Audrey Tang: Hi!  I heard from David Eaves that you are interested in working with us. What is your thesis or your research topic at HKS?

Eve Lee: To be honest, my research thesis is still in the works. We don’t really have to decide until the fall this semester this year for me.

Eve Lee: This research with you really just came about as of Tuesday. As you might know, I was in the process of looking for a summer internship. I had an offer here on working with the US government.

Eve Lee: I went to Eaves for advice on whether I should take it. He gave me some of his perspectives, and then he saw on my resume that I was from Taiwan. He was like, “Oh, why don’t you work in Taiwan with Audrey?” I was like, “I didn’t know that was a…”

Audrey Tang: …an option?

Eve Lee: “…that was on the table,” yeah. I told him it would be incredible if I could. He said, “Well, I’m just going to reach out and see what happens.” Here we are.

Eve Lee: I’ve spent the past couple days thinking really hard about it. I would like to turn the research in the summer into a thesis.

Eve Lee: The thing with my program is that our thesis can’t be just research-based, because our degree is more like a professional degree. It has to be policy-focused, research certainly can and should be a component, but the idea is that we work with a client to identify some sort of problem they might need help with.

Audrey Tang: That would be awesome. That would be awesome. We’d welcome you to identify our problems.

Eve Lee: [laughs] I’m not sure what problem I can find within your operations, but I…

Audrey Tang: There’s plenty of problems, many of which intentional. That’s how we attract people. [laughs]

Eve Lee: My thought process in the last couple days is that, if I can start with the research part, and in the process, identify something that I could potentially work on and then work on that throughout the fall and spring semesters.

Eve Lee: Around I think February or March 2021 is when we need to start be able to finalize and deliver the final product back to the client, which ideally would be you guys.

Eve Lee: In terms of topic, I’ve been doing a lot of research on the portfolio of work you guys do. I’m interested in the intersection of technology and government broadly. Really, that can mean open government or general participatory government-style work that you guys promote. I’m also interested in the disinformation part.

Eve Lee: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your focus, because I want to make sure that whatever I’m researching is actually one of the top priorities for you guys, so that it’s beneficial for the both of us.

Audrey Tang: The focus for my office for this year, a lot of it is around the National Action Plan of the open government. It is a process that’s being headed by the National Development Council. It is the first time that Taiwan will have our own four-year National Action Plan on open government.

Audrey Tang: It is quite exciting, I guess. Here is the link in the NDC that talks about the main areas that we’re focusing. Here is my social media post. Well, let’s not use social media. This is my blog post about it.

Audrey Tang: Now, the point of the Open Government Action Plan is that it outlines for the next four years, which coincides with the presidential term, of the various commitments that Taiwan makes, both to its internal stakeholders as well as to the global community on how to make ourselves more transparent, participatory, accountable, and inclusive.

Audrey Tang: That is the large road map for the next four years, and we’ll be focusing on it for this year.

Audrey Tang: This is also solving at the root of countering disinformation, namely, that if just by habit, the government tells it quick, tells it all, there really is no room for rumor to grow.

Audrey Tang: Especially when we tell it all, we can add some humor to it. This is the idea of humor over rumor. That is how my office take on the disinformation issues. The other parts of disinformation countering strategy is largely in the social sector, and therefore, not our purview.

Audrey Tang: Of course, if you’re interested in researching about disinformation ecosystem in general, I can also build connections from you to, say, the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, maybe FB Taiwan, maybe the other stakeholders, like Line, Google, Yahoo, and so on, so that you can make your independent assessment of the counter-disinformation ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: Although it would not be an internship, then, because only a minuscule part is happening in my office. Maybe you would consider actually interning at the TFCC, the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, [laughs] which is actually the nexus of the social sector power.

Audrey Tang: That is one part. The other part is youth engagement. We have this yearly program where people go to check at whatever digital services in the national government or the ministries that they don’t like, and they improve it for the better.

Audrey Tang: There’s just this very regular way of working from July to end of August, which coincides with the time that you’re here. You can look at the past three years to see the portfolios that I made.

Audrey Tang: Last year’s cohort notably did a pretty good redesign, not only for the National Palace Museum, which is now being rolled out, but also on the one-stop registration for mountaineering and hiking.

Audrey Tang: These were highlight cases from the last year’s RAY program. That’s another part which is youth engagement. It all depends on your research interest, but these are the current focus. It’s mostly open government, social innovation, and youth engagement.

Eve Lee: In addition to these, do you guys also have initiatives in terms of working with the other ministries in the government on compiling the data they have and integrating the data in some form, then use it to funnel to the open government and open data initiative? Is that also part of your office’s role?

Audrey Tang: We’re more like mechanism designers. The day-to-day implementation is mostly the National Development Council. We do work with the Presidential Office on flagship projects that, every year, we mentor about 20 teams.

Audrey Tang: Here are the timeline, where again, it’s around the time that you go back to Taiwan. We will have the fresh cohort of five winning teams of this year’s Presidential Hackathon, which will be determined on end of July and then begins our process of integrating the five winners.

Audrey Tang: Each team receive a trophy from the president. The trophy is a micro projector. When you turn it on, it shows the president’s image handing the trophy to you, promising whatever you prototyped in the three months through a data collaborative across three sectors will be made into national policy and reality in the next 12 months.

Audrey Tang: Our work, along with NDC’s help, is more on ratifying the already champions of that year into this cross-sectoral and also cross-ministerial data flow. We are not doing this outside the Presidential Hackathon purview.

Audrey Tang: If you’re interested, of course, you can also choose one of the winning teams of the Presidential Hackathon, follow through its integration, and see how the open government data and the data collaboratives work.

Eve Lee: I see, yeah. Sounds like the time I will be Taiwan definitely coincides with really cool, exciting, much opportunities.

Eve Lee: I started thinking, I wonder if it would be too large of an endeavor to try to do my research on the broader effort and planning, and then the specific pieces of it, instead of trying to focus on just one part. I do think that they all go together, in some way.

Audrey Tang: They do, certainly.

Eve Lee: I wonder if it would be possible to do that.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. We’ve had a cultural anthropologist and a human geographer doing this portfolio of research. I can, of course, put you in touch with them. I think they did a pretty good work. One of the cultural anthropology work is to analyze not only my office but the wider g0v community and how that works with the ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: Not only PDIS, but actually, anything that looks like our office from the g0v culture is amenable to the cultural anthropology lens. I’m pasting you the ongoing dissertation from Li Mei-jun, who I think provides a lot of very good background of how kind of work came to be.

Audrey Tang: You can see at the section called drafts of dissertation where you can see titles like, “Meiyouren can do anything,” which is a very interesting title. If you want to take such a broad scope, then my suggestion would be putting you first in touch to Mei-jun and maybe Yu-shan.

Audrey Tang: They are also Taiwanese, and they are all doing degrees overseas. They took a very similar approach. Maybe they have some outstanding questions, and maybe you can form a research group or something. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That would not only be about me or my office, but rather about this new, cross-sectoral way of data collaboratives working across sectors in Taiwan. That would be interesting, and I think Eaves would consider that interesting, too. That would be my suggestion.

Eve Lee: Perfect. Yeah, definitely, that would be great to connect with the other researchers. I have a question. Do you guys do some sort of analysis on the type of users that are actively engaged with you, either online – probably, mostly online – and also going to the offline events?

Eve Lee: Then trying to see if you can spread the initiative to a broader audience, rather than just a relatively smaller, online-active audience?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we do. The join.gov.tw platform does such analysis. There’s a little difference between rural and municipal, which is something that we’re very proud of. I think that’s because the e-petition part concerns a lot of local cases.

Audrey Tang: If you’re interested, of course, we can put you in contact of our NDC delegate. Then you can get the statistics from the NDC, who maintains this. Also, maybe worth considering is a similar system, this horizontal network, called the Participation Officer Network, is also being rolled out in Tainan City.

Audrey Tang: There is many different municipal governments using the Join platform, such as Taipei, Taichung, and so on. If you’re interested in how not limiting to the Taipei City or not limited to large municipalities, there may be interesting cases when you’re around that takes a definitely local nature and that may be worth following as well.

Audrey Tang: G0v is running its biennial summit in Tainan this year. I don’t know how close you are to the community in Tainan, but Tainan definitely is one of the main hubs, as of this year. A distinct character than Taipei, Tainan is much more closer to the, exactly as you said, this everyday, not super clustered, audience.

Eve Lee: That makes a lot of sense. That would definitely be really cool to be able to get the data and the statistics on the users who are using the platform, or generally using the open government initiative.

Audrey Tang: I’m pasting you the stakeholders in Tainan from the g0v community.

Eve Lee: Perfect, thank you. I think I have a lot of research next steps to look at. I have a few more logistics questions if that’s OK. What has been the standard model you worked with the researchers, if there is a standard model?

Audrey Tang: There is no standard model. [laughs]

Eve Lee: OK, great. I figured.

Audrey Tang: The sample size is too few.

Eve Lee: I hope to spend as much time onsite as possible. Since I’m trying to split my summer into an internship with the US government and also research with you, I think I would end up having to do this just over August onsite, and then…

Audrey Tang: We have a colleague in New York, anyway.

Eve Lee: Perfect. Then that works better, then, because ideally, I would be able to still conduct the research and potentially the thesis project/consultancy part over the fall semester and early spring, too.

Eve Lee: Over August, I’m definitely open, and ideally, would go to your office five days a week, if that’s something that…

Audrey Tang: There’s no requirement for that, because we have three physical sites, anyway. That’s not including the New York, Bristol, and London colleagues. We are a very distributed team. As with other researchers, of course, I’m around every Wednesday to the Social Innovation Lab.

Audrey Tang: That’s my office hour. If you book my time in advance, we can just chat for a while every Wednesday. That’s the easiest. My advice would be actually going to where the action happens. Like if you’re interested in the Presidential Hackathon teams, go to them.

Audrey Tang: If you are interested in the RAY part – that is the service design – you can go to specific service design teams and so on, because we don’t work in our office. There really is no point for you to be five days in a certain office, unless, of course, you want to learn about the bureaucracy.

Audrey Tang: I don’t really think it’s your goal coming back to Taiwan. There are, of course, some essential crew handling phone calls and things like that, but most of us are just on various different dispatches. Like me personally, I go around Taiwan every other Tuesday, and sometimes Monday and Friday, too depending on the e-petition systems.

Audrey Tang: Maybe if you would like to travel, of course, there is a lot of traveling. If you don’t like to travel, I would suggest that you focus on maybe one or two teams and build a stronger relationship with them.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the Social Innovation Lab is an open space, so you are always welcome.

Eve Lee: I think I’d like to take the next week or two researching and flesh out a more detailed research plan, and check in with Professor Eaves and see if he thinks this is an appropriate way to move forward with. I think he would like to turn this into a case study, if possible.

Audrey Tang: Sure, why not?

Eve Lee: OK, cool.

Audrey Tang: The Social Innovation Lab is here. There is a pretty video and such. If you prefer the US internship over Taiwan, there is no open stake, [laughs] so there is still plenty of room to consider. I really appreciate that Professor Eaves has this gesture, and I really appreciate the time that you put into researching our office work and focus.

Eve Lee: I definitely want to make it work, so ideally, I can still do this over August and then beyond. It was just hard to actually turn down an internship.

Eve Lee: I really appreciate your time and getting on Skype so quickly.

Audrey Tang: No problem, sure.

Eve Lee: Once I’ve done more research on these topics, can I email you back, or should I go to a different…?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we’ll just go back and forth on email. I will be emailing you in a couple days, anyway, with this transcript. I will continue this exchange over email.

Eve Lee: Sounds great.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Anything else I can help you with?

Eve Lee: I think I’m all good for now.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Have a good local time, then.

Eve Lee: Thank you. Have a good night. Bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.