Audrey Tang: I’m still waking up. This is my first meeting of the day 7:00 AM. It was just freshly getting caffeinated, but I should be fine in five minutes.

Rob Ricigliano: I just had dinner. I’m in the Midwest. I’m in Wisconsin. Not quite East coast time.

Audrey Tang: Greetings.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I wasn’t going to show my face because I’m sick, but now you’ve seen it. It’s all good…

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: How are you?

Audrey Tang: Pretty good. Good to meet you.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I’m sorry I interrupted you, Rob.

Rob Ricigliano: Well, I’m on the upswing of the caffeination process.

Audrey Tang: Other than insufficient caffeination, I’m not suffering from any other condition.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I have a major caffeine problem as well. What time is it for you?

Audrey Tang: It’s 7:00 AM. It’s literally my first meeting of the day.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Oh my god.

Audrey Tang: But that’s fine.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Thank you for making the time. So kind of you. I’m in San Francisco, so four o’clock. It’s the best time for me, so thank you to both of you for that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Not too bad. [laughs]

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Then we’ll just get going. The structure will be very loose. We get to do these interesting conversations around tough questions that are very…not obvious to answer.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: The issue we’re thinking about now is around democracy and governance and what makes for a system that is resilient and inclusive.

Audrey Tang: It’s like the bedrocks infrastructure. If you’re doing non digital deliberative democracy and you discover that half the population can’t read, that’s what you focus on, or maybe built now reading forms of interaction. You know what I mean.

Audrey Tang: The idea of universal broadband access, universal education based on competence, not on literacy, and democratic institutions that are already used to respond to the here and now, rather than every four years or every year in a budget cycle.

Audrey Tang: These three are the core components and these components assuming they’re fulfilled, then we can talk about this question. The main point here is who builds the system because any system does supports the well-being of a society needs to co-evolve with the society.

Audrey Tang: Almost, by definition, those coming later in, and on the society, have a better grasp at emergent phenomena, compared to the people like me, who’s already 40 years old.

Audrey Tang: The point here, is to be maximally, permissive, in the potentials of this system, without foreclosing any future possibilities, but be conservative in what we prescribe, in the sense of making sure that it’s very predictable. It’s like a heartbeat, people can rely on this temple of system.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, I don’t have any other rules in the designing system, it all depends on what the stakeholders are interested in, what we could, problem, be climate change, this information, pandemic, that we work on, or more importantly, it was that time constraint.

Audrey Tang: Without the time constraint component in this question, I’ll just say back and write some poetry because [laughs] that’s what they’re doing, there’s no time pressure. It’s the highest effort, the initial response.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: That’s great. I would love for you to talk a little bit more about those components. Even in the bedrock, as you described it of infrastructure. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take you back to those points and ask you to add a bit more.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Certainly, universal broadband, that makes sense. I would love to hear what you mean when you say universal competency?

Audrey Tang: Competency education. In Taiwan, we draw the distinction between media and digital literacy education, in which still a few are broadcasters, and most people are consumers of information.

Audrey Tang: Literacy is just so that they comprehend information may be, can be critical of the information, be creative with the information, but it’s it, there is no rebroadcasting. There is no remixing. There’s no storytelling, the agency of everyone being a producer.

Audrey Tang: When I say Robin as a human right, I mean, bi-directional, but broadband. Almost, by definition, you can live stream as well, as you can watch live streams. You can listen, but you can also share.

Audrey Tang: Starting from 19, our basic education curriculum has switched to a competence framework, where the students learn about, say, data stewardship via air boxes, as early as eight years old.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, several concepts around data stewardship, like those written in GDPR is impossible to teach, without using a competency-based framework. A literacy-based framework simply doesn’t work.

Audrey Tang: The same goes to journalistic understanding of how news and collaborative discovery of truth is created. Again, if you’re not in effect checker’s room, not in the newsroom, not in a position to affect check the three presidential candidates during their debate, which many middle schoolers participated, then it’s impossible to teach.

Audrey Tang: This impossible to teach, but very possible to learn forms, ask for a different way to utilize digital, so that millions of people listen to one another, telling each other stories, rather than listening to a few stories, which is what happens under the literacy framework.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: That’s helpful. That’s a really important shift, accepting that people will consume and create stories that they share out, and they get involved by listening and producing.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: What are then the skill sets that need to come with that so that they can do that in…? What do you think the goal is? What’s the aspiration?

Audrey Tang: First and foremost, it means that AI becomes assistive rather than authoritarian intelligence. In a competence based-framework, the power to set the AI’s agenda is at the edges, closest to where the suffering is.

Audrey Tang: Whereas, under illiteracy based-framework is even more concentrated than before, and taking away agency from the edges into a few. You’re the people who invented the idea of civic tech. [laughs] I don’t need to explain the core concept of civic tech here, but the idea is just to empower social innovators and meeting them where they are.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: This is a very important point. Thank you for explaining that. A lot of the challenges that we are still dealing with is this strong desire to concentrate power in the intermediaries, or in the people who share. Even in not doing that, we mess with the system when people do share and interact. This point is really great.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: When you say that AI’s closest to where suffering is, can you describe a little more about what that looks like in an ideal sense?

Audrey Tang: I have in my mind, in early 2012, 2013 the people in the primary schools starting to run the first batch of air boxes. They are certainly close to the sufferings because they’re at the places in Taiwan where the PM 2.5 air pollution is at the most heavy.

Audrey Tang: Instead of relying on the minister of environment, which at a time only has less than 100 measuring stations…Because PM 2.5 is at emergent condition. Not many people understand about that at the time.

Audrey Tang: Instead of pressuring the legislature to give the budget to the Ministry of Education, or with the Environment’s, which will easily take two or three years to realize, they just built their own and work with researchers in distributing ledgers such as EOTA.

Audrey Tang: They successfully made a system where anyone can join and write, but gradually they switched to cyber secure protocols, COG protocols, rather than reusing the WiFi. They collaborated with components and so on, and therefore gained legitimacy so that eventually people trusted more.

Audrey Tang: The neighbors, schools, children, running the air boxes simply because there’s more in closer, as opposed to Ministry of Environment’s numbers. Now it creates a legitimacy pressure on the Minister of Environment, where in our corner of the earth the natural response is just to go off, arrest [laughs] the people who started such protests on the street.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan being unique in our corner of the world according to CIVICUS Monitor, only jurisdiction does completely open the terms of freedom association, press assembly, and so on. Where we can’t beat them, literally, so we joined them.

Audrey Tang: That’s why we built the Civil IOT system that lends the people running these digital competence projects the supercomputing powered up 20 supercomputer of the National Center for high-speed computing, extending it to not just air, but also earthquake prevention, water quality, disaster, recovery, you name it.

Audrey Tang: There’s an English version of this website. Also, making sure that it became widely accepted for parents. That’s their children arches setting this up in their balcony and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It became a civil movement that unifies people together. That we can talk about climates in an evidence base, where the evidence is gathered, by the community that are suffering the most from any climate or weather or air pollution related issues. This is just one simple example, but that’s the kind of thing I have I mind.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Wow. That’s very cool. I think you’ve said it all. You’re demonstrating a change in the role of government in that example, and maybe I’m asking, are you demonstrating a change in the role of government now? What is that change? What is the role of government in a system like that?

Audrey Tang: The collaboration I call it to people, public-private partnership. With people first, or social sector first, in the jurisdictions where social sector is actually a thing. I’ll call it social sector first. This kind of governance focus on norm building, but the norm building power like agenda-setting power is squarely in the social sector.

Audrey Tang: That’s to say organized civil society with a common purpose of governance. Then the government that the state is simply one of the stakeholders who joins, participates amplifies, but never controls this norm-shaping agenda building.

Audrey Tang: We serve as a bridge such as when people make a 100 or so mask availability visualization during their pandemic around a year ago, we can talk to Google. We can talk to…I don’t know, the for-convenience store chains and many other things so that they can scale out the norms that’s already scaled up in the social sector.

Audrey Tang: The government’s role here is to scale it deeply, meaning that translating these concepts into the expertise of other competent authorities of all age groups to be maximally inclusive. People are not accidentally left behind when such social innovations happen, which tend to be the case if they only serve a few in the population.

Audrey Tang: Because of our involvement, we scaled deeply this idea of people locating the pharmacies and later on convenience store near them, that’s still have mask available. So that the systems totally served more than three quarter of population in just a couple months, and therefore giving everyone the protection, reducing the R-value to be under one and we move on to post pandemic.

Audrey Tang: Definitely, there is a role in government to do that. It can’t actually set the norm by itself. It must do so by collaboration and yielding in a sense to the social sector.

Rob Ricigliano: If I was taking a step back from what you said, they’re not the ones generating the core fuel of content of this. That’s the social sector, but they can then scale. They can deepen it. They can give it roots. If there are relevant laws that need to be written, they can help to create that.

Rob Ricigliano: They make through the bridge to the private sector. I have questions about how the social sector is activated. Is the social sector the one saying, “Hey, we care about blank issue.”

Rob Ricigliano: You mentioned they had a role in agenda-setting. Is that the start of the processes of figuring out what do we care about? What do we need to work?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. The social center produced the norms, but it doesn’t produce them in a vacuum. There need to be, what Lawrence Lastic would call architecture and I’ll simply call code. [laughs] That makes such digital public infrastructure conversations possible.

Audrey Tang: The architecture, in a sense, makes norm happen in a way that’s prosocial because we also know that if you designed a code in some other different way, there emerges a norm that’s divisive, conspiracy theory-filled, polarized, and so on. I’m sure that as advanced democratic state, the US doesn’t have such problems.

Audrey Tang: We see a lot of problems [laughs] in our corner of the world. The code is opinionated. It’s never un-opinionated. It’s just whether it’s intentionally designed to be prosocial, in which case it’s like the intentional designs of public parks, museums, academic campus, even a town hall.

Audrey Tang: It takes a lot of acoustic design, a lot of architecture to make it conductive to a pro-social gathering, but what happens in many nearby jurisdictions is that people are using something that’s designed to like a nightclub. Deliberately to be loud music, addictive drinks, private bouncers, a lot of noise, literally a loud noise, where people have to shout to get heard, and so on.

Audrey Tang: People try to use that as a town hall. That never works just as we wouldn’t host an analog face-to-face Town Hall in the local nightlife district. I’m not saying that we should ban the nightlife district. It’s a place for a nightlife district. It’s just not public deliberation.

Audrey Tang: The architecture is something that a government can foster, but not control the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit. The PTT has been running for 25 years. It’s open source, co-governed, literally a national university student pet project even now. It answers to no shareholders, no advertisers because they simply have not.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, it enabled that finally one last message, “To save the Taiwanese people.” It got three arched in 24 hours and resulting in a house inspection for all flights coming in from Taiwan on the first day of 2020.

Audrey Tang: The same message I’m sure reached social media of many other jurisdictions as well, but because they maybe were distracted by the nightlife architecture, [laughs] they did not result in the same triaging and decisive action.

Audrey Tang: The message also didn’t reach the people in Wuhan, because of a very different architecture choice based on “harmony” but I’ll probably not go there.

Audrey Tang: The architecture, that is the Civic Infrastructure begot the norm of prosocial conversations, which then work with the public sector results in the laws and regulations who mentioned which shapes the market, so that it can work with the norms, not against the norms.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I have so many questions, but first, how do you define public sector?

Audrey Tang: The public sector in general or in democratic politics, because it’s very different. In democratic politics, it means that these are the services that need to work with everyone, and a non-payer of disservice cannot be excluded from it.

Audrey Tang: In democratic politics, I will also say that the control is based on democratic principles, such as voting, which could use some improvement, but not capital listed control principles. That’s the layer I would add.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: OK, great. Then I’m just curious if your public sector, is it primarily still associated with government? Public sector could mean for us even like nonprofits, or it could mean local government, for example, services. I’m just curious if your…

Audrey Tang: No, number exclusiveness in the people, it serves as well as the principle of democratic control. These are the defining characteristics. For many charities, there may be democratic control if they’re structured as co-ops or credit unions and so on.

Audrey Tang: They can certainly define your mission and refuse service to anyone that falls outside of their vision of their scope, in which case they become the social sector and other public sector.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: That’s helpful. Of course, the natural question is [laughs] who maintains the pro-social structure, and where did this come from?

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Governments do not often play a role like that. It’s very easy for the government to be more of a power hoarder in some ways, depending on the…

Audrey Tang: This is like asking who maintains the Internet. [laughs] It’s everyone’s business with everyone’s help. The software that we’re using now, GTC. Who maintains GTC?

Audrey Tang: Again, it’s anyone who makes use of GTC, in a sense, contributing. Also, of course, because we run our own GTC instances, also contributed their hosting power, the time spent, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This used to be difficult to explain before Wikipedia, but now after Wikipedia, rather easy to explain. There is an initial tier of designer [laughs] that sets the norm of initial interactions.

Audrey Tang: Afterward is merely people applying those patterns of interactions that seem useful to whatever issues they deem useful, and then just replicating that norm, in a way that’s hopefully, conflict-free, replicated data type, that is to say, produce data that other people can use as materials in their next interactions.

Audrey Tang: This idea of CRDT, which powers from either Calc to Google Docs, is key to the digital way of prosociality. If you do not design it as a conflict-free, replicable data type, then it’s inviting violence, escalation, and the antisocial corners of social media that I mentioned.

Rob Ricigliano: How do you grapple with folks who don’t have a pro-social intention? In other words, they try to exploit something in an otherwise open system, to co-opt or to divide or polarize.

Audrey Tang: The asymmetry of time spent to vandalize Wikipedia vis-à-vis the automated and semi-automated structure that Wikipedia has in its disposal, shows that nobody is interested in trolling. If the trolling doesn’t pay off, they will just move to some other forum.

Audrey Tang: If we’re just talking about individuals with intentions, the current counter trolling technologies are already very mature in doubt. Of course, if you’re talking about, state-based interference, there’s something else altogether.

Audrey Tang: The size of the space nowadays already has the patterns that make sure that the trolls have to pay, like 100 times more time, if they want to vandalize this and these moderators.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: That’s very helpful. In the event of more organized interference, state-based or otherwise…

Audrey Tang: They can afford 100 more times a cost.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Individuals, or if there is more of a concentrated effort to do so, how do you manage?

Audrey Tang: I think then we’re back at the bedrock because that’s essentially attacking the bedrock assumptions. If there’s a concerted disinformation campaign that renders the competence framework not useful, swamping ideas, market with deliberative crafted messages, that doesn’t add up.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that the underlying universal problem access, although it’s connected through cybersecurity attacks, the identities are forged and things like that. Again, universal profit doesn’t do much good. It’s all compromised, cybersecurity-wise. I can go on.

Audrey Tang: The basic idea of the democratic bedrocks is that we need to apply a certain sense of proactive defense in the sense that first, we hire the best and brightest white hats, paying them very handsomely to attack our systems even before we deploy that, which is why I emphasize self-hosting.

Audrey Tang: Even for the best of the breed FreeSurfer of community-based proof social infrastructure, we still prefer to host them in the Pentesters and we do follow CVE’s grounds that has advanced detection, and even proactive defense abilities. That’s the first line of defense.

Audrey Tang: The second line is that we also need to work with the antivirus anti-scam communities. There’s already multiple private sector offerings, from the leading antivirus company Trend Micro as well as the startup called Fuschl, and many others.

Audrey Tang: That if you invite it to your end-to-end encrypted chatbots group, then it scans each incoming message for disinformation campaigns. It can respond to you in real-time and within milliseconds if there is clarifications that you can flag it as spam, so that you send it to the journalistic cross-checking.

Audrey Tang: Just like people can flag individual incoming email as spam, is the same design, same concept. Just on a much shorter interval, much shorter tempo.

Audrey Tang: Again, this is like developing an antibody against the virus of the mind. And there need to be such a different system invested, if you think and could be [laughs] reasonably demonstrated that state’s payback endeavors are being used against the bedrocks.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Did you find that similar to the system that was created because the system has created those entities or partners emerge naturally through it, or was there also a concentrated effort to build those antibodies?

Audrey Tang: Yes and no. It all depends on whether people think journalistic work, daily work, is something people just do a little bit every day. It’s more of a norm, a pre-existing norm, that people in Taiwan, maybe because we still remember the time that we didn’t have freedom of the press. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We exercise the freedom of press end of the speech on a very civic level, in the sense that it’s not just three-quarter of people going to vote for the presidential vote, but probably three-quarter of people will say they’re willing to contribute some cognitive surplus in such work.

Audrey Tang: This sense of, not really duty, just a norm, needs to be there. If it’s not there…Again, it could be there at a time when people didn’t use to recycle. We recycle now even glass, and it only took, what, 20 years?

Audrey Tang: If you put a sufficient framework into competency-based education, then in 20 years, you’re guaranteed to get people to live with those norms quite naturally.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Yeah, and we’ve created a very capitalist-oriented system and we have seen the norms proliferate around that.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Rob Ricigliano: In the timescale for the current system, how long did it take to get you to where you are now with the digital delivery of democracy in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: If this is a plural you, the civic hackers, even before the term civic tech, the free software people in Taiwan already plant a lot of this, but usually you serving a social sector need, meaning that people who develop software and code and hardware and open access and journalists and so on, like our tribe.

Audrey Tang: These were already part of our norm around the turn of the century. Nowadays, it’s for everyone. It’s just the citizens initiatives, the participate trip budget, presidential hackathon, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There is now the feeling that these are infrastructure because more than half the population actually use it, and it doesn’t exclude even residents, so you don’t have to be a citizen. This feeling compared to the previous feeling that we had in the turn of the century, it took us almost exactly 20 years.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Was the intention there from the beginning? One of the things that we run into is essentially how do you get to the aspiration? What actually led that desire for pro-social infrastructure to be developed?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. It’s fun to share and enjoy. That’s what Lynne Tobas was saying, just for fun. Fun amplified as joy is the only emotion that’s more viral than outrage.

Audrey Tang: While we do see the anti-social corners of social media-fueled by outrage and by the vengefulness, the discrimination, the things that follows outrage, we can see, and there is now a numerical evidence to pick it up that humor over rumor actually works.

Audrey Tang: Some humor, [laughs] , some fun making as part of the not just social sector, but also public sector can turn this around.

Audrey Tang: This is just like redefining the term infrastructure, which I’m aware the US is now doing well [laughs] what we did in 2016 and in our infrastructure appeal, we redefined digital infrastructure as infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, the rethinking about how democracy works instead of just on the fossilized institutions pure more and more insane. That is just like starting a hashtag is just like starting a party online. It’s OK to have fun while demonstrating. Demonstrating fun may be the most powerful thing there is.

Audrey Tang: These seems like from the 60s, maybe [laughs] in the US, but the sentiments are back and I’m happy that they’re back.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: That’s a very cool analogy. How…

Rob Ricigliano: I find it really interesting that…I work with lots of organizations around complex systems. Social systems, not technical systems.

Rob Ricigliano: Anyway, in complexity and systems there’s this concept of emergence, which is that new realities emerge that couldn’t necessarily be predicted before. What’s interesting to me is that the depth of the pro-social character of the architecture emerged.

Rob Ricigliano: In other words, no one sat at the beginning 20 years ago and just had it all laid out and said, “It’s going to be this, and it’s going to work that way.” It didn’t seem like it was necessarily a specific plan. It may have been a general intention, but it wasn’t…

Rob Ricigliano: It feels to me like an emergent property that’s actually a function of this. It was the free software people at the beginning. It’s the distributed users who are all contributing to maintaining and designing, furthering the system. That feels to me very emergent.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I was trying to search for a term that’s stronger than norm, but not quite doctrine. Maybe I’ll call it ethos. The ethos of the earlier designers, I think, is just as simple as, let’s trust future generations. That’s a very strong ethos.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, to aspire, not to be good citizens, but good ancestors. That made it a prosocialness span across generations. To me is one of the younger generation. I was 14, 15 when I joined the free software movement. I feel trusted by the people who are much more senior than my age.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: That’s pretty important. One of the things that also strikes me is I’m just amazed that…you have a party system. You have parties, right?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I’m just struck by the fact that people don’t use this system to accumulate favor first in party. I’m amazed by that.

Audrey Tang: There’s a reason for that. In Taiwan, there’s political parties for sure. In our parliament, there’s now four major parties, and all of them sign on the open parliament proposal, the national action plan all that and so deepening democracy and linking with the international community.

Audrey Tang: These are the two things that the four parties agree, these are bedrock issues. Nobody would say that let’s compete by being more authoritarian, nobody there to say that after sunflower anymore. It’s not a partisan thing.

Audrey Tang: The other reason is that in our administration which is responsible for most of the drafts of the law that eventually pass in the legislature, were remarkably partisan free.

Audrey Tang: I’m one of the nine horizontal ministers. Seven or so of us are independent nonpartisan. Within the entire cabinet, including the 32 ministers and many others, more are independent people than people of any party.

Audrey Tang: The drafting stage, the place where we listen to the people and gets this “how might we” question, it’s not quite yet at the development delivery to finer details, but at a drafting stage – the first diamond in a double diamond schema – is a non-partisan workplace. That is the political design as well is thanks to the constitutional design of the jurisdiction in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That makes sure that this can accurately reflect the citizens, which…That’s also because constitutionally direct democracy, that Switzerland idea. 100 years ago already inspire that jurisdiction death currently works in Taiwan. We have a lot of direct democracy components in our constitutional thinking.

Rob Ricigliano: Can I come back to the horizontal minister thing? I love that phrase. Can you define horizontal minister versus, is it, vertical minister?

Audrey Tang: Sure, also known as “minister at large” or “minster without portfolio”, but please don’t call me The Right Honorable – that’s a British thing.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, each ministry has a minister. There are also nine ministers that work specifically to coordinate inter-agency cross-ministry and cross-sectoral issues.

Audrey Tang: Our job is to take all designs to make sure that common threads are merged, even when the individual ministries or fight for their values, which they must. Otherwise, they get merged, all the ministries that exist. Of course, defend a particular system of thinking.

Audrey Tang: It’s our job to apply philosophy to make sure that people nevertheless agree on common things, despite their initial difference positions in each ministry. It’s by design. My at-large fields are open government, social innovation, and youth engagement and there’s ministry at large for other issues as well.

Rob Ricigliano: How many…

Audrey Tang: Many of them.

Rob Ricigliano: How many combined ministries?

Audrey Tang: 32 ministries, and 9 horizontal ministers.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: You said seven are independent? I don’t know if you’d used independent, non-partisan?

Audrey Tang: Non-partisan.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Non-partisan. That’s so interesting. Honestly, normally I would think this is the hardest job in the world to work [laughs] across different ministries and somehow find consensus. Or not even consensus, even just agreement with issues.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Can you describe a little more about how that works? You’ve got open government, social innovation, engagement. How do you champion that across the…?

Audrey Tang: I call it “rough consensus” – It’s not quite a consensus, but it’s “good enough” consensus. Because of the time, I’ll just use one example, when I first became the digital minister in charge of youth engagement, there is a youth engagement issue on my table, which is the definition of eSports.

Audrey Tang: At the time, the Ministry of Education was saying that eSports is not a sport – In Taiwan, sport is part of the Education Ministry – because it doesn’t use skeletal muscles. There was arguments.

Audrey Tang: It’s a Ministry of Culture thing. The Ministry of Culture said that, “Come back when the East were half 100 years of proud tradition because that’s what culture means inter-generational heritage.” Obviously, eSports doesn’t have that sort of heritage.

Audrey Tang: Maybe it’s a Ministry of Economy thing. Then Ministry of Economy came back saying, “You know, you’re talking about handing visa to international competitors, you’re talking about military service, and whether there could be an alternate military track, and things like that is about individuals.”

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Economy doesn’t work on the skill of individuals. They work on the scale of companies, manufacturers, inspections for the hardware and software that runs eSports. That’s fine. That’s their job, but to get people into alternative military service. That’s so far from the Ministry of economies.

Audrey Tang: …affairs that they don’t even know how to begin, it’s surely a ministry of education thing. [laughs] I can go on, but you get the idea because it’s an emergent phenomenon, naturally, it doesn’t fit into any of the ministries per user. That’s what the horizontal Minister and Minister at large, plays the role.

Audrey Tang: My way of working with the Open Government principles, is first transparency, making sure that all these cases are documented, there is a true full transcript made, co-edit for 10 days, and then published into the comments, like, literally using Creative Commons zero. Then all the forums just exploded.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there’s a lot of eSport forums, so these become social objects, these proceedings, not just a summary, but rather, each individual sentence has a URL, it became the subject of discussion, and then participation.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who sent me an email, anyone who comments publicly, anyone who started related initiatives, our national participation platform, where 5,000 people can compel a ministerial response, and so on.

Audrey Tang: All this generates a lot of signals, a lot of noise too, but we have ways to moderate them away. I then, bring the most useful, rough consensus arguments from the social sector to our next meeting, 10 days afterward, and I said, “Here is someone who said, the goal which he, like AlphaGo, is now an eSport.”

Audrey Tang: There is a transition from an analog Ministry of Culture, sport, not sport culture, into digital culture and go, like AlphaGo is an AI, that wins against humans, is the first example, is the term based eSport, but obviously, there are other eSports as well, that’s not term based. There is a way for the minister of culture to accept that.

Audrey Tang: In many other very good arguments, like if you see the live streaming eSport competitors, as performing artists, then the Minister of Education, has a way to work with these performing skilled artists and so on.

Audrey Tang: They just crowdsource these ideas, I just bring them to the meeting, and the public service are convinced. I always suspect maybe some of them just post under a pseudonym [laughs] because they couldn’t say it in the public sector. They go and say I’m a social sector. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: After just research meetings, we arrive to, a rough consensus that if we call them the skilled, performing, digital, cultural, locus, then everyone can work with the eSport people within their ministry or boundaries, and so it’s stopped.

Audrey Tang: I didn’t do any decisions, I just bring the best arguments from the social sector to the public sector, and the other way around and provide a full accountability trail, and how this regulation and later on law is called co-designed.

Audrey Tang: It’s not quite a veto and process because there’s no multi-stakeholder forum. This is more asynchronous, but this is just what I do on a daily basis.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I’m just struck by how…It’s a really different role to think of yourself as this person in a government versus the authority figure making decisions on behalf of people. It’s a really different role. I just want to call that out. It’s believing that you’re…

Audrey Tang: You mean a lowercase minister. Yes. I preach. I hear confessions, too, I guess.

Rob Ricigliano: My background as a mediator and in doing peace-building work in violent conflict zones around the world…I think you’re like…a capital M Minister is what I would give you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Rob Ricigliano: I love the term of the good enough consensus. I think that’s always the way to avoid getting stuck. I’m thinking the same thing, just around this role…

Rob Ricigliano: This facilitator role is what animates things. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it feels like you need to define certain terms in ways that would allow other ministers to then take pieces of it and go deeper, and they can work with these types of artists, or they can work with these…

Audrey Tang: Cultural workers?

Rob Ricigliano: …technical issues.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I will call this technology. The technologies that I employ here, like open space technology. It says technology on the tin. Obviously, it’s technology, nonviolent communication, dynamic facilitation, are all social technologies.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Thank you for that. It was a helpful illustration. As you think about technology…what’s kind of a challenge with technology, and maybe also an opportunity, is that it is very dynamic in and of itself. It’s itself constantly evolving.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I’m struck by two things. One, the fact that your government is [laughs] technology able enough to incorporate in this way is pretty significant.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I’m curious how that is. If you do have a generational split in their ability to envision this and what you do in that? Second, around how do you remain adaptive as technology changes? Do you have to, or is it not necessary?

Audrey Tang: Very good questions. If we broaden the definition of technology, so there’s social tech is tech, then the answer is that we need to be aware of new ways to get good enough consensus. New ways that people are using to communicate with other people.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, the public sector will feel very distanced, very quaint because people are no longer paying attention to the modes of communication. I’m not just talking about the physical modes, the encoding, the media encoding of the media that the government is using to engage the people.

Audrey Tang: It always starts from communication stands to bring people together. I joke about putting the A into digitizations become digitalization. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Digitalization is just binary coding. It’s coding things into digits, but digitalization is about inclusion. It’s about making sure that people who previously didn’t have a voice are empowered with the assistive intelligence or the technology that empowers them to have voice.

Audrey Tang: These are the direction of development of our infrastructure technologies. We run procurement with a API open by default mandate, so that any technologies that develop for any particular generation of needs need to offer it, just like universal accessibility, offer it to people with blindness.

Audrey Tang: They also need to offer OpenAPI, so that the next generation of technologists don’t have to redo everything they just did, but rather reuse those APIs. This is how we repurpose the code-developed text file system in three days into the mask ordering system, and later on also the triple stimulus voucher ordering system, and many more.

Audrey Tang: That’s because the systems are designed like Lego blocks to be API first. That’s what enabled what you said, the newer generation of technologists, to think that it’s quite inviting for them to join. They do not have to, I don’t know, relearn COBO, or to [laughs] rewrite certain Fortran programs [laughs] to deploy DB2, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: These bedrock technologies are still there. They’re still functioning, but they are now speaking open API and interacting in a way that’s much more conductive to connecting people to people, not just the old ways of connecting machines to machines.

Audrey Tang: That’s the direction of digitalization and that’s how our procurement, even reverse procurement, like the social sector build applications that we need to provide a reliable real-time API that doesn’t need public-service review before each batch of publishing. Published upon collection.

Audrey Tang: Again, this lowers the risk of all public service, because nobody is to blame. If there is data bias, people collaborate and figure things out. Also, reduce the time spent to adjust to the real situations on the field.

Audrey Tang: When people accuse us of data bias, we always say, “Yeah, legislator teach us. We have the same data to teach us how to be less bias.” We follow through on that as well. It’s also an accountability move. I hope that answers the question about technological generations.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Yes, that’s amazing.

Rob Ricigliano: If you could say a little bit about the impact on the general public.

Rob Ricigliano: You talked a lot about how the government has been operating, and then some of the architecture side of this. What’s the impact been on the users? Are they user slash contributors? They must have an impact on that.

Audrey Tang: The contribution is definitely the slash. [laughs] People are not thinking of themselves as users, which to me, sounds always like the digital equivalent of the old concept subjects, of the king, I mean. The idea of users in the addictive-substance business, says to me that [laughs] they can’t live without the infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: They can’t live without the system. They’re powerless against the learned helplessness/omnipotence, the feeling of omnipotence enabled by digital systems and so on, so citizens rather than users.

Audrey Tang: A smart city has users but a smart nation has more citizens. Smart citizens idea is simply anyone can pick up the phone and call the toll-free number 1922 and complain about you’re rationing masks, but you don’t have the color attribute.

Audrey Tang: I’m a young boy. I’m getting pink. I don’t want to wear pink mask to school. All the boys in my class have navy blue mask. It’s a government problem. I propose that you add a color…code to the Mask Rationing System.

Audrey Tang: Any boy that gets this issue feels natural to call 1922. Then within 24 hours, get their questions resolved by the medical offices, including the minister. All wear pink regardless of their gender. The Minister of Health even say, “Pink Panther was a childhood hero.”

Audrey Tang: The boy that called becomes the most hip boy in the class for only he has the color that heroes wear. In a sense, Pink Panther wears pink, I guess. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The point is that everyone communicated in such a way that pink became the most hip color for a few weeks. Color isn’t gender mainstreaming. Any good mask protects you, not its color. These become a new prevailing social norm.

Audrey Tang: These single anecdote shows how a democracy responded in the here and now, rather than every quarter or every budget to cycle empowers the citizens to feel that they too could contribute. Anyone with any idea is empowered to tell their friends and families, “Hey, I got the Minister of Health wearing pink the very next day.”

Rob Ricigliano: [laughs] That’s great.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: You didn’t respond directly to what the request was, which is good. You actually said, “OK, I hear your request, but I actually wanted to redefine what pink and blue means so that they are not gender associated.”

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: That took a different…I guess what I’m saying is there’s a judgement call that’s made there that centered around that…

Audrey Tang: Yes. If we had instead say, “Bullying is bad,” it makes the bullying worse.

Audrey Tang: The team of participation offices is very important. In each ministry, we have a handful of people, collectively around a hundred now that works with the art of engagement. Unlike media offices that talk to journalists, or parliamentary officer, talk to NPs. The participation offices engage anyone.

Audrey Tang: They are also nicknamed by me, #officers, because they have to respond to any emergent hashtag. The idea of wearing pink mask of same Pink Panther are all the work of the participation officers, of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. The participation officer also lives with a very cute dog, which also helps. This is like literally the spokesdog of the…

Audrey Tang: …participation officer named Zongchai. It’s a Shiba. When the Minister of Health said, “OK, tomorrow on, we start to implement physical distancing. The young boys and girls, and transgenders receive this. When you’re indoor, keep three Shibas away or wear a mask. If you’re out, keep Shibas away or wear a mask.

Audrey Tang: You can’t really unsee this.

Audrey Tang: Physical distance is finally communicated without punishing anyone. That’s the point, because if we punish anyone, the decimation of social secure agency makes the message harder to spread. Nobody can resist a cute dog.

Audrey Tang: It’s telling you, if you wear a mask, it protects your hands. It protects your face. It protects your mouth from your own unwashed hands, so you won’t do this. Again, these are very effective communication, and that’s what it mean by media encoding in a sense.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: It’s also what you mean by fun, which I really appreciate. It doesn’t have to be just a punitive system that government enforces.

Audrey Tang: Very important. Optimizing for fun.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Thank you.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: This has been so helpful. We’re out of time. Everything you told us is so rich. We should wrap up, Rob. Any final comments from you, Audrey?

Rob Ricigliano: Is there anything else from you that you would want to say to us, or ask us?

Audrey Tang: Would you prefer that our conversation is released as a video to the commerce or as a transcript or both? I hear Eshanthi saying about, initially, not publishing the videos. I can make arrangement so that your audio is published, but just my video if that makes you feel better.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: It’s fine. Is this how I look when I’m sitting?

Audrey Tang: I’ll just do the audio-only with just my video. I think that’s more fair because I didn’t say that upfront. I’ll publish it first as a unlisted video. I’ll send a link to you. You can review it a little bit. If you’re OK with it I’ll just flag it public.

Rob Ricigliano: Wonderful. Thank you very much. Really helpful, really interesting.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Yes, it’s fascinating. I think we’ll try to move to Taiwan soon.

Audrey Tang: You can do that right now using the gold card. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We’re offering this healthcare and all to pretty much anyone you can apply it from overseas. More than 2000 people have visited Taiwan. A lot of people in Silicon Valley is now in Taiwan. [laughs] Thanks to the gold card…

Audrey Tang: …that you are now unleashed to visit any days. You can keep this for three years, renew it, and you don’t have to invest in talent or work for it as a Taiwanese employer. This is just an invitation to visit.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: I’m going to. Are you kidding?

Audrey Tang: Nope.

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: And I’m vaccinated, so don’t worry.

Audrey Tang: Great!

Eshanthi Ranasinghe: Audrey, bye.

Audrey Tang: OK. Thank you. Live long and prosper. Bye.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Rob Ricigliano: Thank you.