Eivind Røssaak: Should I start? My name is Eivind Røssaak. I work as a researcher at the National Library of Norway. I think we’re one of the few national libraries in the world to have a distinguished research section. We take part in national research projects in Norway. The current project is called "Digitization and Diversity", in cooperation with the Oslo Business School among others.

Eivind Røssaak: We look into the transformation of culture and media industries in Norway after digitization, as we call it, in a broadest possible sense. We investigate the book industry, the newspaper industry, the book industry, libraries and museums, and finally the cinema industry. We’re a team of about 20 researchers.

Eivind Røssaak: Here today, I represent them, and I told them I would hopefully be able to meet you. They’re very curious and very interested in both your role, what a person like you are able to do within a government structure, so to speak, and how this set-up can also possibly inspire other countries.

Eivind Røssaak: I have some specific questions concerning my research project, on how we look at things, and maybe some viewpoints.

Audrey Tang: Would you like to close the door? Not to make this a closed-door meeting, just to make sure the recording quality makes better. Please.

Eivind Røssaak: To start, what’s your ambitions and dreams with your job?

Audrey Tang: I don’t have any ambitions.

Eivind Røssaak: That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: I’m here to fulfill other people’s ambitions.

Eivind Røssaak: Exactly. How can you fulfill other people’s ambitions through the structure you’re working in now?

Audrey Tang: Like here, which is my office, I hold office hour, which is every Wednesday, 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, but not limited to Wednesday. Today is not a Wednesday, people can still just meet me here, provided that they agree to have the entire conversation published online after 10 days of editing.

Audrey Tang: Just by this simple act, we have a website called SayIt. It’s kind of archival work, actually, so you can see that in my two years as Digital Minister, I’ve talked to 3,000 people in 160,000 speeches. Each and every speaker, it is structured data, machine readable.

Audrey Tang: You can see not just interviews with journalists and/or lobbyists, but actually the internal meetings that I hold is also published online.

Eivind Røssaak: They are done here, mostly, these events?

Audrey Tang: That’s right, the collaborative meetings are usually done here. Of course, I also tour around, like going to Toronto, to New York City, and things like that. All of these conversations, it’s not just the summary. It is actually the entire conversation, with the names and everything.

Eivind Røssaak: I saw your blog, but I didn’t find this page.

Audrey Tang: Right. It’s called SayIt.

Eivind Røssaak: Could I take a picture of it?

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Eivind Røssaak: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: This is just the textual part.

Audrey Tang: On my Twitter and my Facebook there is also the non-textual part, which may also interest you, because you also work with other modalities. Which is at track.pdis.tw, PDIS being a public digital innovation space.

Audrey Tang: For each occurrence -- for example, a conversation with Paul Preciado, which is a philosopher -- it is available both in live-streaming mode, in transcript mode, and as a interactive whiteboard, of sorts. People with different modalities, they can choose the modality that they prefer to relive the conversation.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes, with lobbyists, we also keep a 360 record, so there you can put on VR and relive the lobbying with Uber, and so on. The whole point of this, what we call radical transparency, is to make sure that everybody can get the context, the why of policymaking.

Audrey Tang: In other countries, with the freedom of information laws, usually, the government is required to publish only after a decision is made. Before a decision is made, it’s called a drafting stage. Usually, those documents are never made public.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan’s FOIA, we say the drafting stage information may be made public if it serves a public interest. In reality, officials very rarely use that clause. When I joined the cabinet, I have three working conditions, like compact. The first one is everything I see, when I publish it, is of public interest. I don’t have to check with anyone anymore.

Audrey Tang: Anyone can put on a VR glass and feel how it’s like in my daily schedule, who I have met, who I have talked with, and know the why of policy making. Even though the public service at first feels kind of uneasy about it, very soon they found it has everything going for it, and nothing against.

Audrey Tang: Previously, when things go right, after the decision, the minister always take all the credit. When things go wrong, they don’t go past the drafting stage, the minister always blame the public service. Now, with the radical transparency, it’s the other way around. If things work right, everybody sees which public servant are the one who proposed the innovation in the first place.

Audrey Tang: They have names on it, they have a photo on it. I talk about their names in my presentations, and they also face the people, face-to-face, in collaboration meetings. They feel much more proud of their professional work. They’re no longer anonymous.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if things don’t work out, if it doesn’t become policy, then I absorb all the risk. It’s always Audrey’s fault. People in the public sector can always partner with the social sector and the private sector to continue those endeavors because now, they have the context of policy making.

Audrey Tang: Very soon, all the public service people decided, "Oh, it’s actually a good idea." The two years of working, mostly in members, everybody knows how the cabinet works and how a digital minister works. That’s my first working condition. I don’t have anything that I want to push, and that’s my second condition.

Audrey Tang: It’s called voluntary association, meaning that I never give orders, and I never take orders. My office is literally one person from each ministry, at most. Technically, I can have 34 staff. At the moment I have 22.

Eivind Røssaak: Here, in this building?

Audrey Tang: In this building, as well as administration building. PDIS is literally like six spaces in the physical, and also in the digital. In a digital space, what we share is a workspace. At any time, I can show you exactly what my team is working on.

Eivind Røssaak: This is open also?

Audrey Tang: This is entirely transparent. Every time people in my office can start a project, and every time we can track how the project is going. Anyone can join it, and nobody takes command. Anyone can create a card, saying "OK, I want this to happen."

Audrey Tang: They have to talk with all the other different people in the staff, which are all from different backgrounds, and different ministries. Each ministry is a different value, you see, to create synergy. My work is purely facilitative.

Audrey Tang: I don’t take sides, or rather, I take all the sides of all those 22 people. Then they figure out what to work with. That’s the core team. The peripheral team is the team of what we call participation officers in every ministry.

Audrey Tang: That is charged with the same facilitative role, but with their agencies. As I work in a cross-ministerial role, they work in a cross-agency role within their ministry. It’s like a fractal thing. That’s the second thing. It’s called voluntary association. The third thing is called location independence.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that wherever I am working, I’m working. I’m not limited by space or time, in terms of work. Anywhere that has broadband Internet, that enables me to connect to the virtual space, I count as working hour. The same applies to my staff.

Audrey Tang: Every year we have like 30, 40 interns. Some interns, they are not in Taipei. Some interns are in Toronto all the time. They’ve never been in Taiwan in the two months, and they’re still our interns.

Eivind Røssaak: Are they usually Taiwanese, or foreigners?

Audrey Tang: They’re usually Taiwanese, but we also have fellow researchers, like Fiorella, is from Florence. We also have people from Madrid doing comparative human geography, which is very ethnographic, meaning lots of hanging out. She studies the effect of those collaborative spaces on people, how people behave, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We also work with researchers, and we also publish papers on the social archive network. I think all this enables a rather different view on a ministry. It’s almost like a, I don’t know, spiritual ministry. It’s all about making sure that people can figure out common values despite their different positions. That’s our main way of working.

Eivind Røssaak: How does this work, really? Are you the alibi of openness and freedom of expression?

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Eivind Røssaak: How does your practice affect everyday practices and routines in Taiwan? For example: My wife is from Taiwan, so I go here often. Her brother is a businessman in Yuanlin.

Eivind Røssaak: He says, "If you meet Audrey Tang, can you ask her, why it is so cumbersome to expand a business, set-up a new business or buy a new office, one has to go through a bunch of access points and databases to fill in a variety of forms and applications, why doesn’t the government set up one database for these kinds of application processes?"

Audrey Tang: That’s right. onestop.nat.gov.tw, our one-stop company registration, we just finished that work. Previously, they really needed to use a kind of wooden seal, like 印鑑證明 and things like that. It’s all relaxed now.

Audrey Tang: It’s fixed now. What we do basically is we systematically review all the different outdated regulations and interpretations. Then we set up this platform called sandbox.org.tw, where people can say they think certain regulation is out of date, they are in need of update.

Audrey Tang: Previously, the ministries usually work in a kind of siloed way. They’re kind of difficult to move across the ministries.

Audrey Tang: Because of my entirely cross-ministry working methodology, your friend, or your family, they’re very much welcome to go to sandbox.org.tw, and/or to attend one of my regional tour meetings.

Audrey Tang: I tour around Taiwan. Every Wednesday, I’m here, everybody can talk to me, but on Tuesdays, I tour around Taiwan. Visiting in Hualien, and I don’t know when we will go to Yuanlin, but in any case, we just tour around.

Audrey Tang: As I tour around -- for example, when I was in Taitung -- it was maintained by the Council of Indigenous Affairs. I talked with the Amis people, the Lukai people, the indigenous nations, who often work on what we call 勞動合作社, a co-op focused on labor, a working co-op.

Audrey Tang: These people, they previously had a lot of legal complications, because they are not a company. They are not subject to the labor basic law, and things like that. People often mistake them for just associations and things like that, but they are actually a co-op. They raise a lot of points.

Audrey Tang: Previously, they were stuck, because the Ministry of Interior would say, "Oh, I need to talk with the Ministry of Health and Welfare. I need to talk with the Counsel of Public Construction, and National Development Counsel, and things like that."

Audrey Tang: This original story gets lost when you only have like five pieces of A4 papers. Often, it just gets nowhere, but because when I was touring around, it’s not just me. All the 12 ministries, here, are in the Social Innovation Lab, on the second floor. Watching through my eyes the actual people, and people’s stories, and their problems, their issues. It’s two-way.

Audrey Tang: The people in those indigenous, rural, or remote areas, they also see all the 12 ministries’ people. It’s very difficult for the ministry to say, "Oh, I have to talk to the Minister of Interior," because the MOI is sitting next to them. They have to brainstorm and figure out something.

Audrey Tang: The entire transcript is published 14 days after each such meeting. In almost 100 cases, within two weeks, we just have a solution, because nobody wants to lose face. Previously, the public service didn’t want to take the risk of initiating a cross-silo conversation or to be accused of 圖利, of unfairly treating a certain commercial supplier.

Audrey Tang: Now, because it’s transparent, it’s multistakeholder. I absorb all the risk, so suddenly they become very normative. If you go to sandbox.org.tw, you can see almost 100 cases that has been either relaxed, and/or simplified, and/or redesigned to be more digitally accessible.

Audrey Tang: Still, I do nothing. I do nothing than making sure there is a space for people to formulate their synergies.

Eivind Røssaak: Very good. I’ve been assessing various digital archive projects around the world. I was very fascinated by TELDAP, or the Taiwanese e-Learning and Digital Archive Project.

Eivind Røssaak: I think it started back in 2001, and it was a very pioneering project, because at some point, up to 150 museums, libraries, universities, cinemateques, and film archives were involved in this digitization project.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Eivind Røssaak: I thought it was extremely interesting. I told my colleagues about this, and I’ve been trying to follow it up. Now, it seems their website is hosted from Academia Sinica. IHowever, it seems to me, it’s not very much updated recently - is it still active?

Audrey Tang: It has several successor projects that reuses the archives in a way that is more participatory. It is true that the TELDAP was very pioneering, but as with the National Palace Museum, which started a very similar...

Eivind Røssaak: That was also part of it, I think.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, it’s a sibling project. The outcome of these efforts were not open data, in the sense that it was not entirely open for remixing and for licensing.

Eivind Røssaak: I think so, too. I also had that silo feeling again, when me and my wife tried to work through it.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. If you want to remix, you have to fill in those A4 forms, for them to send a CD-ROM to you, and so on. I think while the work is commendable, its distance from the general population is very wide, so that people don’t feel it’s part of our culture. They feel it’s just something that is the historian archivers are doing for their field.

Audrey Tang: One of the main contributions, I think, in the both National Palace Museum, and the Ministry of Culture, is that we restarted a project called 國家記憶庫, the National Memory Archive.

Eivind Røssaak: Oh, interesting.

Audrey Tang: It is a retake of the original TELDAP vision. The National Palace Museum counterpart is...

Eivind Røssaak: Who is hosting this, the Ministry of Culture?

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Culture, that’s right. The National Palace Museum, which I assume you know, is not part of the Ministry of Culture? The NPM is actually a cabinet member. We are very strange. The head of NPM is actually a cabinet member. It belongs to its own.

Eivind Røssaak: Always?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because technically it represents the memory of the Qing Dynasty, [laughs] for some reason.

Eivind Røssaak: Is this the same website?

Audrey Tang: It’s the NPM one.

Eivind Røssaak: That’s NPM one.

Audrey Tang: Right. Previously, in the previous cabinets, like three years ago, since TELDAP, two or three years ago, the NPM and the Minister of Culture resists the open data movement. They refuse to offer their archivals and their Creative Commons license. It makes it very difficult for people to bridge into their work.

Audrey Tang: One of our contributions, when the new cabinet formed, is we made sure that the NPM and the Ministry of Culture adopts the same open data license as any other international data sets is using. At the moment, it is, of course, not exactly very high quality. I think it’s 300 dpi or something, but, still, it’s something.

Audrey Tang: Then you can use it for any purpose, whatsoever. I think this really makes the NPM really feel closer to people, and we see more creations this way. We also made use of new technologies, such as what we call photogrammetry, or videogrammetry, which is drones.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, remote-piloted flying vehicles. They fly around those cultural buildings and sites, and makes a 3D scanning, essentially a snapshot of these cultural buildings. At any time you can virtually take a VR glass and walk in those buildings.

Audrey Tang: It’s both digital preservation, but it’s also offering creative assets for filmmakers, for comic makers, for any kind of makers, actually, to station their work within those historical buildings. That is another Creative Commons work.

Eivind Røssaak: That’s TDAL? What ...?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the Taiwan Digital Asset Library.

Eivind Røssaak: That took over from TELDAP, in a way?

Audrey Tang: There’s many, as I said, derivative projects following TELDAP, including the TDAL, Story Taiwan, and of course, also The National Palace Museum Open Data, and so on. You can see a connection of these within the larger idea of 國家記憶庫, a citizens’ memory archive.

Audrey Tang: It’s both more accessible in terms of reusing, but it’s also more participatory in terms of people can also share. That’s our new direction, so to speak.

Eivind Røssaak: The National Central Library have a project called Taiwan Memory, also. It’s about the Japanese era. That is also a derivative then?

Audrey Tang: Right. The "Memory Archive" (記憶庫) is more like a meme. It’s a hashtag. Anyone can use that hashtag to join this umbrella project.

Audrey Tang: Whereas in TELDAP, you have to sign a contract with the team in order to join. That is very top-down, the taxonomy. This is more like a folksonomy, and people can elect to join if they choose an open license.

Eivind Røssaak: This is very interesting. I’m trying to write about this, but it’s very difficult to get an overview of the Taiwanese situation. Maybe we can exchange some info, if you have a good connection in the field that you could put me in touch with?

Audrey Tang: I do actually. Sure.

Eivind Røssaak: The right people in cultural ministry, perhaps, too, who initiated these derivative projects.

Audrey Tang: Actually, it’s all online.

Eivind Røssaak: My wife can help translate this.

Audrey Tang: It’s the framework. It actually has the entire archive of all the different cities, all the different regions, and how they’re participating into the memory archives. The Minister of Culture is more of a curative role.

Audrey Tang: It is not actually going there, absorbing, and making new archives. It’s rather making sure the people who do so is interoperable, in a way. It indexes, but it doesn’t actually do more than periodical curation. I do have connection to the people who actually run this. If you’re interested, I can put you in touch.

Eivind Røssaak: That would be great, thank you so much.

Eivind Røssaak: Can I ask you a question on a different subject? Because I learned about the referendum, like the one on gay marriage.

Eivind Røssaak: Then a friend of mine told me recently how the question was posed to the audience in Taiwan and the question was something like, "Do you think that the natural way to get married is between one man, and one woman?" and then people could say yes or no.

Eivind Røssaak: The question was not about gay marriage at all. It wasn’t addressed explicitly. It was a total displacement of the original question. I was very shocked when I...

Jing-Yue Yeh: It’s manipulation.

Eivind Røssaak: Yeah, I heard about that. I thought that...

Audrey Tang: The actual phrasing is that, "Do you agree that within a civil code, the marriage should be defined as between a man and woman." It talks about civil code, it doesn’t talk about natural.

Eivind Røssaak: It seemed like going away from the matter. My friend told me that. To most people who didn’t know what context this was in, they would say, "Yes, that sounds natural to me." It wasn’t really about it. It sounded very strange to me. What is your comment on this, the way this referendum was done?

Audrey Tang: It talks about is civil code, which is a particular chapter in the legal system. The reason why it’s framed this way is because otherwise, it would be unconstitutional. Our constitutional court already have ruled that people, regardless of their gender, need to be protected in their right to marry.

Audrey Tang: Also, the marriage protections, in terms of the rights and the duties that they enjoy from the state, must not be discriminated against, whatever their gender is. That is already done. By next May, if the legislation has not enacted a law that protects the same right of the same-sex couples, then the existing civil code automatically applies, regardless of what it currently says.

Audrey Tang: That’s the constitutional ruling. That is why the referendum has to talk specifically about the civil code definition, because it cannot prevent the law from offering the same protection to same-sex couples. The only thing they can do, the referendum can target is that it need to be done in a separate law, instead of inside the civil code.

Audrey Tang: That is what the referendum is about. It is more about whether it requires a new act and a new bill, or it just change the civil code. The end result is the same effect. The referendum just talks about the legal apparatus to make it happen.

Audrey Tang: Initially, they tried to add more things to it, but those were ruled as unconstitutional, which is why the end result is something that seems very technical.

Eivind Røssaak: I guess that explains it. Then, in the end, it means that the civil code won’t be changed, according to the referendum?

Audrey Tang: For the next two years, because the referendum is good for two years. Probably, there will be a special act that says same-sex couples, or something like that, is allowed to marry, and they enjoy exactly the same rights as chapter what and what, between this clause and that clause, in the civil code.

Audrey Tang: That’s all this law says. It’s just a technicality that moves it outside the civil code, and that’s it.

Eivind Røssaak: Many people abroad have considered it as a little bit strange that Taiwan has a referendum concerning a...

Audrey Tang: A legal technicality?

Eivind Røssaak: Yeah, a legal technicality, and also questioning what is already a human right?

Audrey Tang: The referendum doesn’t talk about the human right, it’s the same right that’s protected. It just talk about the legal technicality.

Eivind Røssaak: It’s a little peculiar, or misunderstood out there, maybe.

Jing-Yue Yeh: The target was to restrain the right of the gay people?

Audrey Tang: No, the right is exactly the same. Even if the civil code is changed to say that the same-sex couples can marry exactly as heterosexual genders are, that also means it’s exactly the same right to marry, right?

Audrey Tang: Even the civil code changes. It doesn’t, for example, talk about artificial insemination rights, adoption rights, and things like that, because these are not in that chapter of the civil code. Whether it changes civil code or uses a special law, it’s exactly the same right to marry.

Audrey Tang: This is, I would say, more a mobilizing referendum than anything. They want to use this as a way to mobilize the forces that feel slighted after the constitutional ruling. I think that is what’s happening politically.

Eivind Røssaak: Interesting. Can I ask you something about Taiwan and the world, and this concerns also Norway in the world, our research project. It’s about how do you look at the influence of Facebook. It’s enormously strong now.

Eivind Røssaak: Norway is well-known for having almost 250 local newspapers. It’s one of the highest per capita in the world, I think. Now, many of these newspapers lose revenues, because even local companies put their ads on Facebook, rather than in the local newspapers. The newspapers lose...

Audrey Tang: Well, that’s not news. Before Facebook, it was Google, but yes.

Eivind Røssaak: It changes the infrastructure of a nation, this clash between the local and the global. In Norway, and in the EU, there are many efforts at regulating some of the so-called innovations from the tech companies in Silicon Valley.

Eivind Røssaak: Do you have issues like that here in Taiwan, when it comes to these global infrastructure clashes, as I would call them?

Audrey Tang: In terms of news, Taiwan always has a really vibrant, independent publishing tradition. We were among the first wave of people who translated the term blog as 部落格, and started movements around independent blogging, and things like that. There’s a strong civil media scene in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Still, now, I think when you ask people where to look for a social community opinion, many people will say, "Oh, it’s the PTT," rather than any other for-profit companies. PTT is not-for-profit.

Audrey Tang: It’s within the infrastructure of the National Taiwan University, but it enjoys a certain kind of independence from either the university or the general public, because it’s purely not-for-profit. Also, it is maintained mostly by students, and by people in the social sector.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that, when we think about social media or social enterprise, we don’t move that quickly into the Facebook imagination. When we talk about social something, we think of the social sector.

Audrey Tang: There is a strong social sector that manages its own media in Taiwan, and they still have considerable legitimacy, if not pure influence. They have traditionally survived on donations, rather than advertisement.

Audrey Tang: The Da-ai television company, for example, mostly relies on donations and grants instead of advertisements. I don’t think they run much advertisement, anyway. Where people don’t have existing donation and/or subscription model, they use crowdfunding.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Taiwan Reporter, it is a crowdfunded media that is well-respected, and so on. Because the funding source is very diversified, people don’t fear as much the loss of advertisement money. Which in Taiwan, as well as in other places, has all flown to Google and Facebook. That is a fact.

Audrey Tang: Any media that still remains needs to adjust its business model. Because of the -- I wouldn’t say social media -- the more socially-minded media, they already have a diversified funding model. They’re less impacted by the lack of advertisements.

Eivind Røssaak: So you think there is a stronger sort of autonomous social sector, perhaps, in Taiwan, than in Norway, or in Europe? To me, it seems like EU has certainly become one of the only forces in the world who are able to confront the tendency of monopolizing the Internet by giants such as Google and Facebook in terms of protecting the local initiatives and diversity.

Audrey Tang: Our local initiatives are pretty strong, like when we first did the Uber consultation. The Taiwan Taxi Company said, "All we want is the same and fair rules. We don’t need subsidizing. We don’t need protection against oversea interests."

Audrey Tang: All we say is, for example, Uber was able to charge extra meters if you require a special form of car, like a van or something like that. They were able to do surge pricing and things like that. They, for a while, operated without insurance costs and taxation.

Audrey Tang: The Taiwan Taxi Company says, "If you tax them, and if they register in a fair fashion, and if we’re allowed, for example, to also use cars with different colors." If you don’t hail it on the street, you don’t need to paint them yellow.

Audrey Tang: Then you can just call them from a 7-11, from Ibon, or from your phone. The Taiwan Taxi Company said, "If we are also allowed to use cars without painted yellow, that can be offered in a tailor-made fashion, maybe offer different services, and is able to price accordingly, then we can compete fairly, and we don’t need subsidizing.

Audrey Tang: That is what I have eventually done. Uber is legal, in a sense.

Eivind Røssaak: Is it legal now?

Audrey Tang: It is legal. All the Uber cars, as you can see, start with a R, as a rental. They are technically rental cars. They pay their taxes, their insurances, and so on, so it is legal. It wasn’t, but now it is.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan Taxi Company, as well as other taxi companies, are now also able if you just call a Taiwan taxi car from your phone or from 7-11, chances are that the car that greets you also accepts mobile payment, it may not be painted yellow, and things like that. It’s a fair competition.

Audrey Tang: Also you can call Japanese cars, using the Taiwan Taxi app, and the Japanese tourists can also call Taiwan Taxi Cars when they visit Taiwan, using their Japanese app. There is more Uber-like behavior, but they’re all within the same competitive framework.

Audrey Tang: We’re seeing the growth for the Taiwan-based Taiwan Taxi Company is not bad. People don’t generally feel that the government need to, for example, subsidize or to "protect." Of course, that only pertains to the part of Taiwan Taxi Companies that can leverage the latest mobile and digital technologies.

Audrey Tang: It is true that there is certain unions, there’s certain co-ops, that has not yet matched with the innovators, so that’s what we do. We also make sure that they have accessible digital retraining transformation services, so that they understand what mobile payments are, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: That is what the government needs to do, but not at the cost of, for example, blocking the external platform economy.

Eivind Røssaak: That’s interesting. I saw that you gave a talk at the UNs, open social enterprise. That looked like a very interesting event. I heard it was also some conflict around an issue, that China tried to stop the live stream.

Audrey Tang: They really didn’t. Because it’s live stream, they have to say something, but that’s it. All I work with is the sustainable goals. The goals are universally recognized by all the people on Earth really, that we need to get here by 2030.

Audrey Tang: As long as I work within the framework of the sustainable global goals, those same goals the PRC people have also signed it. Of all the different attendants, whether it’s remote or in the flesh, of the UN activities that I attend as part of the sustainable goals, I’ve never once had the PRC tried to stop me.

Audrey Tang: One of these gets live streamed, the Geneva Internet Governance Forum. Once they realized it’s live stream, they have to say something, I guess. In reality, I’ve never faced technical blockage, and so on.

Audrey Tang: The most is that if I inform the secretary that I will appear, here through telepresence in some hour and so on, maybe the PRC will stay out of the room, but that’s the most they can do.

Eivind Røssaak: I think it’s very interesting, and fills me with optimism, when I see the way you can work both nationally and internationally. Do you think that you can help Taiwan become recognized, and get access to more international venues through your work?

Audrey Tang: Oh yes, you’re absolutely right. Taiwan can help. Taiwan can help other people.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan can help other people, really. Most of our work is around the sustainable goals, as I said, but a part of the sustainable goal that I am personally interested in is enhancing reliable data. We talked a little bit about that, encouraging cross-sectoral partnerships, and most importantly, open innovation.

Audrey Tang: In the sense that, for example, in many UN settings, I shared the AirBox, which is people measuring their own air qualities using measurement boxes that’s less than $100 USD, so they’re very cheap. In many jurisdictions, they don’t allow citizen scientists to organize to 2,000 or more sides, especially around this region.

Audrey Tang: If there’s more than 200, maybe they get disappeared, or severely discouraged, because they really threaten the legitimacy of the government. What we do is that we can’t beat them, so we join them. We not only set up complimentary measuring sites on the places where citizen scientists are not as active, we also listen to the citizen scientists who say, "We want a measurement point here."

Audrey Tang: Which they cannot actually do, even with drones. It runs out of battery. We are going to build wind power turbines there, for the power plant. Of course, we can carry the air boxes there. Everything here, as you can see, is open source.

Audrey Tang: It’s snapshotted, put to a distributed ledger, commonly known as blockchain, and then uploaded to the national super computing center. We have a website called ci.taiwan.gov.tw, that puts all the meteorological, disaster recovery, earthquake prevention, water quality data.

Audrey Tang: The very interesting thing is that we partner with the local -- as well as international, because it’s all international standard -- climate change scientists. There’s some open data teams from Japan that won the award for using Taiwanese data.

Audrey Tang: Then we also have people who work on AI, that can look at the air quality measurements, and write reports. That is very common to decision scientists, in that they will write like weather reports, and post it on PTT.

Audrey Tang: The "AP-Buster" team write in a way that is very PTT-speak, in a way that is very accessible. They can automatically push out those information, and without any human intervention. That’s very innovative.

Audrey Tang: We also have the Taiwan Water Corporation, again working with AI researchers, to detect the water leaks early, and things like that. Because it’s all open source and open hardware, everywhere around the world, people can just download it from GitHub, from Internet, and start experimenting with open hardware, and join the Taiwan Initiative Network.

Audrey Tang: We’re not doing it in a colonizing way, rather we co-create. Like the Wellington people in New Zealand, they invited water company AI researchers to them, co-work for three months, and resolve their own water leakage problem. They didn’t used to have the water shortage issue, but because of climate change, they now do.

Audrey Tang: In this way, we just partner with anyone who face the same social environmental issue, and co-create. Taiwan can help is the main message. We don’t quite think that people need to help Taiwan. It’s exactly the other way around.

Eivind Røssaak: I saw the Taipei Art Biennial now, which has "Post-nature" as a topic. I don’t know if you have had time to see it, but it really demonstrated all the local initiatives around Taiwan beautifully. There is also a very tough video documentary about the history and life of the social eco-protest movement.

Audrey Tang: I actually attended one of the opening talks with Preciado and Joshua Lee. That’s me. You can find the entire transcript, video, and everything online. On the track.pdis website, just look for Preciado, and you’ll see it.

Eivind Røssaak: OK, very nice. One of the topics in this video was: can Taiwan survive without nuclear power plants? Do you think so?

Audrey Tang: Well, eventually.

Eivind Røssaak: Eventually? You will do it through windmills?

Audrey Tang: Wind turbine is one of the most interesting ones, because the Taiwan Straight is really powerful, in terms of the wind. The main challenge of course, is that Taiwan don’t have the technologies. We have to partner with people in UK and Denmark and so on.

Eivind Røssaak: And Norway.

Audrey Tang: And Norway, sorry.

Audrey Tang: Let’s change that in the transcript. Partner with our Norwegian and UK counterparts to build the windmills. Once we have sufficient renewable power, as well as the storage power grid and the smart meters. Actually, the problem is always not the raw amount of energy, but rather how you can store it and distribute it efficiently.

Audrey Tang: That’s the main thing. Once we have that smart grid, I think we can survive very easily using mostly wind power, but also of course, hydro, solar, natural gas, and what have you. The solar panel is more challenging, because we’ve almost exhausted the available land for solar panels.

Audrey Tang: Even there, I think we also have some way to, for example in farmland, to interleave with the crops, and have the crops still grow with some shielding of solar panel. There’s also some innovative way, where instead of donating to a charity, you donate through a social enterprise that builds solar panel on the roof of the charity.

Audrey Tang: Like the shelter or the school, and things like that which makes them cooler. I mean temperature is cooler, but also it provides a renewable income source for those people. Even on those rooftops that belongs to people who generally wouldn’t have funding to build solar panels, we are now using social financing to build those solar panels.

Eivind Røssaak: My friends may have some questions or comments, I think.

Geir Yeh Fotland: There are about 50 Danish families who are working with windmills. There’s about 600 windmills in Taiwan, on the west coast.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s just the stationary. We still haven’t announced the floating windmills, which is technologically more challenging, but actually more powerful. If you have floating, you can build it farther away.

Jing-Yue Yeh: Would the windmills affect the fishing boats?

Audrey Tang: No. Actually, it’s all pre-planned. It’s fine.

Geir Yeh Fotland: Another one, to use is the tidal water in north Norway. The tide water is three meters difference, high and low. The tide water’s about 60 kilowatt an hour, the water stream.

Eivind Røssaak: We can use the wave and water power, alongside the windmills.

Jing-Yue Yeh: I had a question.

Audrey Tang: Yes, please do.

Jing-Yue Yeh: On the fake news, during the election period, I received many, many message from Line. Many are false. Even if I know it’s false, I don’t know how to do it. If I tell the people, the person who send me, then she would get angry.

Audrey Tang: You can instruct them to add this bot from the civil society, called CoFacts. CoFacts is collaborative facts, and the name is literally 真的假的, "Is it true or not? You don’t have to do the explaining.

Audrey Tang: The bot can do the explaining for you. You can instruct your friends, if they see information they don’t know whether it’s true or not, but they feel very strong, so they have to forward it to someone, they can forward it to the bot.

Audrey Tang: This is exactly like how we flag junk mail or spam mail, right? Email is usually private, right? If there’s an unsolicited email -- Nigerian princes have 1,000 or whatever, US dollars, 1 million US dollars, looking for deposit -- then it is not really freedom of speech, because it’s really wasting everybody’s time.

Audrey Tang: It makes sense for people to flag them and send them to a clearinghouse, called Spamhaus, actually. Then they analyze the messages to make sure that whenever there’s another batch of people from the same sender, with the same content, it’s sent straight to the spam folder. It’s not really censorship.

Audrey Tang: If you click junk mail, you can still see those messages, it’s just, it doesn’t waste people’s time by default.

Eivind Røssaak: This is a government initiative?

Audrey Tang: No, even though it looks like government, it’s actually a zero. It’s a g0v initiative. G0v is basically civil society, social sector people who look at what government haven’t done, but they think the government should done. They just do it themself, but use g0v as a domain.

Jing-Yue Yeh: Do they work fast enough to...?

Audrey Tang: Of course. As you can see, there’s only three rumors that’s not yet replied. Most of the rumors they get replied very, very quickly. We can very quickly see what is the most trending rumors at the moment.

Audrey Tang: At this particular moment, there is usually about...This one is very popular, for some reason. No, not this one, the 11 people one, which is true, actually. [laughs] This one is also very popular. It’s about when someone have a cardiac arrest, you should use a bow tie or a tie, actually, to fix the issue. It’s actually misinformation.

Audrey Tang: It’s actually wrong, and it shows you exactly how it’s wrong. If you just just teach your friends to flag those, the bot can get back to you, and say whether it’s true or not. Some of it is true, it’s just very sensational. Some of it is false, and then you don’t have to do the explaining. It doesn’t harm your social relationship with your Line friends.

Jing-Yue Yeh: That’s good. The second question was, all the issues will be published on the Facebook, on the website, on the Internet before the law has become law? Every stage will be open?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Jing-Yue Yeh: Essentially the referendum, if we want to use the Taiwan name to join the Tokyo Olympic. Before it became a serious issue by the government...

Audrey Tang: The government doesn’t initiate that, it is citizen initiated.

Jing-Yue Yeh: Right, but China has done something to stop us.

Audrey Tang: What, exactly?

Jing-Yue Yeh: They stopped the 東亞青運.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Jing-Yue Yeh: It’s not a problem yet, but China could do something.

Audrey Tang: Sure. The PRC, of course, they can always do something.

Jing-Yue Yeh: Does the openness come or go?

Audrey Tang: You mean, if we put this referendum in secret, they would not be able to stop us?

Jing-Yue Yeh: Because it’s still in discussion. It’s still in discussion, and China already take this first step before a government can be...

Audrey Tang: If a referendum proposers are doing it in secret, first of all, I don’t think it will mean that the PRC won’t know about it. It’s very likely the PRC will know about it anyway. The second thing is that the countersigning, the signature collection part of the petition, is meant to have people talking about this issue. You can’t really do it in secrecy. It doesn’t really work like that.

Jing-Yue Yeh: Since China has done something, many people thought, "Oh, if we vote that way, then we will harm our support people to join the Olympic games. Maybe we should wait for the result. Then China won’t have enough time to react to that."

Audrey Tang: It is true. It is possible that if the signature collection is not so loud, if people don’t go to the street to collect the signatures, that it will not create such a political pressure so that the PRC has to react. On the other hand, I don’t think our democratic process should be judged based on what PRC reacts or not.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s not a healthy point of view, because everybody can do something. It’s true that I think the electronic signature collection, it will actually be wrote out online. We didn’t have time this time, because of our cyber security auditing laws. It only become into effect next January. We haven’t yet audited the referendum system.

Audrey Tang: Eventually, you will be able to sign a referendum countersignature through electronic means. It will be not exactly secret, but you can do it in your comfort, privacy place. I think it will both make referendum more convenient to propose.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you’re right, it will not be as loud as people going to the street, collecting signatures. Although they are, of course, still free to do that.

Geir Yeh Fotland: They know that they can elect online. I can vote from Taiwan. I don’t have to go to Norway for election. Taiwan, you have to come to Taiwan for election. Why is that?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, that’s an obscure part of Taiwanese law, because we have this idea of household registration. The idea, very simply put, is that people are supposed to be registering a certain household.

Audrey Tang: When they vote, they’re only supposed to go to the ballot box of that particular household, the registration. That’s the root reason of why over-the-Internet voting is not yet enabling Taiwan. We’re considering relaxing that.

Audrey Tang: In many places where it’s not voting for people, but rather voting for budget, or for priority, that participatory budgeting, or iVoting in Taipei, the e-petition system, or the, very soon, the e-referendum signature collection system, these you will be able to do over the Internet.

Audrey Tang: The actual voting for a person part, at the moment, is still tied to the household registration system. Of course, if the household registration system gets an overhaul, if we can say anyone should be vote anywhere, then it will probably start with the referendum.

Audrey Tang: The reason why is that if people vote for their township, for example, but in a place that’s very far away, it’s very easy to see who actually voted for what. Perhaps, only quite a few people live in that particular precinct that has their household registration back there.

Audrey Tang: Referendum doesn’t have this problem, because everybody votes on the same national referendum issues. We will do a lot of experiments. I think the electronic tallying is also another thing. This time, people who work at an election booth, they stay until very, very late to open all the referendum cases.

Audrey Tang: If we have automatic tallying, like in punched cards or in the 2B pencils, and things like that, you can easily use machine to count it. You can also do a human count, in parallel, to verify it. It enables people to very easily see the result right after the referendum.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that takes away some advertisement revenue from the media, but I think democracy makes more sense. Maybe we’ll try that, but with the caveat, the Central Election Committee is independent. I am supposed to say what they will do, but we have provided plenty of advices, and I think they will try it out, first with the referendum.

Audrey Tang: If it works really well, then maybe we’ll move on to other things.

Jing-Yue Yeh: Many people work in China, and if they are allowed to vote through each Internet, don’t you think China will do something to intervene?

Audrey Tang: People have proposed something that is more of a compromise, in the sense that you have to still vote in a booth. Maybe you go to Kinmen, and then you voted in a booth in Kinmen. Over the Internet, through postal, or whatever, it still counts back in your household registration place.

Audrey Tang: That is the kind of compromise position that people have generally agreed on. You’re right, if you’re allowed to do so in a Internet that is controlled by the PRC, there really is no guarantee of secrecy, of who is watching when you are voting.

Audrey Tang: I think voting for electoral candidates -- as in, voting for people -- we still need a lot of time for people to get into the state where people feel they’re secure in doing such voting.

Audrey Tang: Which is why we’re not doing Internet voting for people, but for petitioning, for participatory budgeting, and maybe sometime for referendum in a compromise solution. Maybe we can try those, but not yet, for the president, and for the MPs.

Geir Yeh Fotland: We also can vote ahead in Norway, three months ahead. If I’m in Norway, three months before the election, I can vote before I leave.

Audrey Tang: That’s another good solution. In the sense that if you do Internet voting that is ahead vote, you can always -- even though people are watching over your shoulder, and things like that, giving you bribery, or whatever -- you can always at an election day, still go to the booth and override your previous voting.

Audrey Tang: Far as I know, Estonia is doing something like that. Again, it requires every party’s mathematicians convince their party, head of their party, that this makes sense. At the moment, we’re not quite there.

Eivind Røssaak: Is this Social Innovation Lab part of your project?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Eivind Røssaak: It was started by you?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’m technically in charge of the National Social Innovation Plan, yes.

Eivind Røssaak: This compound here, it’s a very interesting place. I’ve never been inside this area before.

Audrey Tang: Lots of fun.

Eivind Røssaak: Yeah, lots of fun. Then when I came in through one of the gates, here, I was met by this odd sign...

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Eivind Røssaak: ...it said art and political warfare.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, because it used to be a headquarter of the air force. Literally, it’s political warfare, it is all the military drills, it is the command center.

Eivind Røssaak: I can’t read that Chinese character there, but it’s a very strong statement, political warfare.

Audrey Tang: That’s what it means.

Eivind Røssaak: That’s what it means? Really, even in the original, too?

Jing-Yue Yeh: It means propaganda.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Propaganda and everything.

Eivind Røssaak: It was used for that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and before, in the Japanese rule, here was the industrial technical research facility. It has a very multilayered history.

Eivind Røssaak: What’s going to be done with these buildings, and is there any plans for developing this?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so in this part, the Social Innovation Lab, anyone who can say which sustainable goals that they’re working on, they can use this place for free, for their activities. It opens until 11:00 every night.

Audrey Tang: Every time, maybe if you go around around weekends and so on, sometimes you can see markets and like a bazaar kind of thing. You can always see it displaying one of the 17 goals. Our only requirement for people using here as coworking space, or holding events, is identifying which sustainable goals they’re working on.

Audrey Tang: That’s the only requirement. We don’t charge them for money or anything like that. That’s the SI Lab. It’s optimized for sustainable goals. The rest of the TAF, it’s called the Contemporary Culture Lab, or the C-Lab.

Audrey Tang: They have Social Innovation as one of their pillars, but they also work on actually national memory. National memory people, digital art people, digital culture people, and so on, they are also there, and each one has a different building.

Eivind Røssaak: In these?

Audrey Tang: If you walk over there, you will see some national archive people, I think, working on the digital preservation and participatory culture. The whole point is that this place is not for the finished product of art or culture.

Audrey Tang: This place is where creators create. You’re supposed to go here and participate in the making of the projects.

Eivind Røssaak: It seems like the art exhibition over here, too, was very unusual.

Audrey Tang: It’s very participatory.

Eivind Røssaak: Exactly, that’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: That’s the point.

Eivind Røssaak: It’s great stuff. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Feel free to tour around.

Eivind Røssaak: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Geir Yeh Fotland: I’m born in Taiwan, and my mother took a lot of photos from the 1950s. [quiet chatter] Maybe the National Library would like to have my slides.

Eivind Røssaak: I hope we can digitize it.

Audrey Tang: Wow. That’s great. Feel free to join the National Memory Project.

Jing-Yue Yeh: Many of the regional missionaries, they took also a lot of photos. The photos now are in Norway. The children and grandchildren don’t know what to do with it.

Audrey Tang: Just digitize it, and put it somewhere. Cool.

Eivind Røssaak: About the digital memory archive, did you have any people in mind?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I do, actually. The C-Lab people, they actually work as a kind of exhibition display space for the National History Memory. One of the people working on this plan, Ilya Eric Lee, we started working together in 2000, and with Shu Lea Cheang, the artist currently representing Taiwan in the next Vienna Biennial. In any case, we worked quite closely back in the early 2000s.

Audrey Tang: Ilya is now working with many of those visions, not just the C-Lab, but also the presentation of the National Memory or History, and so on. I am happy to make the introduction.

Eivind Røssaak: Shall we just do it on email?

Audrey Tang: Email works well. Feel free to just email me, anytime.

Eivind Røssaak: I’ll do that. Thank you very much. I’ve been to a conference here.

Audrey Tang: It’s just fine.

Eivind Røssaak: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: All right, cheers. Thank you.

Eivind Røssaak: Thank you.

Geir Yeh Fotland: Thank you. Is your T-shirt displaying the 17 global goals from United Nations?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.