elsewhere. Mozilla is mostly applying research. You’re not quite a cyber security researcher, where you will build the right connection with the research community.

JiaChen Jiang: Got it. It’s just right there, kind of in the middle.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, yeah.

JiaChen Jiang: I’m trying to think. Mozilla, the organization itself, you’ve spoken about honestly compared to Microsoft, it’s a lot more closer to the community in a lot of ways.

Audrey Tang: More grassroots, yeah.

JiaChen Jiang: Right. You mentioned that there’s a new department within Microsoft that does this.

Audrey Tang: That does civic tech engagement, uh-huh.

JiaChen Jiang: Is it called the civic tech engagement, or...?

Audrey Tang: Or something like that, yeah. It is actually called Civic Technology Engagement Group, a few years ago. There’s a lot of restructuring nowadays. I don’t know what they’re called now, but it used to be called the Civic Tech Engagement Group.

JiaChen Jiang: I’ll look into it. I have a more direct connection with them, and I want to be able to track people down, physically. Meanwhile, for Mozilla, it’s more emailing people and hoping they will reply.

Audrey Tang: There’s no good or bad. It all depends on kind of the culture. If you join Microsoft and find out the cause your working is worthwhile, then I think it’s good because it also helps to solidify Microsoft’s new mission, post development mission. Like Microsoft changed my GitHub, not the other way around mission. [laughs] It’s also worthwhile.

JiaChen Jiang: The reason I ask is because I am going to be there this summer, but Mozilla is more of in the future kind of thing. I’m trying to figure out how to get the most I can out of something I’m certain I’m going to be there for, and then as well as exploring.

Audrey Tang: These are not mutually exclusive.

JiaChen Jiang: For sure.

Audrey Tang: Mozilla is very good at leveraging people’s cognitive surplus for community work. Even if you only have two hours every week, they’ll find something for you to do anyway.

JiaChen Jiang: Thank you. That’s really inspiring in a way. I’m going to take a quick look again.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

JiaChen Jiang: This might be going a little bit off topic. For context, in my experience, a lot of college students in the US, especially who are in the tech industry or are studying tech-related things, really want to make some kind of impact on the problems that they learn in class.

JiaChen Jiang: All the resources that are provided are gearing them towards corporate work and the typical kind of cubicle lifestyle. I’ve been trying to set up some kind of organization at my school that offers more resources and makes tech for some sort of impact work a little bit more accessible.

JiaChen Jiang: I was wondering if you had any advice or recommendations or things that I should keep in mind as I go through this process.

Audrey Tang: Your target audience is undergrads, or...?

JiaChen Jiang: Undergrads.

Audrey Tang: Undergrads.

JiaChen Jiang: Right.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like, I don’t know, chess, computer club, or MIT railroad club, [laughs] and things like...?

JiaChen Jiang: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Again, they’re not mutually exclusive. We do see, for example, the Netscape Company starts as really a undergrad hacker group thing. Then there’s the dot.com boom, and then they become this huge company, part of this corporate world, doing enterprise-y stuff, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Then there’s the dot.com crash and at the right time with open-source people, who used to be free software people, but we rebranded ourselves to be more acceptable to the capitalistic thinking, [laughs] managed to convince Netscape to become Mozilla again, and to kind of the best of both worlds, right? It became a social enterprise that keeps the grassroots mission, but still earns a lot of money every year.

Audrey Tang: There’s many cases, maybe not as high profile as Red Hat or Mozilla, but people who really start with a good vision and a good business model, and like Kickstarter, that later on applied for the B Corp certificate.

Audrey Tang: There’s still capitalism at work, but at least they prove to a degree that they’re not doing harm to the society or the environment while doing their economic work. Not quite unicorns, but zebras. [laughs] My advice would be not to blandly reject the capitalistic narrative, because in the US, it’s almost literally impossible.

JiaChen Jiang: It is the one, singular narrative.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s the dominant ideology. Instead of working against the dominant ideology, we can just repurpose it, saying we’re working with the local chapters of Benefit Corporations -- B Lab, Impact Hub, you name it, impact investors.

Audrey Tang: Really, what you’re doing is empowering people to think of viable alternatives. That would be my advice. Like not exactly saying no to capitalism.

JiaChen Jiang: Right. One or two.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

JiaChen Jiang: Make a third option. You mentioned Red Hat and Mozilla as being very prominent kind of best-of-both-worlds organizations. Those are two that I’m familiar with. Are there any others that you would say are possibly lesser known, but is also actually the best of both worlds?

JiaChen Jiang: There’s a whole lot of companies out there talking about doing social impact, when 99 percent of their work is the other direction.

Audrey Tang: Kickstarter is a pretty good example by its own. Not many people know that they’re a B Corp, and they’re doing a very long term, kind of patience funding in a way. GitHub used to be a star case, but it’s now Microsoft. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: There are really many, but the thing is how mission-locked they are. If they are not sufficiently mission-locked in the start, like through their configuration of their board, or things like that, then at some point the lure of NIPO or the lure of a new round of investor may actually just to change their mission so that they are no longer locked to their original social mission.

Audrey Tang: There’s actually a movement in the US called the Benefit Corporation Movement that designs such a thing directly into the company law so that you can lock into your mission and signify to your investors that if you invest, you have to play by these rules. That is also something worth looking toward.

JiaChen Jiang: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: If you look for a Benefit Corporation, and maybe a listing of them, you can look at the tech companies that have actually declared their social or environmental mission, and is not just doing it for CSR, but they’re committed to do it as part of their work.

JiaChen Jiang: I’ll definitely look into that, because it’s something I’ve personally been trying to figure out. These couple years of college is indeed, like which companies out there are really only dipping their toes into civic tech and tech for social impact, and all of that for the brand name, or for the public support, and which ones are actually doing important work.

Audrey Tang: Committed.

JiaChen Jiang: Google does all of that - I want to say it’s a smart city initiative - it’s Sidewalk Labs, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right, yes.

JiaChen Jiang: Microsoft does this new 2015 civic kind of thing, and Facebook with Internet For All, and all of that. Of all of these corporate organizations, would you say if there is one or any that is doing some kind of research that is actually significant or is actually helpful towards this separate civic community...?

Audrey Tang: I visited the OpenAI Foundation, and I think they are doing worthwhile work. They are nonprofit, but very well-funded. They don’t have to ask for donations. [laughs] It does have its benefit in the sense that it’s kind of a think tank for the global AI community of how to balance the ethical concerns, and indeed shape the narrative that there is a ethical concern in the first place.

Audrey Tang: If you’re interested, purely for social good, instead of Benefit Corporations, nonprofits like OpenAI is a more guaranteed thing, because they have a manifesto.

Audrey Tang: You can read it on their web page that they’re not there to compete. They are going to work with any organization that are solving artificial generated intelligence, but in a way that is ethical, and participatory, and co-curated with the society, rather than dictating the norms, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I would say then look at the nonprofit part. Even the Mozilla has two parts.

JiaChen Jiang: Right, traditional nonprofit and the...

Audrey Tang: It has the foundation part and the corporation part.

JiaChen Jiang: This is just purely out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, and that entire...?

Audrey Tang: It’s not around long enough for me to have an informed opinion.

JiaChen Jiang: Got you. Right.

Audrey Tang: There’s evaluation reports you can read about Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and they’ve been around for a very long time. The Zucks foundation is just around for a few years, so I don’t really have sufficient information to make an honest assessment.

JiaChen Jiang: I’m just interested because I get the sense that some of these organizations are set up very thoughtfully and some of them maybe do not have as much thought put into them.

Audrey Tang: They also mostly have to go through quite a few iterations, to really find their position in the nonprofit world. Because there’s a movement, many names, effective altruism, or things like that, that they really are looking for evidence that impact measurement from charities and social enterprises.

Audrey Tang: It’s kind of made up, but if you join these kind of nonprofits that are about effective altruism, then you kind of, by default, make other charities behave more responsibly.

Audrey Tang: That is also a line of work you can pursue.

JiaChen Jiang: I think a big question I personally had about the establishment of that foundation is to what degree should these companies with huge resources and huge, I guess, academic brainpower, donate their resources and brainpower to organizations that have been around for much longer and have been doing that work for much longer?

JiaChen Jiang: And to what degree should they be setting up their own organizations? What the benefits are for either/or?

Audrey Tang: Setting up their own organization allow them to control the research agenda and the work that this new nonprofit do. Literally, before they open the AI team, there is no nonprofit set up to tackle that particular issue. It kind of needs its own foundation, because they can’t piggyback on the existing one.

Audrey Tang: While very long and well trusted, like the ACLU, and Electronic Frontier Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, the usual suspects, they’re around for a very long time, but on the other hand, they’re continuously opening up new lines of possible research to just keep themselves relevant.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think there’s a good or bad. You start a new foundation if you want total control of the research direction. You support an existing one if you want to defer that to people with more experience.

JiaChen Jiang: Thank you. I think that’s pretty much everything I wanted to ask about.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

JiaChen Jiang: Thank you so much for your time.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. I’ll send you the transcript. We get to co-edit, and we publish.

JiaChen Jiang: Perfect. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much.

JiaChen Jiang: Could I get a picture of you, by any chance?

Audrey Tang: Of course.