Audrey Tang: OK, is there anything I can help you with?

Javier C. Hernández: Do you mind if I record?

Audrey Tang: No, not at all.

Javier C. Hernández: I was interested in getting to learn more about your work. I’ve read about it obviously a lot online, and was curious kind of what you were finding here, and what you focusing on in this year rolling, and how you founded PDIS.

Javier C. Hernández: What sort of issues have you been most interested in, and what sort of solutions are you working on? Maybe, if you want to start by giving me a broad overview, then we can go from that.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Let me close the doors though, so our recording has sound quality. All right.

Audrey Tang: Actually, we’re PDIS.tw, Public Digital Innovation Space, and open government is my primary mandate.

Audrey Tang: So far, our most successful work is work on the radical transparency principles. This not only means that everything that we do is on the record, but we also make the pipeline of the technology underpinning of making such digital workflow possible, into part of the process of the administration, part of the procurement, and also published as playbooks.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, documenting those kind of flow of transparency for other ministries and also local governments. We do a lot of evangelism, lecturing, and workshops with other ministries and local governments. I would say that this is our current focus. Once we have a good transparency system, then we’ll move on to participation here.

Audrey Tang: Civic participation has many different forms. So far, we have a vTaiwan.tw platform that is focused on digital economy. It’s a process that we collaboratively determine the agenda with civil society and private sector stakeholders on issues such as social enterprises, such as we used this platform for Uber and Airbnb before.

Audrey Tang: Also coming up, for example, unmanned aerial systems, sharing economy such as Airbnb, and privacy-related laws, anything that’s related to the digital economy.

Audrey Tang: This is a cross‑sectoral collaboration. The National Development Council has a separate platform called join.gov.tw. This platform allows three kinds of participation. One is e-petition. You may have heard if 5,000 people countersigns, they can enact a petition.

Audrey Tang: We review it every month, and then we select three proposals every month to be intensively collaborated as a workshop every Friday that I brief with the Premier on the next Monday.

Audrey Tang: There’s also a section for regulation 60‑days pre‑announcement discussions.

Audrey Tang: There’s now also a section where all the major projects of the Executive Yuan is published online with its monthly deliverables and allocations, so people discuss on those items. All this input gets fed back to the accountability system, which we are now trying to string together.

Audrey Tang: For example, the presidential promises, the upper‑level projects. There’s also the eight‑year mid‑ to long‑term projects. This is the context under which the ministries‑level projects happen.

Audrey Tang: The full life cycle between these ministry projects, which then also divides to scientific and technology and everything else. They also have their own review boards, which we are now trying to get civil society and private sector’s input with its own review committee. Then the execution, the monthly auditing of those projects.

Audrey Tang: Between all these points, we use this platform to feedback the input from the civil society here, so that it builds an accountability of why exactly is this policy being made, why exactly is this decision being done, provides this whole context, instead of just focusing on one month or so.

Audrey Tang: After this, we work on inclusion, which means to take these abstract numbers, pictures, business information systems, or whatever, and then build ‑‑ using VR, interactive theater, whatever ‑‑ to make the stakeholders who are not so mathematically or equally inclined.

Audrey Tang: Nevertheless, the idea is to enable more people to participate in understanding there’s going to be a park constructed around you, and you can practice deliberation meaningfully, like attending a meeting, but scalable. This is the goal, and these are just the means.

Audrey Tang: The end goal is that we want to include more stakeholders in the policy‑making process, but we start by just making the process itself transparent and making it aware to the general public. This is the circle that we’re working on.

Audrey Tang: We’re pretty sure on how to do this. We are basically making experiments, some successful and some not so successful. Once we get some good practices, or even best practices, we will just feed it back to the existing accountability system, and make this transparent, as well.

Audrey Tang: This is our guiding principle, but we’re still halfway there.

Javier C. Hernández: Very well thought through it seems, developing it. What is your sense of the biggest obstacles in including everybody?

Audrey Tang: Quite a few. The very fact that there is no easy, automated way to turn PowerPoints or turn the dialog that we’re having into structured data is one of the obstacles.

Audrey Tang: This is where machine learning can help a lot, by just capturing everything that happens during a meeting, maybe recorded through a VR camera, and enabling people of different cognitive modes to process this in the form that they want. It might be as a transfer of ideas, interactive infographics or whatever.

Audrey Tang: Currently, all these are manually done, but because there are many parts of it that two groups of people would produce the same results, that means that it’s automatable. Our focus this year is to automate as much of these processes as possible. That will be the main technical hurdle.

Audrey Tang: We don’t yet have the technology to automate. We need to use human labor for many processes. Once this is fully automated, it means that it costs little to nothing to allow participation. Then we can meaningfully say we will now have access to every policy.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, it’s just on regulations and laws pertaining to the economy and administratively important spending projects, maybe 60 of them, and petitions over 5,000 people. All of these have a threshold, but as the costs lower, we can also lower the threshold, so then more and more topics can go on, done in a participative way.

Javier C. Hernández: Can you offer a few examples of what you envision this adding up to? Maybe a certain type of meeting that, right now, is behind closed doors or doesn’t allow much public participation could be opened up. If you just have some specific ideas...

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say they’re behind closed doors. If you look at all those large meetings in the past year, there’s many that are open to a lot of things like pension reform, and also deliberations around importing of Japanese food.

Audrey Tang: Currently, the judicial reform one is ongoing. Previously, there was the pension reform one. It’s not like the current administration doesn’t want public forums. It’s mostly that the cost is high, so it only selected the most prominent ones.

Audrey Tang: Those tend to be the most controversial ones, so many participants would elect to destroy the process, instead of participating in the process. We see a lot of mobilization around trying to get people who disagree with them unable to enter the deliberation.

Audrey Tang: That’s become their favorite tactic, and just downright destroying the furniture, the proceedings, and so on. Due process is what we already are doing. There’s no obstacle in adopting it, but convincing the civil society that the due process actually leads to predictable results is difficult, because trust is quite irrational.

Audrey Tang: We can say the government trusts the people or starting to trust people, but it doesn’t mean that the people trust back immediately. They don’t have any reason to. We had 30 years of martial law. [laughs] There’s no reason why they’d suddenly trust the government.

Audrey Tang: What we’re doing now is focusing on smaller scale things. Just last Friday was around whether motorcycles should be allowed to take the left lane from a two‑lane road, instead of having to do a hook turn, which is a Taiwan special. This is concrete. This is controversial, but this is not pension reform controversial. [laughs]

Javier C. Hernández: Not yet.

Audrey Tang: Not yet, that’s right. We invited motorcycle riders, the association of the large vehicles, the Ministry of Transport, and so on, and worked very intensively for four hours, allowing everybody to voice their concerns.

Audrey Tang: For the non‑bikers there, like me, they had also the first point of view recording of how it’s like to drive motorcycle, so we that can build empathy for each other. We allowed online calling. There’s thousands of people watching the livestreaming, providing for input. We collaboratively decided on a course of action that everybody can live with.

Audrey Tang: What I mean is that we start small, like 5,000‑people level, and gradually build that trust, instead of just having the most controversial, the most difficult. I wouldn’t say that if we do a, for example, same‑sex marriage forum we would get meaningful results. We would need to get people’s habit into this kind of process for this situation.

Javier C. Hernández: In terms of how you incorporate this into your own role as a minister here, maybe you can talk a bit about your daily life and how you incorporate these principals into how you manage a government office.

Audrey Tang: The PDIS team is all volunteers and I’m an anarchist, meaning that don’t give commands. Everybody just determined which part of this roadmap they’re interested in, and then just go ahead and do it. Every week we have a roadmap ‑‑ I mean quite literally a roadmap, so you can see that we have...and that’s last week.

Audrey Tang: We’ve been doing this for half a year now, so everybody knows where everybody else is on the weekly roadmap. It’s a very dynamic, organic team. If there’s anything that really needs doing, and nobody’s willing to do it, I do it. [laughs] That’s how I run the team.

Audrey Tang: As for the larger picture, I think because we have a participation officer, every ministry, for 32 ministries ‑‑ some ministries have up to four of these people ‑‑ we’re just trying to spread this process through collaborative workshops and so on. Then they can also establish these teams back in their ministry.

Audrey Tang: Some of them, like Interior, or Health and Welfare, or Agriculture, they already have something like that, because they need to face angry people on the street or on the network all the time. But some of them are more internal‑facing, and they didn’t need to do that before.

Audrey Tang: One of our projects is Internal Join, where we get all the career public servants and contractors a forum also to do their own petitions. Once they reach 300 people, also they will be given the same treatment that is pertaining to career public servants’ welfare. There will be a new platform, naturally, that will enjoin. We’re calling it Internal Join.

Audrey Tang: The stakeholders will be public servants themselves, and they can feel the [laughs] thrilling challenges of being an advocate and activist and calling to petition and so on. That’s how we’re trying to spread a culture, but getting career public servants to also see the value of participation by improving their own welfare and maybe forming labor unions or associations.

Javier C. Hernández: What are your models? As you look around the world and see what kind of work has been done out there, are there any government or communities...

Audrey Tang: I was raised in Internet Engineering Task Force culture and the Free Software culture. These are the models that I look for, and, of course, the ICANN, the whole Internet governance model. This is what this is modeled after. This is essentially a set of units with hobbyists and telecom operators.

Audrey Tang: It’s not part of the UN, it’s not endorsed by any country, but nevertheless has the legitimacy of allocating domain names all over the world and determining how the Internet operates.

Audrey Tang: They do this by practicing radical transparency and participation in full accountability for the stage you’re in. They’re still working on inclusiveness. This is very hard, but this is what I look up to.

Javier C. Hernández: What about any other governments that have tried these efforts? Are there any countries?

Audrey Tang: There are cities. There’s many city‑level collaborations. I worked with Madrid very closely, and also have some interactions in Barcelona and Bilbao, basically all over Spain, after their Occupy. They tend to be after Occupy.

Audrey Tang: It was Paris after the Nuit Debout, with Wellington, after Occupy Wellington, with Iceland after the Pirate Party stuff. Inevitably, it was after the Occupy, and then of course, now South Korea, after the Candlelight occupy.

Javier C. Hernández: When you look at this situation around the world, how to you characterize the public interest in becoming a greater part of the process and this anger and dissatisfaction with the current status quo that’s arisen?

Audrey Tang: I think it was very aptly characterized as a so‑called disempowerment of citizens. On the one hand, Reddit and social media in general let everyone know that they’re not alone in caring about something, so they formed solidarity very quickly, by swiftly trusting each other. That’s in common time.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, the agenda‑setting power, especially in bureaucratic governments, contributed to this part. This wasn’t a problem, because people didn’t have an alternate model of working together. Now the civil society, and increasingly the private sector, is adopting this horizontal model of communication.

Audrey Tang: As people get more agenda‑setting power, both in their private lives, and also in their non‑profit contributions communities, it’s really just the public sector that’s lagging behind. They’re still operating under the old Waterfall, top‑down model of things.

Audrey Tang: That leads to a lot of anger, as you said, because that’s the last bastion that wouldn’t change. Governments around the world are feeling this pressure. It used to be that they can set the agenda of how the nation is developing, but now we’re maybe 10 percent of this direction‑setting power.

Audrey Tang: I think the most important thing for a career public servant is to give up the illusion that we can control the national agenda in a meaningful way, and then also trust the collective intelligence more, instead of characterizing people as ignorant or populous masses or whatever. We’re way past that now.

Javier C. Hernández: How’s it going in terms of convincing other people, people like career civil servants, who spent their lifetimes in government and are perhaps very accustomed to that agenda‑setting role, and perhaps aren’t as comfortable with radical transparency, participation, and so on? What’s your own sense in working with people like that?

Audrey Tang: I think that one of the keys here is the property of paper. Paper is by its own merits, secretive. It’s very hard to distribute, and so on. It’s very easy to annotate and shred the paper. If all your personal experience is about paperwork, none of this comes natural, because copying takes effort and distribution meant collection is very difficult.

Audrey Tang: I think what we’re doing here is, instead of saying, "open government for everything," we’re just saying, "We’re doing away with paperwork," and introduce a lot of OCRs, scanning machines, all sorts of electronic equipment, so that we can try to simplify the workflow.

Audrey Tang: Previously, what we called an e‑government approach, is mostly just replacing every stop’s paper with computer and keyboard, but the workflow itself doesn’t change. There’s still the one‑way approval.

Audrey Tang: There’s also still a chain of command. You have email instead of snail mail, but you still only mail to your boss and underlings, and it doesn’t really change the bureaucracy. What we’re doing now is a simplification of workflow.

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to fill in the same paper or electronic paper form anymore, because the system itself captures your work and automatically generates a report for you. We simplify a lot of those accountability procedures, just by introducing the electronic workflow system.

Audrey Tang: We also established a global workspace, where all participation offices in all the ministries share the same channel. If you’ve used Slack or any of those groupware, it’s natural to you, but it’s not natural to career public servants to work in a, by default, "working out loud" way.

Audrey Tang: All these measurably lightens their load, because they don’t have to spend hours figuring out who said what, where, why. It provides a context. What I’m saying is that I’m just introducing those enterprise social tools, collaborative tools, inside the government, to speed up their work, to make them enjoy their work more.

Audrey Tang: Then this year, going to do machine learning for many of the redundant work, so that they can go home earlier. Just incidentally, this would enable the government process, but we’re not selling this. We’re selling the simplifying work premise.

Javier C. Hernández: What sort of feedback have you gotten?

Audrey Tang: Pretty good. Previously, back in the paperwork era, like we just had a case yesterday between the Judiciary Yuan and the administration here. It used to be that prosecutors and the judges, they need to ship paper records of court all around.

Audrey Tang: Those are sealed, so it’s impossible to do a full text search on a sealed paper. You have to call it back, and then float it around. For those larger cases, it can fill up to a room, so it’s a nightmare for everybody involved.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, the best they have done so far is to have a paper copy machine to ship physical paper copies, so that both have a copy going forward. Why not exchange PDFs? Well, you know, PDFs, they may contain errors, handwritten text, or there may be not quite A4 papers.

Audrey Tang: There may be out‑sized papers. Most of all, they see it as a zero‑sum game, "I spent one hour to save you an hour. Why should I do that?" My intervention was mostly first introducing high‑speed scanners, that there should be no‑brainer, [laughs] but it’s just not part of the plan.

Audrey Tang: Then also introduce a workflow, where both sides saving more time by the end of it. None of this is rocket science. It’s basically just saying, "We’re trying to think outside the paper workflow." I tend to do this with all those different ministries.

Audrey Tang: The reception has been good, because people were really looking at an opportunity to redesign their workflow. It was just they were not authorized, because their bosses or the ministers were not advocating this.

Audrey Tang: People wouldn’t want to appear as slacking by proposing this thing that reduces their workload, because...I don’t know why, actually. It’s related to the culture here, where if a minister doesn’t go home, none of the staff in the office goes home before the minister, for some reason, which is why I always go home by 5:00 or at least 6:00.

Audrey Tang: This is basically setting a culture that says, "You know, it’s OK to save time." Then people are actually very happy.

Javier C. Hernández: Have you been systematically going through the various ministers’ offices and looking for these kinds of time‑saving suggestions?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I have this "ask me anything" platform, ask.pdis.tw. People with all the ministries, they can just submit their ask there. I try to process it with the minister.

Javier C. Hernández: Do you have any other colorful examples of things that you’ve trouble‑shooted for them or introduced?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, there’s plenty. There’s an upcoming one about agricultural products, like cabbage. Last year, during the typhoon season, there was this controversy about the so‑called cabbage worms, people stockpiling cabbages and trying to speculate.

Audrey Tang: All of this is rumors, because the agriculture committee has not enough space. It only reported upwards to the reporting chain, so it does not contain everything. The Weather Bureau, the Agricultural Committee, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Finance, they all have a set of data, but they only report within their own silos. They never link together.

Audrey Tang: What we’ve now done is a website that’s actually already operating. They will announce it by April 29, I think. It’s basically just a dashboard with six pre‑defined graphs, but you can also select your own graph.

Audrey Tang: You can see the cabbage production, the predicted production, and then also they print daily release of stockpiles, and also importing lambdas and so on. It’s very complete, and then with the market, ongoing prices for Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung, so we’ve also worked with local governments.

Audrey Tang: We managed to convince everybody to release their relevant data as open data, so that we can curate everything in the same interface there. It’s basically radical transparency to end speculation. It is very similar to the real price registry of households that the Minister of the Interior did to combat housing speculation a few years before.

Audrey Tang: This is very interesting, because when we were working on that case, everybody assumed that the Committee of Agriculture wouldn’t release the data, this frozen stockpile that they release every day to control the price.

Audrey Tang: Everybody assumed that they wouldn’t release the daily budget, exactly how much they pushed to the market to regulate the price. When I really get down and work with them, they finally agreed that actually it’s OK to release yesterday’s prices, because it’s already done its job regulating the market.

Audrey Tang: It’s important, because it’s important that we see the trend, year over year, or three‑year running average for everybody. Then Taipei City, initially they didn’t want to release their markets, saying that it will imbalance the market price, but Taichung and Kaohsiung agreed, so they started pressuring them to give in.

Audrey Tang: The whole point is that this is how we’re getting back to the storytelling devices. Previously, it is the government says this, the expert says that, the media says that. This is objective. This is not the government’s interpretation. This is what happened out in the field, on the market.

Audrey Tang: Just by having all the information in the same place, we try to end the room for speculation. The storytellers can be anybody, or they can just use the graph here and draw the conclusion of their own, but people can always go back and check for themselves what those numbers mean.

Audrey Tang: We’re also doing the same thing for the disaster recovery, for the water, electricity supply, earthquake prediction, everything. That’s another project. There’s many projects like this. They all share the same structure.

Audrey Tang: They used to have different silos of data, which are presented on the Web page that is daily designed for the higher‑ups, and we have many, many silos that look like this. What we’re now doing is that we are saying, "You need to open up the common API endpoints here, and then aggregate it to a common pool of data.u.tw."

Audrey Tang: So that people can draw their own conclusions based on the aggregated data here. The civil society and the private sector can also contribute to the data, so this is all bi‑directional relationships.

Javier C. Hernández: In pushing for this kind of change, do you encounter any kind of skepticism initially, about switching to a model where people have more access to this kind of data themselves, directly, rather than having some sort of compilation or characterization...?

Audrey Tang: I went in saying that we’re not touching personal data in any way, not even remotely. No, there’s been no resistance, because all this is defined by the FOIA law here. We have a FOIA law, 2005.

Audrey Tang: It says very clearly that unless it’s trade secret, national security, or privacy‑related, everything else should be open, by default, proactively, not just when people request it. We have previous knowledge, legal underpinnings, so no, there’s no resistance.

Javier C. Hernández: In going through something like this, what is your sense of Taiwan and its unique history, and how that influences what people are looking for, what they’re seeking from their governments, as it relates to transparency, participation?

Audrey Tang: I’m the last generation to remember the martial law. My brother four years my younger doesn’t remember it anymore. During the martial law, there is completely no transparency. It’s entirely opaque. You can’t even criticize the government. It’s called the White Terror.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, it’s a little bit of reaction formation, actually, people suddenly enjoying the complete speech freedom, press freedom, assembly freedom. They coincided with computers, like personal computer appeared the same year when martial law was lifted.

Audrey Tang: There is a strong association in the society of the electronic technology and democracy, really. In the first presidential election coincided with World Wide Web adoption in ’96. There is a strong association that those free software tools that we use are to ensure freedom of speech, expression, and assembly.

Audrey Tang: People will not tolerate token transparency. They know what token transparency is, because the martial law era did that. They wouldn’t accept anything that tried to roll back the freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Audrey Tang: The transparency implicitly, I think, in Taiwan, main participation that people need to get into the part of the process in order to feel the transparency. I would say that it’s just this generation, essentially, seeing ourselves as the first generation to really have freedom of speech in this way. We don’t want to lose it. We will just want to experiment.

Javier C. Hernández: Maybe you can just talk a bit about growing up. I know you very quickly as a child became very interested in computers and that kind of thing. How have you seen attitudes shift within Taiwan just about the use of technology and the desire for transparency?

Audrey Tang: The ’80s in Taiwan and early ’90s, there was no direct presidential election yet. It took seven years. Those seven years, there’s a lot of NGOs, a lot of civic movements that fights for equality, or for human rights, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They all used digital technologies, because that’s what’s hip at the moment. Taiwan being a Silicon island that produce personal computers, the equipment is cheap. It’s easily accessible. I think computers are seen as a liberatory device pretty much during the entirety of the ’80s and the ’90s.

Audrey Tang: The most important social movement activities were all VCR‑recorded. There’s this pipeline of self‑media or civic media in the ’80s and ’90s. I would say that it’s seen as liberatory, liberating technology. The Internet didn’t become a shopping mall overnight.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, they were used very much for activism and for civic society to organize themselves. We don’t have Amazons or Facebooks here, but there’s a lot of very large civic society organizations, and NGOs, and grassroot movements.

Javier C. Hernández: It’s obviously been a couple years in which we’ve seen a lot of political activism here in Taiwan, and a lot of young people especially getting involved.

Javier C. Hernández: I’m curious, thinking through your lens of somebody who studies participation and governments, I’m curious, how do you characterize that movement ‑‑ Occupy, etc. ‑‑ in the context of Taiwan’s history, and where do you see the youth today, especially, and what they’re seeking from the government?

Audrey Tang: Like all young people, they seek meaning, and create a meaningful life. Internet being a great way for people to meet kind like‑minded people, I think it’s done tremendous good for young people of all kinds to find like‑minded people, not just within Taiwan, but globally as well.

Audrey Tang: There’s a very strong sense of connectedness in Taiwan’s youth that we’ve not seen before, where the generation before me were raised looking, I would say, at the industries, especially the manufacturing or service industries here, they have very clearly defined verticals.

Audrey Tang: There was not so much interdisciplinary work. People were educated to join one particular field to work in one particular position. Now, the youth are more and more working across the traditional fields. They’re also switching jobs much more.

Audrey Tang: Even public servants, they used to be once you get into public service, they would get out. Nowadays, people are switching in and out more and more. We’re seeing a lot more cross pollination between youth people, which is great, because then they apply different science views to also the different thinking they have outside of the government.

Audrey Tang: They go back a change the government in a way that fits better with the collaborative tools, the collaborative spirit. We’re seeing a lot more young Korean public servants to maybe take a sabbatical and then do some collaborative work.

Audrey Tang: We’re also seeing so‑called civic actors that just saw something that the government really doesn’t do well, and then try to form NGOs, or even a social enterprise, and then try to fill in the gaps that the government doesn’t do. Like Tzu-Chi, it’s huge. It does a lot of administrative work on health and welfare.

Audrey Tang: There is also many, many medium and small ones in the voluntary sector, that fills particular niche in the society. I think Taiwan’s unique in that the government doesn’t see itself as an all‑encompassing government.

Audrey Tang: I guess it’s not that special if you’re in Europe, but in Asia it is unique in that the government is comfortable with itself changing gradually, using less power to assert itself. That creates opportunity for young people in and out.

Javier C. Hernández: One thing that I know you’ve spoken about in recent articles in your interest in disinformation or fake news. I’m curious if you could talk just a bit about that phenomenon, how you see it in manifesting in Taiwan, and what you’re doing about it.

Audrey Tang: The lack of transparency is the soil of rumors. If you hear bad things spoken about your friend, and you meet that friend every couple of days for basketball or for movies, then there’s no room for rumor to grow. You just call your friend saying, "Hey, I am hearing this gossip about you."

Audrey Tang: There’s no room for rumor to grow. If there’s a general distrust between people in government, and the government doesn’t practice transparency, then of course there’s room for rumors. There’s always been rumors like that.

Audrey Tang: I think most important thing is critical thinking, which is why media literacy is in our new K-12 curriculum. It’s about critical thinking while making different perspectives assume perspective, practicing empathy and checking sources, like all journalistic training starting from the first grade all way through grade 12.

Audrey Tang: We’re not teaching it as a class. We’re incorporating into how every class is taught. I think that’s the core, the media literacy thing. For the people who’s already out of K12, I think what’s important for is everybody, not just government, to practice inclusion.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that we release news or release what we’ve seen in the world in a form that is easily understandable by people. We have to react timely to people’s inquiries, and not just during typhoon sessions.

Audrey Tang: Say we published this only during typhoon sessions. There will be rumors saying that this is fake. This is fabric, whatever. What’s important is that it’s published in April and also May, and also June, and July.

Audrey Tang: By the time come in August, people will learn, saying this is to be trusted, that it’s all the data and how it came from. It’s well‑audited. If we just selectively publish this over typhoon, it would not be trusted as much. A background of transparency is also very important.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s pretty much it. I’m not as worried about rumors as some other people.

Javier C. Hernández: Have you seen any examples of disinformation or rumors spreading in Taiwan that have proved dangerous or annoying?

Audrey Tang: Annoying, for sure, but dangerous, not so much.

Javier C. Hernández: Do you find that the media literacy curriculum, that it... You mentioned it’s grounded in some principles of journalism. How do you teach, when you think about teaching young people especially, how to interact, and how to evaluate sources that are... How do you think about that challenge?

Audrey Tang: We took a page from how the French is teaching philosophy, for example. It’s not about indoctrinating the great Confucius or Laozi. It’s about being able to argue meaningfully, and to concede different viewpoints, different arguments.

Audrey Tang: While the course is being developed, mostly by journalism experts, I think the idea is to question the teachers, and for the teachers to stop assuming a source of all truth, which doesn’t work, anyway. People, now the student use their phones to check Wikipedia.

Audrey Tang: It’s impossible to monopolize the truth, anyway. For the teacher to gradually become not somebody who teaches, but just as somebody who facilitates learning. Once the teachers assume this role, and then we’ve designed empowerment costs for teachers, also, people can then see the student‑teacher relationship is more important relationship.

Audrey Tang: Once they do that, the students can then form equal dialogues or conversations among themselves, and the teacher just happens to be someone who studies. I think that’s the fundamental thing about K12, because in Taiwan, experimental education has been legal for years.

Audrey Tang: There’s all sort of different experimental teaching methods already proven itself in Taiwan. When we did a K12 curriculum change last year, we incorporated a lot of proven techniques that’s already got adoption in the experimental education community and integrated into the K12 teaching.

Audrey Tang: I think having autonomous students is the ultimate goal, and indoctrination is the furthest from it.

Javier C. Hernández: In the remaining time, I just would love to talk more about you personally, and how this fits in your career work. I’m curious, we talked a bit about this, but what do you see as what motivates you, and has motivated you throughout your career, and how does this fit into that, this current role?

Audrey Tang: I’m interested in autonomy myself. I dropped out of high school. It means that I really treasure making contributions to not specific people, to just pretty much everybody. I’m not a nationalist. I don’t think of my contributions as pertaining to Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I see Taiwan as being a geographical feature on which this happens, but nothing more or less. Taiwan’s been around for 4 million years. That’s way before human beings, and it will continue to exist without us.

Audrey Tang: Preserving the ecosystem is also important. What I’m saying is I’m mostly a digital minister for fun. I find great joy in implementing all this. To me, it was an experiment in how far one can go without taking or issuing commands in the government. So far, it’s gone pretty far.

Javier C. Hernández: How much interaction do you have with the top levels of government there? I know you’re a minister. Do you meet regularly with people like Tsai Ing‑wen?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. There’s presidential meetings, of course. There’s also monthly review meetings. There’s also weekly meetings every Monday with other ministers without portfolio and every Thursday with ministers of ministries and so on. There’s very regular communication.

Javier C. Hernández: How would you characterize the top leaders of Taiwan feel about having somebody who’s obviously very autonomous believes in a lot of these ideals, that perhaps many people would find more radical?

Audrey Tang: I think they’re happy that I’m a conservative, not a progressive. I mean that I don’t have an agenda. I’m not inflicting my views on other people. If they’re ready, they can join here, and we can work.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying "after three years, everybody has to do this". This would be giving commands. I think people generally find me friendly and easy to work with. In many cases, I’m just an expert adviser, like on the rumor thing.

Audrey Tang: I am not in charge of that, but they asked my technological input or education input. For things which are not mandate, I am also just working with volunteers, people with real issues, real problems to solve. It’s all bottom‑up when it comes to this work.

Audrey Tang: I think it poses no threat to any top‑down decision maker. It’s actually to the benefit of everybody. So far, I have not encountered resistance from my peers.

Javier C. Hernández: You’re a friendly anarchist.

Audrey Tang: I’m a friendly anarchist.

Javier C. Hernández: The other thing that’s very historic is that you’re probably the world’s highest‑ranking publicly transgender people. I’m curious, how does that influence just being in this office? Having a face, and somebody who obviously has, for many years, been someone who people look up to in this realm.

Javier C. Hernández: Now, you’re in government. I’m sure that’s brought of lot of inspiration, perhaps, to people who are...

Audrey Tang: I’m happy about it. I don’t feel that I can represent transgender people in general. My own experience growing up, because the body’s testosterone level naturally is about the average of human beings. I don’t really belong to either camp, chemically speaking.

Audrey Tang: I don’t even have a strong affiliate to either gender. I wouldn’t say that I speak for the transgender people, as if you’re another gender. It’s nothing like that. I’m mostly just non‑conforming, generally speaking.

Audrey Tang: For all this work, computers doesn’t care whatever the gender one is. I think it’s just natural to me. So far, people seem to find my natural attitude very reassuring. It’s not like I will get offended.

Javier C. Hernández: How do you think about Taiwan in terms of its progress in welcoming people who perhaps don’t identify with a traditional gender?

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan’s extremely friendly in that. The Aborigines already had those fluid or non‑binary traditions.

Audrey Tang: Also, with the ethnic Han people here, I think there’s less physical differences among sexes in ethnic Han people than Caucasian people, for example, that also contributes to a more equal relationship, just physically speaking, of people who practice non‑conformant roles.

Audrey Tang: Also, I think there’s a strong tolerance culture of people who don’t pose a harm to the other people. It’s part Buddhist, part Confucian, but it runs pretty deep. It’s OK to be strange and different here. It’s OK to be celebrated, even outside of the major cities. You can’t say that for many Asian countries.

Javier C. Hernández: Things are much more progressive in that sense. Is there anything else that you wanted to add that...?

Audrey Tang: No, I think we’re good.

Javier C. Hernández: Thanks again for your time, and I appreciate it. I learned a lot.

Audrey Tang: I’ll send a transcript.