Audrey Tang: Hello. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah. I can hear you all right. Sorry I’m slightly late. I’ve found the ear phones.

Amelia Tait: Great. Thank you. Is it all right if I record this call just so I can get your quotes accurate?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. I’ll also record locally, so you’ll get a very higher fidelity version afterwards.

Amelia Tait: Great. Perfect. Thank you so much. If we could start with maybe if you could give me an overview of a day in the life of being Taiwan’s Digital Minister. [laughs]

Amelia Tait: I’m sure no day is the same, but an overview of what an average day might look like.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Actually, it depends on the day of the week. Every Monday is pretty similar, every Wednesday, very similar, and so on. Do you have a favorite day of the week?

Amelia Tait: Let’s start with Monday, I guess. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: OK then. Monday, I usually attend the work lunch in the Executive Yuan in the administration, so I have two offices. One in the administration building and one in the Social Innovation Lab — In the screen share I’m sharing with you. It’s a co creation space.

Audrey Tang: Part of my conditions working with — not for — the government is that I get to work anywhere. It’s what we call location independence. Monday is actually one of the two weekdays that I’m usually in the administration office to catch up with my colleagues.

Audrey Tang: We have a work lunch around which we just share a Kanban, a Trello like tracking system. Ignore the drones. Here is the Kanban that we built, and because as a digital minister, another condition of my working is radical transparency, at any time I can show you this Kanban, which is all the stuff in the Public Digital Innovation Space is working on.

Audrey Tang: This is just like a Trello track, you see here that the 20 colleagues of mine are each dispatched from a different ministry, basically just starting projects and joining each other’s projects, and so on. At the moment, as you can see, we’re working on our plan for the Open Government Partnership summit in Canada.

Audrey Tang: Basically, each one of us take turns reporting the occurrence that has been going on the previous week. We create a new column in the Kanban for the week. Then we move the things that are done into the Kanban. In the typical Scrum or Agile manner, if things are blocked or if a certain column has atrophied and so on, we do some gardening and lunch, and that’s Monday.

Audrey Tang: In the afternoon, the visitors from other governments or regional partners, and so on, usually visit me in the administration. Then we make a full recording of the what everybody has said and ask them to co edit. Usually, Monday is also when I send out the pre recorded opening speeches, keynotes and things like that for the week.

Audrey Tang: If people ask me to, for example, chair at a opening or something without interaction, I usually just pre record whatever message they want me to say. That’s a typical Monday. As you can see, a lot of those conversations are interviews and so on, takes place on Monday. Here is also where we publish everything, like 10 working days after each meeting.

Amelia Tait: What about Wednesday, whilst we’re at? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: For Wednesday, my Wednesday schedule is public. If you go to au.pdis.tw, you can see my office hour, which is always Wednesday. As you can see, I still have a slot open on March 27th. [laughs] Anyone can take a block of my time in the afternoon in the Wednesday, again, in the Social Innovation Lab here.

Audrey Tang: It’s actually on public display here, too, so that people can also see. In addition to the afternoon booking period, they can also walk in. I’m in the Social Innovation Lab from 10.00 AM to 10.00 PM, for 12 hours, and in three segments. The first segment before 2.00 PM is walk in.

Audrey Tang: The second segment is the pre booked hours, and then afterwards is dinner, and usually pizza, in the g0v Hackathon, which we call the vTaiwan Meetup, which is the weekly meeting of the vTaiwan project in the g0v. I usually leave the Social Innovation Lab, which is 10 minutes’ walk from my place, around 10.00 PM.

Amelia Tait: I think also interesting is that you have these online spaces like vTaiwan to do this crowdsourcing, but then you do have these physical meet ups and this office time. Why do you think it’s important to have the technical side and the physical real world side together?

Audrey Tang: I think while online is great for brainstorming, offline or rather face to face is at the moment still crucial in order to build mutual trust, especially over food.

Audrey Tang: I guess technically, we can order the same pizza now and share some experience over Skype. It actually takes a lot of preparation to do so, and it doesn’t really scale. Believe me, I’ve tried it. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s scales to like three cities, but not much more. I think this sharing of community spirit enables the online collaboration to be much more efficient because then we don’t run the risk of misinterpreting each other’s words, or projects, or angles, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Such kind of way to welcome especially first timers into this very inclusive space is very important, because it’s very easy to look at online dialogues and see that it’s too professional, it requires too much commitment and so on. Enjoying food is something everybody can do, and so we very consciously run the hackathons, centered on high quality food.

Audrey Tang: It’s also a kind of psychological hack because when someone hears the new idea, like quadratic voting or whatever, for the first time, if it’s an abstract concept, then people usually feel distanced about it. If you enjoy really good food, and we have a dedicated kitchen and chef here in the Social Innovation Lab, you usually associate a much better feeling, a hopeful feeling, a enjoyable feeling with the new idea.

Audrey Tang: It makes people’s mind much more open. The same applies to the geometry of the design of the space.

Amelia Tait: That’s absolutely fascinating. This is a big question, but over the your last few years as digital minister, and using vTaiwan and these hackathons, what’s the change that you’re most proud of or the thing that’s happened as a result of those that you think is the most important?

Audrey Tang: vTaiwan is a project that is recursive. By that, I mean it is both a collaborative space, but it also generates laws and acts that enables more collaborative spaces. It’s a generator, is what I’m saying, and so I think I’m pretty proud of the sandbox system, which is all a result of the vTaiwan processes.

Audrey Tang: Sandbox, which actually we learned from the UK fintech sandbox, is the idea that you can challenge existing regulations for up to a year, and for a limited time, limited risk, and for the entire society to get used to this innovation. If it’s not a good idea, it’s open innovation, so everybody learns something.

Audrey Tang: If it is a good idea, then the regulators, just after 60 days after the end of experiments, merge back into the regulation. We moved far beyond only fintech. vTaiwan has enabled the sandbox of autonomous vehicles, of platform economy, 5G spectrum.

Audrey Tang: Basically, any law, any regulation can be challenged, aside from money laundering and funding terrorism, which we know what will happen. We don’t encourage experiments on that two regards, but otherwise, you can challenge anything, which is why I think Taiwan is the only jurisdiction to enable multimodal like hybrid self driving vehicles.

Audrey Tang: We have the Taiwan CAR Lab that tests various builds. You can have a flying car or whatever. After testing such builds in public sandboxes, you can then work with the regional revitalization communities to enable particular use cases, like drone delivery, and autonomous ships for remote islands, and things like that, and challenge or rather run with a forked version of the existing laws.

Audrey Tang: No matter which laws or regulations are being challenged, the MPs of course can always say, "Oh, but this needs a full parliamentarian deliberation," but they can take up to three or four years of doings so. While they’re doing that, the experiment continues to run and continues to generate open evidences for everybody to see, and including a business model.

Audrey Tang: Essentially a local monopoly for a while, but after the MPs are done with it, then of course this becomes the new regulation and law, and everybody has new competition entering the market and so on. This is basically the regulator saying we stop trying to regulate the norm. We first observe the norm, a manifesting, and then we base the regulation on it. It is what we call regulatory co creation.

Audrey Tang: It’s in full swing starting this year, as part of the regional revitalization plan.

Amelia Tait: It feels like there’s definitely this appetite for transparency there, and that people are really engaged. Do you feel like a similar system, transposed to a different nation, do you think it would have the same success?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is essentially just a larger city. From Taipei to the south most high speed rail station, Kaohsiung, is less than two hours, so it’s really just a larger city geographic wise. Population wise, it’s 23 millions people, but then it’s easier for us to deliver broadband as a human right, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s really a substrate of very high literacy, very high democratic participation willingness, a taste of continuous democracy, not just voting. I think it’s really the substrate upon which this kind of radical transparency governance system is built.

Audrey Tang: I would say, for other jurisdiction who want to try this, it’s far easier to start at a scale of a metropolis or a city where the situation is comparable to Taiwan, then scale it out and more deeply.

Amelia Tait: That makes sense. I know you’ve said in the past, in previous interviews that democracy in Taiwan is as old as the World Wide Web. I feel like...

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Amelia Tait: The problem with some of the older democracies trying to upgrade, update and adapt to the Internet is that there maybe... Do you think they are as resilient as Taiwan to some of the threats against democracy that we might see online, like the weaponization of information through fake news, or stuff like that?

Audrey Tang: I think in Taiwan we’re very familiar with disinformation, and also the civil society really takes full responsibility instead of relying on the government. I think that the core reason is that while our presidential election is 1996, the lifting of the martial law is ’87.

Audrey Tang: That leaves a decade where the civil society enjoy the freedom of assembly, speech, and so on, to build their legitimacy even before the democratically elected presidents builds some legitimacy of the administration.

Audrey Tang: That means that for many issues such as disinformation, disaster relief, or things of public service nature, people tend to trust the social sector more than the public sector. If the largest charity like Tzu Chi publish a number about a disaster relief and then the government publish a number, chances are that the people mostly believe the social sector’s number.

Audrey Tang: That has been the case since I was a child. I don’t see it changing now. That means that the civil society really feels a obligation in tackling issues like the disinformation thing.

Audrey Tang: The g0v initiative, for example, basically takes everything that people think is of public value, but the public service isn’t doing — or shouldn’t be doing, or isn’t doing enough — and they just change the gov.tw into g0v.tw to introduce the shadow government service.

Audrey Tang: Of course, I’ve shared before, the budget visualization which we merged back into the National Digital Service in 2017, which is a itemized visualization of each budget. For disinformation, the Cofacts system is pretty neat. It basically is a chatbot in the end to end encrypted system line, which is like WhatsApp.

Audrey Tang: When people add this robot as their friend, whenever they see a rumor, they can just flag it by forwarding it to the bot, and then the bot does fact checking through collective intelligence. It’s just like spam mail in a private communication medium. People nevertheless can voluntarily report spams or junk mails into this like Spamhaus system that’s built by the social sector.

Audrey Tang: They then partner with the Taiwan FactChecking Center which looks at the most virulent, the most epidemic rumors that’s spreading, and do a fuller fact check in a way that is very visible, and also in a way that reviews the entire investigative journalism work that’s behind those facts and fact checking.

Audrey Tang: This then of course feeds back into the algorithms of popular social medias such as Facebook to dial down their virality so that it reaches less people, which is akin to the Spamhaus sending signals to Gmail and then the incoming email gets moved into junk mail folder.

Audrey Tang: This is a pretty resilient civil society alert, not at all managed by the government system, that basically lets people see both sides of the story or many sides of the story. Also, it has a definite benefit in being open source.

Audrey Tang: The database is open as well, and so third party projects like the Meiyu bot gets built. Meiyu is another bot that people can add to their chat rooms or chat groups of their family channel for example. This bot basically listens to each and every message in every group that they have been invited in, but they don’t keep the log.

Audrey Tang: It compares it to the Cofact database, so whenever it’s similar, it just says, "Oh this is a rumor. It has been disputed, or it has been clarified before." People, instead of waiting for five hours or waiting for a day to get a fact check, they actually get a fact check as soon as they post it in their family channel.

Audrey Tang: This really changed the behavior of people. It saves the intergenerational conflict because people don’t have to correct their family members. Now a robot can do it for them. [laughs] Those are the systems that we’ve been seeing as very active, and also being widely approved. Certainly, they get more legitimacy than compared to if the government does the same thing.

Amelia Tait: That’s amazing. That’s fascinating. I want that everywhere. [laughs] Beyond disinformation, what do you feel like the biggest threats globally to democracy are that are caused by the Internet?

Audrey Tang: I think Internet enables people to feel much closer to each other for sure. The distance between the government and the people is seen as comparatively larger or more distant. It really hasn’t changed. It’s just the people are much closer or rather feeling closer to each other.

Audrey Tang: The challenge being that people feel that they can only upload like three bits of information every four years, and two bits of information every two years, depending on your representative democracy system. It’s too asymmetric, whereas the online communities, for all their drawbacks, offers a far larger bandwidth in collectively deciding what the community wants, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It creates a metaphors mismatch. People experience governance as something that’s continuous, but then the state says the democracy is something that happens every two or four years. I think that mismatch of metaphors is the core challenge, which is why we’re shifting toward a continuous democracy system.

Audrey Tang: We ask people to participate, vote, and even quadratic vote on things instead of on people. That enables people to focus much more on the context of policy making rather than on particular tabloid news about people.

Amelia Tait: That’s fascinating. Going back to what you said earlier about a lot of the tools being open source, why do you think it’s so important for governments to procure free and open source software? What do you think other governments can learn from Taiwan in that regard?

Audrey Tang: Certainly, it’s good for sustainability of service. In Taiwan, we have a Government Digital Service Guideline that says open by default. While open source is important and it is in the guideline, we also say that the open API, especially import/export API, as well as the data, the government data that is produced is equally important if not more important than open source.

Audrey Tang: The reason is that if you have a open API, meaning that if you design your government services to be accessible not just to people, or to people with disabilities like blindness in a way that are friendly to them. If you treat machine intelligence as a kind of people with disability or alternate ability, then you can design your services to be also friendly to other machines, through structural data, skimmers, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Once you design things this way, even if it’s not yet open source, it enables people who want to deliver the same service, but in a better way, to mix and match the system and adapt it to the latest devices and the latest user flows, without you having to redo the back end or the database, and the core business logic or government layer.

Audrey Tang: I think open API is really the key, because then it enables independent service vendors and providers to be in an additive and synergic relationship with existing large vendors. If you don’t have that open API and as a kind of anchor to collaborate, then they’re in a kind of a zero sum relationship with existing system integration vendors.

Audrey Tang: That’s literally the first policy that I enacted as the digital minister, is making open API the national default for procurement. Open data, of course Taiwan is really committed to basically say that anything that the people can see as part of freedom of information law must also be able for the machines to see them as well.

Audrey Tang: That is because if people have different modalities of learning, of understanding, and so on. Some people prefer a bubble graph, some people prefer things that they can interact, and so on. Without open data, you’re basically limiting everybody to presentation style that is maybe five percent or three percent of the population is really comfortable with, and which is not really inclusive.

Audrey Tang: That’s the argument for open data. Finally, for open source, it enables what we call knowledge sharing or cooperation, because then you don’t have to maintain the burden of adapting the system to newer devices, newer requirements any more. You can ask the community to help building it for you, but it is only if you have a community in the first place.

Audrey Tang: Through open API, open data, the community can be built around public service. Once the community really trusts the government to deliver on its open by default promises, then the open source will find a large number of people who want to co create and maintain with you.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t have that community relationship and just open source and post it on GitHub, you will find that nobody will want to start or fork project because the community always takes place before the code. The source code is just a excuse really for people to get to know each other. [laughs]

Amelia Tait: That’s very interesting. As a conservative anarchist, what’s your long term vision about the Internet and our networked world? Is it something that can actually replace systems of governance, like traditional governments? You say you work with, not for the government. Is it alongside? In the long term future, what would you envision?

Audrey Tang: That depends on, how long is a long time? Buckminster Fuller has a saying that I really like. He said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

Audrey Tang: Basically, instead of struggling within the rules of the existing system, what the Internet has always been about is that showing a voluntary associative system where people can innovate without asking for permissions. Actually, it’s a new model that makes all sorts of existing models obsolete.

Audrey Tang: I think Internet, as long as the core principles, end to end innovation, permission less innovation, is kept, there’s always new generations of innovators that can take their vision of future and imbue it into the code of the Internet. I’m not worried about Internet, which is why I’m a conservative anarchist.

Audrey Tang: Conservative means there is a tradition. The tradition has been going on for quite a while, and what’s important is for people to understand, to embrace, and to respect the tradition of the Internet.

Audrey Tang: Once it’s part of the common, digital literacy is part of the common curriculum, part of the common sense really of a society, then naturally, people, when faced with new threats, as you put it, like disinformation, people will react in a way that adds to the Internet instead of taking from it. People will not, for example, react by saying, "OK, we ban blocks of IP addresses," and so on.

Audrey Tang: Back when the spam was really a problem, during that Bayesian spam filtering days, it was really tempting to ban entire countries from sending email, but the spam management community decided against that. When a supposedly more costly but ultimately more human right preserving way of detecting patterns and only blocking systems with those pattersn.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, we’re taking away the fundamental rights, the broadband as human right, and the rights to communication to entire blocks in the African continent of people, and that would be actually a shame. I’m very happy that the spam fighting community made the right choice; I’m making sure that that the counter-disinformation community in Taiwan and also abroad makes the right choice this time.

Amelia Tait: Would you say then that you are optimistic about the future of the Internet?

Audrey Tang: I’m a possibilist. [laughs] There’s various possible futures. I think I’m optimist up to the point that I think an optimistic vision is self fulfilling. Then of course, a pessimist, or a doomsday, or authoritarian vision is also self fulfilling.

Audrey Tang: We will likely see that the Internet being kind of warped in the different thought patterns, different norms of each society, and in some places warped beyond the design of the original Internet thinkers, both good and bad. All sort of possibilities will happen, is what I’m witnessing.

Amelia Tait: That’s a great way to put it. That’s actually everything I had to ask you, unless there’s anything that you want to add that you feel that we haven’t covered, or any message that you want to say?

Audrey Tang: No, this is good. I think I’ll quote from my favorite singer and poet, Leonard Cohen. He said, "There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in."

Audrey Tang: Internet, to me, is never finished. People keep seeing various cracks or different problem, even in the very core systems like the DNS and so on, but then that’s how the light gets in.

Audrey Tang: That’s why we have a vibrant community caring about this, really a common wealth of all. I think it is those cracks that keeps the community moving forward and upward as the Internet community.

Amelia Tait: That’s a brilliant message to end on. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been really enjoyable chatting to you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much. Cheers.

Amelia Tait: Thank you. Bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.