Christopher Balkaran: Thank you so much, Minister, for doing this podcast. I really do appreciate it.

Audrey Tang: Hello.

Christopher Balkaran: [laughs] How are you?

Audrey Tang: I’m just making sure that you can hear me.

Christopher Balkaran: Yeah, I can hear you perfectly. Can you hear me?

Audrey Tang: Yes, I can. I was saying that I do not have a local recording with this iPad, so we’ll have to rely on Skype. Hopefully that’s OK with you.

Christopher Balkaran: OK. No worries. That’s totally fine, yeah.

Audrey Tang: Awesome.

Christopher Balkaran: Thank you. I know it’s 7:00 AM in Taiwan…

Audrey Tang: It is!

Christopher Balkaran: …so thank you so much for waking up and doing this podcast first thing in the morning.

Audrey Tang: No worries.

Christopher Balkaran: If it is the first thing that you’re doing in the morning. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It is. Aside from drinking some Bulletproof Coffee, that’s literally the first thing, this is the first work.

Christopher Balkaran: Are you a big coffee person?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, especially for a 7:00 AM podcast, but yes.

Christopher Balkaran: I was telling Joel this over email, I was like, “Oh, my goodness, I have so much ground to cover with Minister Tang in an hour.” I’m going to try my best to be as succinct as possible, and get a really good understanding of what incredible work the government of Taiwan is doing, and how it could be a model for Canada and other countries around the world.

Audrey Tang: Glad to help.

Christopher Balkaran: Before we begin, I wanted to know a little bit about – without getting it too much down the political rabbit hole…

Christopher Balkaran: How was Taiwan’s political civic engagement prior to your government and what did you see as some of the major gaps that needed to be fixed?

Audrey Tang: When we occupied the Parliament in 2014, when a Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or the CSSTA, is being rushed through the Parliament, it’s largely seen as a gesture by the parliamentarians that due processes, radical transparency are not very much on their minds, and was evidenced by a 2012 advertisement – I think one of the first YouTube advertisements filmed by the government back then – called the Economic Booster Plan.

Audrey Tang: The advertisement is very simply structured. It simply showed the citizens of all traits looking very confused as a lot of words whooshing past them – that’s the Economic Booster Plan – and they look like they have no understanding of that at all. Then a background voice says, “Oh, the Booster Plan. Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to understand it. We just have to do it.”

Audrey Tang: I think that advertisement was flagged as spam very quickly, because citizens took at this insult.

Audrey Tang: That is also why the g0v movement has been born, directly because of that advertisement, because a bunch of civic hackers, some of them my friends, thought that maybe the problem is not the citizens. Maybe it’s because the state have not made available the budgets in a way that is visualized and are easy to understand. So they did exactly that, forking the government, so to speak.

Audrey Tang: I would say transparency, accountability, participation, and inclusion were the four things that was largely seen as missing out of negligence when we occupied the Parliament in 2014.

Christopher Balkaran: As you are speaking, it’s like that one critical moment, the straw that broke the camel’s back kind of thing. I could imagine leading up to this point, there was this opaqueness that many in Taiwan felt that government was undertaking public policy direction, and there’s no real understanding as to why the direction was being taken in the way it was, and people felt a disconnect.

Christopher Balkaran: Can you explain a little bit more about that disconnect? It must have happened over many years where people were like, “You know what, I’m totally checked out with this government completely.”

Audrey Tang: Sure, certainly. I think this is not out of specifically negligence or anything. It’s more like under the tradition of Freedom of Information Act or FOIA, the government only publishes after a decision is made. That is to say, as usual actually with FOIA acts, the government doesn’t have to publish anything in the drafting stage when the governments still have no idea what’s going on, but it is precisely those drafting stage documents, conversation records, and meeting minutes.

Audrey Tang: These are the most valuable, because it explains the context, the why of policymaking, not just the what of policies made. Even though there is a clause in our FIA law that says, “Oh, but if it’s of public benefit, as approved by the superiors, then the public servants can publish things in the drafting stage.” Very few public servants actually use that.

Audrey Tang: When I become Digital Minister around four years ago, I said, “OK, any meeting that I chair, any meeting with journalists or lobbyists, the entirety of the transcript or the video recording need to be published. It’s always of public benefit.”

Audrey Tang: That’s my working condition. Then people saw that this radical transparency, meaning transparency at the root, really helped inviting people of various different ideas in the society to co-create much more effectively, because they can now understand why we’re doing this or why we’re not doing this.

Christopher Balkaran: What you’re doing in recording all your conversations reminds me very closely of what Mr. Hansard did in, I think it was, Great Britain. I’m not sure if you know about the Hansard system.

Christopher Balkaran: Basically, it was the House of Commons had all these representatives from various parties. They would debate, and nobody took verbatim notes as to what questions were being asked, what was the response from the government, or other members of opposition.

Christopher Balkaran: Literally, somebody sitting in the stands sat down and just took these notes of everything that was being said exactly as you just mentioned for radical transparency and for more civic participation.

Christopher Balkaran: I guess coming out of that, my question would be what have been some of the early results in terms of, I’m sure you can probably sense who’s watching or how many people are downloading some of the meetings that you’re having.

Christopher Balkaran: Do you see that there’s a lot of uptake for people?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. I started work 2016 October as Digital Minister. Almost immediately, I think in November, there is just this interesting case that came my way. In October, when I first become Digital Minister, the Parliament held a public hearing about e-sport, which is very interesting in Taiwan, because it’s in this no-ministries land.

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Culture says it’s not part of our traditional culture. Maybe come back when e-sport have 100 years of history.

Audrey Tang: Ministry of Education, which is in charge of sport, says that there’s no way that they will convert this one-hour mandatory sport hour in the education facilities into, I don’t know, League of Legend sessions?

Audrey Tang: Not their business. Probably the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Christopher Balkaran: Right, for sure.

Audrey Tang: The MoEA said that, “We take care of the hardware manufacturing, we take care of the software manufacturing, but there’s no way that players are somehow Ministry of Economic Affairs’ purview.”

Audrey Tang: There’s really no ministries taking care of that particular issue of specifically the rights of the e-sport athletes. Of course, the athletes voiced their concerns, and we made sure that we captured everything they said about military service, about the lack of possibility of getting a large venue.

Audrey Tang: Even for foreign teams arriving to Taiwan, there is no visa category for them and so on.

Audrey Tang: These are very real suffering and pain points that no ministries was considering themselves equipped to handle. After collecting all these thought and pain points in October, in November, we started this internal cross-ministerial conversation.

Audrey Tang: There has been lots and lots of failed conversations, even headed by previous cabinet’s premier, to no effect. This time, I was ready, because all the transcript of all the ministries positions, I am not judgmental.

Audrey Tang: I am not saying that you shouldn’t do this. I’m just saying anything that you say after 10 working days of co-editing, we will publish it to the wide Internet, including on PTT, our local equivalent of Reddit, and we will see what the netizens think.

Audrey Tang: We published the transcript. People who are posting the most upvoted ideas really came up with really, really good arguments. For example, they said that Weiqi – Go as in AlphaGo, I guess – is now an e-sport, because most people compete online, and AI plays better than human beings, which are the two e-sport qualifications.

Audrey Tang: We’ve been offering a lot of perks and special study programs, military service alternatives, and so on to professional Go players. There’s no reason why we cannot just reuse these regulations.

Audrey Tang: There’s people who argue, for example, it’s a sport, but it’s not a physical sport. It’s an intellectual sport. There are some clauses in the Ministry of Education’s regulations that you can look at and so on.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that being the wide Internet, there’s personal attacks and so on, but it simply elided them, and only brought those really good innovative points back to the internal meetings. The ministries people are like, “Well, yeah, I used to play Go when I was young. This makes a lot of sense,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: After three negotiations, all the ministries are happy with this new definition of e-sports as an intellectual sport, a public performance, and things like that, which leaves all the three ministries with something to do. People are very happy.

Audrey Tang: I think the point here is that I am not specifically ordering anything, commanding anything. I’m just a conduit through which the collective intelligence can work with the state intelligence.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s the critical point, and that’s something I’m going to get to later when we talk about digital, social, and innovation. I think that’s exactly what government should be is a conduit of the will of the people, generally speaking.

Christopher Balkaran: I think, here in Canada and the United States, a lot of politicians say that they are encompassing the will of the people, but they’re encompassing certain segments of the population.

Christopher Balkaran: Before I get to that, I wanted to chat. I think the reason why we need, or Taiwan needs, a Digital Minister like yourself is because the rate of technology and the rate of its increasing, increases over the past 5 to 10 years, has been so exponential that it is a full-time job just to keep up.

Christopher Balkaran: I think the millennial generation is very equipped, but I even see my friends falling back a little bit with technology. There sometimes is, and I hate to be this kind of generational gap, but had there been an older minister in charge of the digital ministry, there’s so much there to unpack and uncover.

Christopher Balkaran: To your point, it’s like there’s this reticence to recognizing e-sport as a legitimate thing. I think my question would be how does Taiwan move forward, knowing that there needs to be a Digital Minister that has their pulse on how we can enable technology to get to the will of the people?

Christopher Balkaran: Regardless of our own political opinion, that we could enable this technology to understand what people are thinking about the future of our societies.

Audrey Tang: I just had to charge my earphone, so I really hope that battery technology is really exponential. It looks more sigmoid to me.

Christopher Balkaran: There you go. Hopefully, yeah. That’s hilarious.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. If we can make exponential battery technology, we solve all our energy problems.

Christopher Balkaran: There you go. Exactly, yeah, and phone technology, phone battery technology. That would be perfect.

Audrey Tang: Anyway, I digress. The point here, I think, is that we’ve always been looking at this reverse mentorship tradition in the Taiwanese political system. Starting from 1990, when the White Lily – it’s also an occupy movement back then – demanding for direct presidential election.

Audrey Tang: It was agreed by the then-president, Lee Teng-hui, to put the Taiwan constitution amendments to allow for direct presidential election that the first one of which happened in 1996.

Audrey Tang: There’s this honored tradition – not very long, 30 years long – of the younger people pointing out the direction and the older generations providing the resources and the know-how to realize that new direction for the country.

Audrey Tang: I myself was a reverse mentor to Minister Jaclyn Tsai of the previous administration when she asked the g0v collective movement to come up with ways to deliberate things like Uber and Airbnb.

Audrey Tang: As a reverse mentor, the system is such that people under 35 years old can work with ministers on day-to-day basis, shadow the minister’s work, and pointing out – because younger people don’t take things for granted, pointing out – what innovative, out-of-the-box directions there might be. For example, using AI to listen at scale to solve Uber. That was that.

Audrey Tang: Then when I become the Digital Minister, I was 35. A year later, I no longer qualify as young, and so I work with our new batch of reverse mentors. We’re now in the third batch now.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that each ministry related to social innovation – that’s 12 ministries – each would appoint two such reverse mentors. Some of them, like in their 20s, have already suggested, for example, our most skilled champions of the World Skills Competition.

Audrey Tang: It’s like Olympics, but for skilled people such as, I don’t know, cloud service deployment and things like that, to be national champions on the National Day Parade and work with the basic education system in the schools to renovate their schools and to give the people in the primary and secondary educations some role model to look up to, so that they don’t think that they study skills because they could not get into academic institution, but rather, they study skills because it can provide a real impact positively on their community.

Audrey Tang: It’s such a good idea that the premier, who heads our Youth Advisory Council, immediately approved that. It is a joint proposal by our Minister of Labor, who is, of course, not under 35 years old and her reverse mentor, who was just 20-something at the time.

Audrey Tang: I think this is a really robust system. It’s about intergenerational solidarity to keep the pulse, but we do not forget people who are older generation, because they have the wisdom to make it happen more smoothly.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s such an interesting concept, the reverse mentorship, because that ties well into ancient cultures and how businesspeople were trained up to be senators and leaders of their governments in indigenous cultures here in Canada.

Christopher Balkaran: Seven generations is a recurring theme across many cultures across Canada. What’s also interesting about that, and I totally get you about being 35. I just turned 35, and I now see the age groups of 18 to 34, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m not young anymore. I’m part of the adult group now. I’m not the young adult.”

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a phase.

Christopher Balkaran: It definitely is. It definitely is. I wanted to talk a little bit about your TED Talk, which I found really inspirational. As I hear you speak, you don’t come across as partisan, political, “This party is wrong. Our party is the best.”

Christopher Balkaran: In your TED Talk, you talk about radical transparency, civic participation, and rough consensus. I can only imagine that sometimes those juxtapose with your own opinions on the way forward.

Christopher Balkaran: Can you talk a little bit about, I know you talked a little bit about the need for transparency, but I’d like to talk more about civic participation. What led you to that and getting a rough consensus?

Christopher Balkaran: Then I’d like to ask you more openly has there been instances where you’ve thought, “This is definitely the way forward,” and then you saw what the civic society was saying and you were like, “Wow, I’m totally wrong. Do not listen to me. This is what I want. This is what the will of the people says, and I have to marry the two or step out of the way of the will of the people.”

Audrey Tang: Certainly. That happens all the time.

Audrey Tang: Just one quick example that I alluded to in my TED Talk. There was a time back in I think it was early April, when we started rationing out the masks, because our mask production at the time is not even 2 million a day, and we have 23 million people.

Audrey Tang: That’s a shortage. That’s a shortage. Then, of course, we eventually ramped it up so that we produce more than 20 million medical masks a day, ensuring plenty of supply to all people. That will take us a couple months to do that.

Audrey Tang: During those two months, rationing is inevitable. I initially thought, “OK, maybe it’s an easy thing in convenience stores,” which we were already shipping the stockpiled masks to. There are ways to pay through mobile payment. There are ways to pay through credit card, and there’s this thing called the EasyCard, and so on, which you can register your name.

Audrey Tang: In these real-name-based purchase, we can connect the back ends and use a one-time UUID to salt the hash.

Audrey Tang: That’s jargon for saying that we do not know specifically the identity of people. We just know that people could not double-stand outside of their quota if we link up the payment systems together.

Audrey Tang: I thought this was such a good idea. Then the people on the street, there’s a person, Howard Wu in Tainan, literally coded up a map for his friends and family to register where in the convenience store or pharmacies still have masks in stock and still not replenished, so you should go somewhere else to queue and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s immediately obvious to everybody, not just me, that uses Howard Wu’s map that, without a participatory accountability, nobody will actually trust the numbers of the rationing.

Audrey Tang: People would immediately doubt that somehow people with multiple phones, multiple credit cards, and things like that would somehow get more masks than they’re allotted. There really is no way for us in the government to prove that. Not to mention that there are people without any name-based payment systems, and what about those people? These are maybe 30 percent of the population. Do they have no masks at all?

Christopher Balkaran: That’s a big number.

Audrey Tang: Right. They prefer cash, and we should actually allow cash-based deployment, because otherwise there is no point reducing the r-value if only slightly over half of population is masked. My idea was a terrible idea.

Audrey Tang: I took Howard Wu’s map to Premier Su Tseng-chang, who said, “Oh, right. This young person, a really good idea.” I think he’s under 35. We immediately said, “OK, OK. Our real-name mask rationing system is going to be based on his idea.”

Audrey Tang: This is what we call reverse procurement. “Then we’ll work with the pharmacies and use the National Health Insurance card,” which covers more than 99.99 percent of not just citizens, but also residents, migrant workers and all, who have stayed for more than six months.

Audrey Tang: They all get this NHI card. First, this is universal access. Then we’re going to publish every 30 second the real-time stock of all the pharmacies. Basically, this is relying on people queuing before you and after you to keep this system honest.

Audrey Tang: This is not about blindly trusting the NHIA’s numbers. This is about a machine-to-machine publication. With more than 140 tools, including voice assistance, chat bots, and so on, even people with blindness or other difficulties, handicaps, can access these real-time numbers and be part of this distributed ledger.

Audrey Tang: Nobody can just modify the number without the other 100 or so developers noticing. This is, obviously, a better system. Certainly, it’s not my idea. It’s Howard Wu’s idea.

Christopher Balkaran: [laughs] That’s an incredible idea. The question I have as a follow-up to that, because that is incredible just to see the ingenuity behind that thought process, again, dealing with 23 million people.

Christopher Balkaran: Having the flex of accepting cash payments, making sure that the numbers are not entered by a person, but it’s a machine-to-machine. I think these are all very, very real. I wonder if, in a way, this is like the precursor to the destruction of a partisan political system, in some ways.

Christopher Balkaran: The civic engagement, especially at the local level, you can’t debate the numbers, and you can’t debate the need. If you get to the will of the people, which it sounds like Taiwan is getting to much more closely than many countries, and you get to the need, then what’s the debate?

Christopher Balkaran: The debate should be more on the theoretical, philosophical discussions. When it comes to mask distribution, there’s nothing the opposition could possibly say to that.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. I guess the debate could also be on incentive design. How do you convince people who do not have a habit of wearing mask to wear a mask? Eventually, the rough consensus on that in Taiwan is this message, very simple. “You wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands.” This is really good as a meme, because it travels, appeals to self-interest as a social signal to remind other people to use soap to wash their hands, because without which, the mask doesn’t work, anyway, and so on.

Audrey Tang: This combines all the epidemiological sound principles into a very simple packaged idea that’s worth spreading. The point I am trying to make is that, of course, people can compete friendly in a way that talks across the different aisles.

Audrey Tang: The result should always be a rough consensus that allows for more input along the way. Then when there is a really good input, we then just amplify it 24 hours in a rapid, like daily, live streamed Central Epidemic Command Center press conference, such as the boy saying that he doesn’t want to go to school, because he would be bullied.

Audrey Tang: When we’re rationing, you don’t get to pick the color, and he only gets pink. The very next day, all the medical officers, including the Commander Chen Shih-chung, wore pink medical masks, so the boy become the most hip boy, with the color of the heroes. [laughs]

Christopher Balkaran: [laughs] That’s awesome. That’s pretty cool.

Audrey Tang: That’s, again, a real-time input mechanism. Maybe it’s not a precursor. Maybe it’s just a cursor. A cursor is a place for input.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s exactly it, and that’s really interesting. It’s amazing. It’s like not experimenting, because that sounds derogatory.

Audrey Tang: I know.

Christopher Balkaran: It’s like figuring out what the will of the people are, while going through the digital social innovation that’s ushered in. This is all, in a way, it’s brand new territory for Taiwan, for sure, but also for other countries.

Audrey Tang: For everybody, yeah.

Christopher Balkaran: It’s amazing how what you’re doing in Taiwan isn’t more widely known. I think in Canada especially, there’s this young millennial generation here that’s just, we’re chomping at the bit for, why is it that we have to line up for driver’s licenses outside, when passport photos and things like that, we have to line up and go to a physical office?

Christopher Balkaran: Hopefully, after a post-COVID world, people will realize the importance of technology.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Christopher Balkaran: I wanted to talk about how the digital social innovation is ushering in these innovative ways citizens can participate in government and decision-making. I can imagine that some people are just like, “I don’t care. You guys are corrupt. I’m done. See you later.”

Christopher Balkaran: How do you encourage people who are dissuaded by government, especially given Taiwan’s history, to reengage with government and know that their voices actually matter?

Audrey Tang: If the government says, “Oh, we’re working for the people. We’re working very hard. We came up with this economic booster plan,” and then, of course, people would be very apathetic. It’s like, “OK, you guys think of everything.”

Christopher Balkaran: [laughs] .

Audrey Tang: Of course, that’s not what we’re going forward as a country. There was this idea of government as a platform. It calls for working for the people. It’s passé. We’re now working with the people. That’s all fine.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, Taiwan has moved so that we’re working not for the people, not with the people, but after the people. After the people, I think, is a really innovative position for governments to take. Basically, saying, “OK, you don’t like queuing in line? You don’t like the tax filing experience? Come and fork the government.”

Audrey Tang: Important pronunciation, fork the government. Forking is the software jargon for taking a system, not writing it off, but developing it to a different direction.

Audrey Tang: The mask map availability thing is forking the government, and so is the designer who started a petition saying that the tax filing system is “explosively hostile” to Mac users, which it was, because it was using Java applets, and it was deprecated back in 2016. On the 2017 tax filing session, all the Mac and Linux users stare at the screen that says, “Please wait while Java installs,” and nothing happens. [laughs]

Christopher Balkaran: Wow. That’s the worst. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s the worst. The governments need to be prepared to look at those outrage, the popular hashtags, and so on. Fortunately, we already, as soon as I become Digital Minister, I established this network, what we call participation officers, or POs.

Audrey Tang: Just like media officers that talk to journalists or parliamentary officer that talk to MPs, the participation officers talk to hashtags. Whenever there’s a trending hashtag full of outrage, they just join the fray. There really is no single representative of any hashtag. The only way to engage is to use that hashtag.

Audrey Tang: They say, “OK, anyone who complain about our tax filing is now cordially invited to the Ministry of Finance in a couple of weeks. You can also join through live stream and pseudonymously through Slido to input your ideas about tax filing, so we can co-create something better.”

Audrey Tang: I immediately reply saying, “I’m Audrey Tang, and this is really our participation officer, not just some anonymous phishing scammer. Please, feel free to register here.”

Audrey Tang: People came. People came. Immediately after our posts, it used to be 80 percent people just trolling and posting very toxic comments. After us posting, 80 percent or more of people became very constructive.

Audrey Tang: Then we used user journey, traditional service design concepts to map out exactly which pain points there were. Then we just set down and worked with the system integrators, with the public servants, and the people who are most toxic online who took the time to show up.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have a saying that meeting face-to-face builds 30 percent of trust. That really was true. Live streaming maybe builds 20 percent of trust. Then we collaboratively built this new tax filing experience for Mac and Linux users for 2018.

Audrey Tang: That has, what, 94 percent of approval rate, unheard of in government digital service, because thousands of people can now point to it and say, “Oh, I contributed at least one Post-It Note.” That’s what I mean by after the people.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s incredible. There’s so many thoughts I have. I guess your participation officers, they have to have a thick skin, because they’re going to hear it. They’re on the frontlines, right?

Audrey Tang: I know, yeah.

Christopher Balkaran: Then again, this is part of ripping off the Band-Aid and getting to the heart of the will of the people. I think that’s really important.

Christopher Balkaran: Just totally off-topic, you mentioned tax filings. I have done zero research about whether or not Taiwan has explored basic income or has basic income in Taiwan.

Christopher Balkaran: Many of the proponents of basic income in North America, they talk about, “Well, we already submit 99 percent of all of our financial life over the past fiscal year to the government through our taxes. We can use that as a system to figuring out how basic income could work if we were not make it universal.”

Christopher Balkaran: If say that Minister Tang, you make under $20,000 Canadian, judging by your last income filing, you’re entitled to this. Christopher Balkaran, you made over this much. You’re not entitled to anything. That way, the system can work.

Christopher Balkaran: Has anything been tried in Taiwan to use the T4s and the other tax forms that people submit to further shape public policy in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: What forms? In Taiwan nowadays, when you’re filing your income tax, you just take your National Health Insurance card, the same card that you use to buy the mask. Go to your nearby convenience stores, and there’s more than 12,000 of them.

Audrey Tang: Just like preordering the mask, you just insert the card into the kiosk. You say, “I want to file my income tax,” and then you click OK on the screen. That calculates for you, and then you go to the counter of the convenience store, and you pay your tax. It’s that simple.

Christopher Balkaran: Are you serious?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I am. I am serious.

Christopher Balkaran: This is wild.

Audrey Tang: If you want to make adjustments like you donated to this charity or things like that, that somehow escaped the scrutiny of tax agency, you can use your phone and use this small verification number printed out by the kiosk to enter it on your phone, make some adjustments, send it, and pay through credit card or mobile payment. That’s it. [laughs]

Christopher Balkaran: Oh, my gosh.

Audrey Tang: That’s the power of co-creation. That’s literally co-created by the citizens who petitioned on the explosively difficult-to-use process back in 2017. What three years of collective intelligence can do is just amazing. Back to your question.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s incredible.

Audrey Tang: UBI Taiwan actually is headquartered in their main events and so on in the Social Innovation Lab, which is also my office. It’s a park. We tore down the walls. Anyone can walk in with their dog and then check how I am working, on my door, and have some 40 minutes of my time every Wednesday and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is open office. I talk with UBI Taiwan. The thing is, in many other countries where UBI is trendy, it’s a thought, there is this one, large social inequality, a structural problem that UBI is designed to solve.

Audrey Tang: It could be like a really bad-looking GINI index. It could be massive unemployment of certain segments, like young segments of the society, and so on, and so forth. The problem is that Taiwan has none of that.

Audrey Tang: UBI is very interesting as a research topic. We help other countries evaluating their experiments and so on, but there’s simply no pressing issue. Like this quarter, I think we’re looking at two successive quarters with upward GDP growth.

Audrey Tang: Not many other countries can say that. We’ve never done a lockdown or a takedown for the pandemic or infodemic. The traditional UBI arguments simply fizzled in Taiwan, because we’re doing very well.

Audrey Tang: While I’m sympathetic to the UBI idea, and I fully support such experiments in other countries where there’s a compelling reason, the sad truth is that in Taiwan there is simply no political climate that would make an argument for such a radical change.

Christopher Balkaran: I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that you do not have tax forms. That’s incredible, and I think every country should do that.

Christopher Balkaran: It’s more than just the millennial kid inside me who’s like, “We should embrace this new technology. It makes it easier.” I’m thinking about the elderly. I’m thinking about my grandparents, my aunts, uncles. This would make it so much easier for them from a mobility perspective just to file their taxes and get it done.

Christopher Balkaran: The same is true with things you just have to do. Your driver’s license, your passport, just routine things you have to go into the dusty government offices. You just do it all through this. That would be an incredible thing.

Christopher Balkaran: This is a good segue, because I know one of the major, or at least one of many, issues in Taiwan is cybersecurity in the digital age. I can imagine that this is something that I’m sure is one of the things that keeps you up at night.

Christopher Balkaran: Cybersecurity is so important for people to have that trust in the system to know that it’s OK for Christopher to file his most personal information in a system and feel that no one’s going to take his Social Security Number or his identity, basically.

Christopher Balkaran: Can you talk a little bit about how, before we get into cybersecurity, how do you ensure that Taiwanese people feel OK providing that information and their opinions online? I think that’s also important.

Audrey Tang: First of all, the kiosks, like automated teller machines, they’re just terminals. There’s, in a sense, only one computer, just with thousands of screens. It’s not connected to the public Internet, so the attack surface is much reduced when you structure public service like that.

Audrey Tang: In the pharmacies where you procure a mask, that go through the VPN, which is strictly speaking still over the Internet. Of course, we took great care to secure those lines using software.

Audrey Tang: It never routes outside of the routing systems that we have planned. All this, of course, is predicated on the firm idea of a clean path. Nowadays, you see where it’s like 5G clean path.

Audrey Tang: It means that all the components in the technological stack are built by people that we know, people that we trust, in liberal democracies, and that there’s no components from jurisdictions where, with all due respect, have no private sector.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, all the privately held enterprises, if it’s large enough and important enough, the party can always install through the party branches and swap the leadership.

Audrey Tang: Back when we occupied the Parliament in 2014, the rough consensus on the street was that we need to keep those PRC – People’s Republic of China – government jurisdiction’s components outside of our 4G infrastructure, which was being built back then. We had that discussion six years before everybody else.

Christopher Balkaran: Wow, that’s amazing.

Audrey Tang: Right. A clean path, really important. We’re really happy to see other jurisdictions waking up to this. That, actually this public conversation about the privacy, the identity systems, and so on is very important.

Audrey Tang: Just this afternoon, I am going to Academia Sinica, our premier academic institution, directly reporting to the president’s office, and not to any ministries, to talk about the next step of our ID system.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s really good that people have this kind of public deliberation. I myself signed on the YID petition of the Access Now Foundation, along with the two organizations from Taiwan, the Open Culture Foundation, the Taiwan Association of Human Rights.

Audrey Tang: When the social sector says something, and we’re like, “OK, you know better. You’re the experts. You come up with this data cooperative, data collaboration system, and so on,” that’s participatory accountability.

Audrey Tang: Just like people queuing in line keeps each other and keep this system honest, the people designing…

Christopher Balkaran: Oh, Minister? I think your headphones died. Uh-oh.

Christopher Balkaran: Minister?

Christopher Balkaran: Your headphones died.

Audrey Tang: Hello.

Christopher Balkaran: Hey, Minister Tang.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, where did we drop off?

Christopher Balkaran: We dropped off at cybersecurity and the digital ID for participation of students and your visit this afternoon to an academic institution.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah. I’ll just briefly recap that. Just this afternoon, I’m going to visit Academia Sinica, the institution that reports to the president’s office, and not any ministries, and work with the civil society experts, who, like me, have signed on the accessnow.org YID petition calling for more accountability and transparency of ID systems.

Audrey Tang: The great thing about working with the social sector is that, just like queuing in the pharmacy, relying on people queuing before and after you to keep the system honest, if we design a system with the social sector supervision, and with the criteria co-created with the social sector, then everybody understands what’s running on their own general-purpose devices.

Audrey Tang: Similar to how, for example, Estonia open sources everything, including drivers and such, of their electronic ID system that’s running on general-purpose computation devices, we can learn from the latest and greatest, and the social sector can say, “Oh, this is what we demand. This is what we want to leave off,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: This co-creation relationship, I think it’s the most important. That’s even more important than any cryptographic components and so on. Unless the people understand it, the cryptographic components do not automatically have an explanation value.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s incredible, and I think that your background, given your extensive knowledge of the Internet and web-based technologies, is very important for the cybersecurity aspect. I guess my question, then, to follow up on that is I know you travel throughout Taiwan regularly.

Christopher Balkaran: You go out to all the different areas in Taiwan. I think that’s a really good thing, and I wish more politicians did that, just more broadly.

Audrey Tang: Definitely.

Christopher Balkaran: It’s so important to do that. I’m sure you’ve met people who are just, they’ve written off your government. They’ve written off government altogether. They don’t believe necessarily in the force of government for good or for chance. They’re certainly not going to go online and share their opinion online.

Audrey Tang: No, not at all.

Christopher Balkaran: How do you, as the Digital Minister, not convince anybody? You don’t want to do that. What you want to do is say, “By the way, you can disagree with me, and you can be anonymous in doing so. By the way, in doing so, your voice actually has a bigger ripple than me coming here and you telling me that you don’t like me.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right, exactly. This is about, there’s a tweet that I posted a while ago that says, “In Democratic Taiwan, ministers trust you.”

Christopher Balkaran: That’s good. That’s really good.

Audrey Tang: Taiwanese reversal.

Christopher Balkaran: Right, there you go.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s hilarious.

Audrey Tang: This is not about me convincing people to trust me more, not at all. This is about me showing that I trust people closest to the pain, to the suffering, to come up with innovations, ideas that’s worth spreading.

Audrey Tang: That’s really important, because in Taiwan, there’s a long tradition of people just organizing the community’s affairs by themselves through co-ops, through credit unions, through social enterprises, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s this huge untapped potential of social sector governance that could be amplified to the digital age. My work is just to go to those local social sector gathering places, not asking them to come to city halls.

Audrey Tang: I visit them. I do a day or two of ethnographic, I guess just hanging out. Hanging out with people and discovering what their pain points are, what they don’t like about their current situation, what negative externalities or policies have been having an effect on them.

Audrey Tang: Always making sure that I respect the elders – well, in both sense, people in the elderly age, and also our first nation indigenous elders – their wisdom of pointing out how to make our ideas – for example, sustainability – work more smoothly with their traditions.

Audrey Tang: Even though they may not say the words like sustainability and inclusion, that’s actually what they have to teach us. Maybe some of our first nations think the tip of Taiwan, Saviah, a really high mountain, almost 4,000 meters, they think it’s a spirit, a natural personhood, someone that guides the development of the cultures. Same for the largest rivers and so on.

Audrey Tang: Maybe instead of just having companies, having legal personhood, we really need to have nature – that is to say, the mountains and rivers – have a say, in the seat at the table to vote.

Audrey Tang: I know that Canada and New Zealand have been considering something like that as well, and to increase the populism, including people that we do not consider people as people. These are really good ideas.

Audrey Tang: I make sure that the people in the 12 ministries all listen intently throughout this bidirectional or multidirectional video conferencing that’s projected on the entire wall so that we build 20 percent of the trust over a video conference.

Audrey Tang: Then they can see that really the people closer to the ground really have really good ideas. The people on the ground would see the ministries’ people not as abstract text documents or PowerPoint slides, but rather people who are people.

Audrey Tang: When the civil servants propose something innovative, they can rest assured that, if it’s an innovation, they get the credit. Everybody sees them, and it’s kept on a Git-based ledger for perpetuity in sayit.pdis.

Audrey Tang: Then, if they say something that is controversial, that upsets the local people, only I am at risk, because you can’t punch people over a projector.

Audrey Tang: With me as the facilitator, the central government public servants are much more willing to try out innovative ideas, because they get the credit, and I handle the mess.

Christopher Balkaran: [laughs] That’s incredible. I know you had said in the past this is about the state trusting the citizens more. That reminds me of an old saying in my family, which is, “The smarter the government, the wiser the people.”

Christopher Balkaran: It’s such a true saying sometimes, because I remember when I was in university studying all types of different things. One of the essays I wrote was on the Black Panther Movement in the United States.

Christopher Balkaran: Some of the policies they put forward were things like, “We need a Breakfast for Champions program, because our kids are not getting breakfast in the mornings. They can’t compete, because they’re operating on a nutritional deficiency versus non-black kids.” Once they did that, they saw test scores increase.

Christopher Balkaran: Just simple things like that. Laundry programs for poor people. Just go around, clean their clothes. It’s amazing how clean clothes can have a psychological effect on somebody, job search, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely.

Christopher Balkaran: It’s really incredible. My question to that, though, is that I wonder if, through these intense civic engagement sessions, where you have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people participating, it has the ability sometimes to undermine potentially what your government…There must be some type of platform or public policy ideas.

Christopher Balkaran: I’ve wrestled with this as well. If I see this as happening in Canada, a politician coming forward saying, “You know what? I’m going to do my best to do civic engagement for the people to tell me what the best way forward is. Far be it from me to dictate what our platform is.” I could also see people saying, “Well, I need to what I’m voting for before I vote for it.”

Christopher Balkaran: Do you see those two as running against each other, or do you see them as running in parallel, saying you want the best government to be the conduit for the will of the people?

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say they are in parallel or opposing. I would say they are connected. I think this is a good opportunity to bring this double-diamond, which is a design thinking idea.

Audrey Tang: First, you explore. That is to say, you ask people how do they feel – if they feel painful or if they suffering, or if they feel elation, they feel joy. There really is no right or wrong. You don’t have to converge on a single feeling.

Audrey Tang: It is natural for people to feel differently on the same fact, while agreeing on this as objective fact. The first part is always exploration. Then after that, after you discover, and then you can define.

Audrey Tang: The definition of the common problem is, I think, one of the most important thing. That is to say, whether you feel happy, whether you feel sad, or something, you can all resonate with each other’s feelings and define our common question as a “how might we” question.

Audrey Tang: How might we, for example, ensure all of the population are masked up while ensuring the efficiency of the distribution method? That’s a common “how might we.”

Audrey Tang: Even people who are very old, or even people who are traditionally marginalized, or even people who don’t have the voting rights, like people who are in their, very young age, like 12-years-olds and so on, they can all participate equally in this process.

Audrey Tang: This is not about voting. This is not about making a decision. This is about finding out the “how might we” question and defining it so that it take care of the most people’s feelings. That’s the first diamond.

Audrey Tang: This is where digital social innovations really help. What you talk about, the traditional political process, comes later. It’s the development of solutions and budgetary. It is the delivery of such budgets in a way that is accountable to people.

Audrey Tang: These two are connected here in this common “how might we” question. All of our work is, essentially, before any bill going into the Parliament, which is the later diamond, we make sure that it is actually addressing a common issue that people agree is something that’s worthwhile in pursuing.

Audrey Tang: Seen this way, these two are complementary. The first part can include as much as possible, as many people as possible, so that the people on the second diamond knows that if they develop something, even though they may initially develop it very slowly, it is not leaving anyone behind. That is inclusion. That’s the most important part.

Christopher Balkaran: See, that’s a really interesting diagram and painting of this very complex idea or situation. I can’t speak on behalf of every country, but in Canada, I feel like we focus many times on the later diamond and not the initial.

Christopher Balkaran: On abortion, for example, there’s many politicians that say, “We’re not reopening the abortion debate.” I’m thinking, “Well, why don’t we? Why don’t we get to that first diamond so that we really understand what people’s thoughts are?”

Christopher Balkaran: When it comes to abortion, people, they’re passionate. Regardless of where you stand on abortion, people are passionate. If I’m government, I want to know where does that passion lie. It’s not black and white. I’m sure that there’s a level of regulation that many people would agree to, but we don’t know that.

Christopher Balkaran: We’re just jumping to that second diamond. That’s a flaw in our processes that digital social innovation and what Taiwan is doing can help rectify, especially when these…

Christopher Balkaran: There’s such big issues, because no minister wants to go out saying, “I’m pro-life,” and they’ve got pro-choice lobbyists that are potentially supporting the party. Instead of, they say, “You know what? I have my personal opinions, but I don’t know what the will of the people is. Let’s figure that out before the government goes down that path.”

Audrey Tang: That’s right. The point here is to ask the feeling of the people, the mood of the people instead of the will of the people. The will conveys the second time, now you have to develop a fine consensus. The mood of people is just a humming, it’s just rough consensus.

Audrey Tang: This is where the people with the most stories to tell can actually contribute, because for them, they reply with their unique feelings without fearing that it may be written off as one spectrum or the other. When you’re exploring on the first diamond, literally, there really is no spectrum. There’s just this multidimensional life stories.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s incredible, and then you can do anything you want with that data. You can slice and dice it how you want.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, exactly.

Christopher Balkaran: That’s incredible. I have four minutes with you. I don’t want to take a lot of your time. I’m so amazed at what Taiwan is doing. I wonder, and this thought kept recurring in my head as I was doing research, which is can this digital social innovation change? Can it withstand a change in government?

Christopher Balkaran: Can another government come along and say, “You know what, the previous government did some great stuff with digital social innovation. We’re going to continue it.”

Christopher Balkaran: The political process is what it is, and a lot of politicians don’t want to be connected sometimes with previous governments and things like that. How is Taiwan ensuring that this process stays apolitical, non-partisan, and can withstand changes in government?

Audrey Tang: Fortunately, after occupying the Parliament, all the mayors, regardless of parties, who supported open government gets elected, sometimes without preparing inauguration speech, and all who do not did not get elected.

Audrey Tang: In our parliament at this point, of the four major parties, this is literally one of the only things that they all agree. They all signed on the Open Government Partnership, Open Parliament Declaration, and building their own multi-stakeholder forums. This is definitely a norm in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I personally work with five premiers in two presidents, the two presidents belonging to different parties, of course. All of them are saying open governments, collective intelligence. That’s just Taiwan’s future.

Audrey Tang: I think this is partly prompted by the fact that they’re saying anything that’s inborn is human nature – that is to say, that’s around when I’m born – and anything that’s not around when I’m born is technology.

Audrey Tang: For Taiwan, democracy itself is technology. I was born when martial law was still in effect. When we first had a presidential election in 1996, this is already after the World Wide Web. We are in a rare position in which we see even our constitution as something like a technology, like kernel design or mechanism design, that we can experiment, and iterate, and make better.

Audrey Tang: When you have a polity like that, where constitution is in itself a technology, I think people take a much more open attitude toward collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: I would say that instead of replicating the Taiwan model, I would encourage people, as you alluded to earlier, to start small, to look at a small community, a county or something, and try out those listening skills, the facilitative methods, and deliberative methods.

Audrey Tang: People will feel much more empowered, because they would say, “Oh, every part of our life, actually, can be made better by this sort of deliberative and facilitative processes.”

Christopher Balkaran: It’s incredible. I’m still trying to rub my head around the fact that politicians, mayors would actually sign on to this, because again, [laughs] I grew up in Toronto. Just the partisan nature of politics over here is very much “You have your issues and you fight for them.”

Christopher Balkaran: It’s very, many times, black and white. In Taiwan, what I’m seeing is that people are OK saying that, “Hey, I have my opinions, but if it’s not aligning with what ideas are of the general population that I oversee as mayor, I’m OK with following that direction.” That is the most important point we’re taking.

Audrey Tang: Maybe we can share like the Icelandic pirates…

Audrey Tang: …or like the Italian comedians. In Taiwan, the only political party that I publicly supported was the very happy party, or literally, their English name is “Can’t Stop This Party.” They’re all professional comedians and YouTubers, like truly professionals, so humor over rumor.

Audrey Tang: That’s really important. If you participate in politics with fast, fair, and fun, and emphasize the fun part, optimized for fun, that’s going to change the nature that you just described of polarization, which is all very serious and sometimes toxic.

Christopher Balkaran: It gets us away from figuring out what the best way forward it is.

Christopher Balkaran: I know I have one minute, and I don’t want to take up more of your time. I want to give you enough time for your next meeting. Thank you so much, Minister, for being this accessible, replying to emails.

Christopher Balkaran: This is incredible how transparent you are with a small podcaster halfway around the world. [laughs] Thanks again, this has been great, and I really look forward. There’s so many more conversations I think we’ll have, so I’m looking forward to those, and thanks again for being on here.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for the great questions, and like the local chime, live long and prosper.

Christopher Balkaran: [laughs] Thanks again, Minister. Take care.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.