Audrey Tang: I am literally from the future...

Audrey Tang: ...12 hours in the future from the other side of this planet.

Audrey Tang: I’ll talk a little bit about how pol.is, far from being experimental, is now being done daily, seen as part of the administration’s normal working system for the controversial issues.

Audrey Tang: This is Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen, our president. I voted for her last year. We’re a very young democracy, 23 million people, and 10 percent of the earth’s marine species.

Audrey Tang: Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen is, in our sixth presidential election, elected the president of human beings, the human species, us.

Audrey Tang: I keep mentioning this because both she and I are advocates for animal right. I live with seven cats and two dogs, [laughs] and we do believe that the human species doesn’t have an exclusive privilege on Earth, on Taiwan, or anywhere else.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. She run a platform of radical transparency, of marriage equality, of sustainability, and things like that, so I’m very happy when she was elected.

Audrey Tang: This is our first family. They’re literally incorruptible.

Audrey Tang: You can bribe them with catnips, but they won’t interfere with the human species’ affairs.

Audrey Tang: The sixth presidential election is also remarkable in that it’s very peaceful, the only peaceful transition in Taiwan’s political history. The previous elections we see 49 percent, 50 percent. We see people unfriending each other after election results. We see a lot of people going to the streets, riots even, in the previous elections, but not this one.

Audrey Tang: Last January, when the ballot opened, Dr. Tsai won by a landslide. But the previous prime minister is an independent. He’s Simon Chang, previously a director of engineering at Google; Taiwan’s first super computer maker; and he’s independent. He doesn’t have any parties.

Audrey Tang: The new prime minister, the one that’s still now the prime minister, for a year now, Lin Chuan, is also independent. There are two independent prime ministers. Something that was unthinkable in Taiwan’s history is that the transition is public.

Audrey Tang: Simon asked all the ministries to publish their checkpoint documents, open data, everything, and upload it to the public Internet for the next cabinet to download as the transition team. I didn’t know I would become part of that cabinet a few months after it assembled, but I still looked at exactly the same documents, so that I can learn what’s going on with the island.

Audrey Tang: This kind of transparent hand-off is borne out of Simon Chang’s idea that all the ICT systems produced in Taiwan under one million US dollars must be made open data, by default.

Audrey Tang: That put Taiwan into the top spot in the Global Open Data Index for two years running -- take that with a grain of salt, because it doesn’t measure the impact of anything.

Audrey Tang: But the societal, the cultural impact, I think is much more important. Dr. Tsai was saying her inauguration speech that we know, before in Taiwan, democracy was about a showdown between two different values. Now it must become a conversation with diverse values.

Audrey Tang: How did we get there, to this post-party system?

Audrey Tang: Four years ago, if you pulled a random person off the street on Taiwan and say, "We’re going to move into a cabinet where not only a prime minister is independent, but there is more independent cabinet members than members of any party in the cabinet," they’re like, "You’re crazy."

Audrey Tang: That has happened because of the Occupy back in 2014. Back in the time, the Sunflower Movement students occupied the parliament. The MPs refused to deliberate a trade service agreement with Beijing, because they think, constitutionally, Beijing is part of Taiwan, or something like that.

Audrey Tang: In any case, they refused to deliberate on the agreement. The occupiers, far from protesting, did a demonstration in the demo scene sense, meaning we take your parliament, and we’re going to deliberate trade service agreement with half a million people on the street, and show you how we can do it.

Audrey Tang: This is facilitated by professional deliberators and participated in by 20 NGOs -- the Greens, the Labors, all the people in the NGOs -- and was supported by the g0v civic tech community. This community is very interesting, because our call-to-action is to "fork" the government.

Audrey Tang: We look at all the government websites that we don’t like that ends in gov.tw, and build a shadow website that ends in g0v.tw, so we solved the discoverability problem. You just look at a government website, change the O to a zero, and get to the shadow government, with open data and everything.

Audrey Tang: Quite a hack, isn’t it? Also, we released, under Creative Commons Zero, our copyright and everything, so that when the next procurement cycle comes, many of the g0v projects then become the official government websites. That was the movement.

Audrey Tang: During the Occupy, the g0v civic tech people worked as amplifiers to support the professional deliberators inside and on the streets of the occupied site, so that everyone just speaks naturally, but they’re transcribed. There’s translations, logistics, everything is kept on the open source nervous system, just as Colin described.

Audrey Tang: It is one of those very rare occupies that, by the end of the three weeks, everybody converged on that set of consensus, which the members of the parliament then bought in. It was a victory instead of being more divergent across time.

Audrey Tang: Why are there literally hundreds of professionals, like me, who spoke to my clients at the time -- Apple, Oxford University Press, Socialtext -- saying, "OK, I have to take a three-week leave, because the island needs me?"

Audrey Tang: I think it’s because, I’m 36 now, we are the first generation that enjoyed the freedom of speech after three decades of martial law and dictatorship.

Audrey Tang: It arrived in 1989, with the personal computers. For us, the personal computer revolution and freedom of speech is the same thing. Our first presidential election in 1996 is also the popularization of the World Wide Web, so many of us worked as campaigners back then.

Audrey Tang: Internet and Democracy, not two things, one and the same thing in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: When we see free software, and we had this very long free software culture movement in Taiwan, we always think of freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, instead of free of cost.

Audrey Tang: We know that freedom is never free of costs. Our parent’s generation, our grandparent’s generation paid dearly for it -- and we need to use the software freedoms to keep it free.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: After the 2014 occupy, at the end of that year, there was this mayor election of the six major Taiwan cities, and five of them were won by occupiers or pro-occupiers, who are very surprised that they were elected mayors. It’s like something that happened in Spain, also. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Afterwards, the previous prime minister, a political scientist, resigned. The new prime minister, an engineer, says, "OK, from now on, crowdsourcing and open data is going to be the national direction." The occupiers and the civic tech people who supported him are then invited as mentors, advisors, to the public service to solve issues like Uber.

Audrey Tang: Uber is very interesting, because it is a virus of the mind. It is a meme, basically, that says, "The algorithm is better than law," and that it dispatches things more efficiently. You can’t really argue with a meme, just like you can’t argue with flu or anything like that. It’s not in the same category.

Audrey Tang: There’s very little things the administration tried, to put fines and so on. It didn’t work. There’s protests, the taxi drivers surrounded the ministry of transport, just like it happened everywhere on earth.

Audrey Tang: For us, the deliberation that involved thousands of people is a scaling down of the deliberation we just did with half a million people. I think we can do it. We designed the deliberation, so that it includes the idea of the focused conversation method, which means listening to each other very deeply at scale. After you do this, you become immune to the virus of the mind, afterwards, to ideologies.

Audrey Tang: In the focused conversation method, we separate into four different stages. We collect people’s facts, first-hand experiences, data objective. Then, after that is confirmed, we move to collect everybody’s feelings about those same facts. You may feel angry. I may feel happy. It’s all OK.

Audrey Tang: After people converge on a set of feelings that resonates with everybody, we then talk about ideas. The best ideas are the ones that address the most people’s feelings. Then we translate them into legalese and sign them into law.

Audrey Tang: To do this, we need to fix the problem that people on the street speak a different language than people in the government. We need translators, we need facilitators, because without those, people are not even agreeing on basic facts, let alone each other’s feelings. Ideas grow into a more potent "ideology" virus of the mind that blinds people to new facts and blinds people to each other feelings.

Audrey Tang: We not only solve this with open data published by government and invited private sector and civil society, but we also used machine intelligence to try to get everybody’s feelings and give binding power to any feeling that resonates with a super majority with people.

Audrey Tang: The Cyberspace Minister at the time, Jaclyn Tsai, said, "I will agree to be bound by whatever the consensus item to make a new regulation about e-taxi and use it to negotiate with Uber."

Audrey Tang: This is our pol.is conversation, that it was seeded with the same URL sent to all the stakeholder groups after a series of pre-meetings that reaches thousands of people.

Audrey Tang: Based on the result of the three-week pol.is conversation, we did have a super-majority consensus that we then used to argue with these people. They all agreed with it, and so it was ratified. After it was ratified, Uber can’t help but play with these new rules, which is why I was invented, this public digital innovation space, taking all the civic tech that we used for the Uber case, and try to scale it to other topics.

Audrey Tang: This is my ask.pdis.tw page. It is open source software. I don’t do exclusive interviews. Any journalist must go through these public channels for me to answer publicly, and the public answers all have this URL and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is not just online, but also offline. I do meet with lobbyists, such as Mr. David Plouffe here, speaking for Uber at the time. It’s not just on the record, it’s on 360 VR record.

Audrey Tang: You can revisit our conversation. I would like to thank the mySociety folks for doing this SayIt structured data, and the Akoma Ntoso format, so that every word that they’ve said and I said are also, for perpetuity, somewhere you can quote.

Audrey Tang: The PDIS is interesting, because I’m an anarchist minister. I don’t give commands. I don’t obey commands. All the volunteers in the public service who work with me are volunteers, and we iterate weekly using business origami, with those usual tools.

Audrey Tang: The first thing that I did as the minister is to recompile the Linux kernel, so that it runs the free software Sandstorm hosting environment, so that this is about running all these open source productivity tools, and guaranteeing, by our cybersecurity department, that they will not do surveillance or authoritarian collection, or anything like that.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we turned those physical objects, those Post-It notes, those face-to-face deliberations, we used the room itself as an ambient computer. Instead of just having people typing into their mobile phones, we now automatically transcribe our weekly deliberation meetings and everything into this room-based service system so that people can participate on multiple different sites.

Audrey Tang: Next week, after I go back to Taiwan, we’re going to have a public consultation about this, on implementing the marriage equality laws, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I have three more seconds. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The idea is that voting and clicktivism is very easy. Everybody can do it, but there’s not much bits. By sharing the open data, by having interactive public Q&A forums, by setting up binding forum processes, and by bringing the technology to people instead of asking disadvantaged people to use technology, we can build a deliberation system that scales to all the communities, for everything.

Audrey Tang: The process itself is in the commons, so you don’t have to go through the Taiwanese government.

Audrey Tang: Anybody, anywhere on the earth, can run this idea of taking something that seems like a technological singularity thing that’s accelerating everything, and turn it over to a plurality that will listen to one side and then the other side, across a time dimension, resolving our differences, and eventually know what we ask of the technology, instead of having the technology dictating what we do.

Audrey Tang: Just to quote Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen again: "We need to build a unified democracy, not hijacked by ideologies; a efficient democracy that responds to the demands of the environment; and a pragmatic democracy that will let people take care of each other’s feelings."

Audrey Tang: We do this just by listening, and building technologies that help us listen to each other.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.