Christine Nakamura: As the moderator for the Q&A session, without further ado, please join me in welcoming the honorable Minister Audrey Tang.

Audrey Tang: Thank you folks. I would like the entire conversation to be a Q&A session. Feel free to interrupt me at any time. Just raise your hand, or without raising your hand, just start speaking, [laughs] and then we’ll have a conversation on whatever topic that...whatever you like discussing.

Audrey Tang: I’m honored to share the work that I’ve been doing for two years as the official minister, and actually for two years back as the understudy minister for the previous cyberspace minister to basically make Taiwan a partner in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: Without further ado, I will just launch into my presentation. To remind you again, feel free to interrupt me anytime.

Audrey Tang: I would just like to show you my office. This is my office in Taipei.

Audrey Tang: It’s the social innovation lab. It’s co-created by hundreds of social innovators. This soccer field is from people with Down syndrome, which turns out their excellent visual artists and so on.

Audrey Tang: Basically, I’m a junior high school dropout. I think that’s on the CV. When I was 15 years old, that was 1996, I discovered this new thing called the Wide Web, and that text books that I’m reading were all out of date.

Audrey Tang: I just told my teacher saying I can be either reading these things that were new 10 years ago, or I can be creating things that will be in the textbook 10 years later, because all the professors...

Audrey Tang: ...they don’t know I’m 15 years, so they are all just responding my emails about their preprints.

Audrey Tang: In any case, my teachers said, "OK. Go ahead and we’ll figure at the ministry first." which is why I’m...

Audrey Tang: ...such an optimist in terms of organizational transformation, because then if people really see the value that a new technology can bring at my own experience, is that they can adapt very easily.

Audrey Tang: Also, then, I discovered this wonderful thing called the Internet society, including IETF, ICANN, and the Internet governance system, which is a radically different political system compared to the previous political systems. For me, it’s my native political system, because there will be another six years before I get my voting right.

Audrey Tang: This is actually the first political system I ever encountered that runs on rough consensus, radical transparency, and accountability, of course, but also by voluntary association. The Internet, as all of you know, has no army, nor navy. At the moment it doesn’t report to any state or even in UN ITU. The Internet itself is multistakeholder and is the largest multistakeholder organization around.

Audrey Tang: I’m bringing the same values that I learned participating in the Internet governance and the early World Wide Web culture into politics today. Today, as Taiwan’s first digital minister, we found that it’s actually working pretty well and is transforming Taiwan’s culture from one that is more or less centering to the one that’s more decentering.

Audrey Tang: When I say I work with the cabinet, not for the cabinet, that is because I’m also a part of this movement called g0v. G0v, although it starts in Taiwan, is now everywhere in the world. Just last week, I was participating with Jeffrey Sachs in the g0v Italy launch ceremony. [laughs] They just launched g0v.it.

Audrey Tang: A very simple explanation of g0v is that all the different websites and services in Taiwan ends in gov.tw, as is like other places in the world. For example, the legislation is ly.gov.tw, the environmental agency, env.gov.tw, or the national budget...you get the idea.

Audrey Tang: What g0v means is really just a domain name, g0v.tw. Whenever the civic tech community sees anything that the government does they wants to do better in a more open and collaborative way, they just tell people to change the O to a zero and you get into the shadow government.

Audrey Tang: It solves the discoverability problem. You don’t have to buy Facebook or Google advertisements because we registered this domain name. With this simple hack, we can create a shadow website for each governmental websites.

Audrey Tang: We did that for more than 100 government services. For each one of it we really push the copyright. It’s under Creative Commons Zero, meaning that it’s in the public domain. A result is that, in the next procurement cycle, if this works, the government just merges back.

Audrey Tang: The civic tech community in Taiwan, using this domain and hack, has been operating for more than six years now. We’re one of the largest networks of civic tech in the world. The very first work back in 2012 was a visualization of the government’s budget so that everybody can click into each of those budget items and have a real-time discussion on what people feel about the budget and how it’s used.

Audrey Tang: After I become the digital minister, of course, this is merged back into the government’s system, joined the g0v.tw. It not only powers all the participatory budgets in our municipalities. For the national budget, for all the 1,300 different ministerial projects, each one of it has its KPIs, its procurement, spendings, research, and everything reported quarterly or monthly on this platform.

Audrey Tang: If anyone clicks it and we comment publicly, all the public service comes forward. You don’t have to talk to a journalist, or a city councilor, or a legislator in order to have a real-time conversation with the public service. That’s the spirit of g0v.

Audrey Tang: In software parlance, we call it forking the government, forking meaning taking something that’s already there, going through the direction, learning what was there, but taking to another direction with the intention of merging back into the government system. That’s how we worked with, not for the government.

Audrey Tang: The interesting thing is that it creates a very different culture, because previously the civil society organizations in Taiwan were seen as they have a lot of legitimacy if there was a new democracy. I still remember the martial law. [laughs] I’m the last generation to remember the martial law.

Audrey Tang: Around the time of the lifting of the martial law, around 1980s, and then to our first presidential election in 1996, there’s about a 10-year window where the social sector grew and gained a lot of legitimacy before even the administration itself gained this much legitimacy through its democratic institutions.

Audrey Tang: There’s many well-respected social enterprises, the social sector and so on associations on one side. Then, of course, Taiwan is also well known internationally as somewhere that there’s a lot of very good semiconductors line. The entire vertical industry around the supply chain management of the optics, the 5G industry sits along on the other side.

Audrey Tang: Traditionally, in Taiwan politics, there’s this very strong tension of two different, both very legitimate groups talking to different ministries so that they’re not scared. The invisible rope is the career public service which feels all the tension, but could not talk publicly about it.

Audrey Tang: They have to somehow both organize and arbitrate between those different interests, the social-environmental interests and economic-developmental interests in the society. Around the turn of the century, this model broke down. It no longer works. It’s the same worldwide because of a simple thing called the social media.

Audrey Tang: With the social media, nobody needs a minister or a councilor to organize anymore. You just need a hashtag. With the right hashtag, tens of thousands of people organize randomly. [laughs] Then we can’t really have one council for each emergent hashtag. That’s not going to work.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that because the emergent issues are so new, Uber, the AI ethics conversation, the distributed ledger technology and so on, we cannot have one new agency for each of those emergent issues. It doesn’t work like that.

Audrey Tang: If we still keep working this way, not only will the public service be under a lot of tension. We will be seen psychologically as being very far from the people.

Audrey Tang: Although the distance between people and government have not changed, but people’s feelings has become so much closer to each other that, relatively speaking, the trust in democratic institutions has dwindled. Ironically, in places where the civil society is expanding, the trust has dwindled very fast. In a place where civil society is shrinking, [laughs] they have a different story to tell.

Audrey Tang: In any case, in Taiwan we’re forced to make a different governance system, as I said, which it’s exactly point by point from the Internet collaborative government system.

Audrey Tang: We asked a different set of questions. Instead of asking, "Who is organizing? What is a fair arbitration?" we now ask, "Given our different positions, what are some common goals? If we can discover some common goals, then are there innovations that deliver all those goals together and this spirit of co-creation?"

Audrey Tang: This is why we’re horizontally building across silos all these interesting ideas as a demonstration. I will put our first public demonstration of the collaborative government schema where we occupied the parliament for 22 days back in 2014. It’s called the Sunflower Movement.

Audrey Tang: At the time, the MPs at the time were refusing to deliberate substantially the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, because of a constitutional loophole that I will not go into. In any case, they refused to deliberate that substantially.

Audrey Tang: Because the MPs were on strike, people just occupy the parliament to do their work for them. That’s the legitimacy theory. Instead of demonstration like protesting, it’s a real thing because the g0v community supported people from all the different sides, the 20 NGOs that occupied all the corners around parliament, to have substantial conversation.

Audrey Tang: People talk about environment, about labor, about economic development, agriculture and so on, but we supported the point-by-point discussion methodology. Anyone can use our app in g0v to enter their company number, or the trade they are in, and we show them exactly which part of the CSSTA affects them, and the evidence-based discussion can start from that kind of conversation.

Audrey Tang: People, when they participate in the Sunflower movement, everyday people deliberate on one aspect, on one part, or they cross pollinate across NGOs by the end of each day we have some rough consensus, and we have some points left to discuss, and the next day we discuss these points.

Audrey Tang: Instead of other occupies, where they just diverge into no agenda in particular, over time, this one actually converge after 22 days into five various followed points after which the head of parliament actually agreed. It was a victory.

Audrey Tang: This is a first public demonstration with half a million people on the street that with the right tools, what Clay Shirky would call situational applications, with the right civic attack, people can actually agree on things, even if we start being very ideologically charged.

Audrey Tang: The g0v people at a time were invited into the public service as mentors and as people who actually care about governance, and are invited to train public service into this art of migrating from a paper-based normativity to an Internet-based horizontal data and algorithm-based normativity.

Audrey Tang: In the first case, we’re given using the free software, and free software in Taiwan always mean freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. As we know, freedom doesn’t come from free. All these things are put to test back in 2015.

Audrey Tang: 2015 was the time when Uber started operating using unlicensed drivers and unprofessional licensed cars. All over the world all the red and pink areas are the one that we’re having intense debates like here also, about the private taxi companies and so on, were about a debate back in 2015.

Audrey Tang: Of course, Taiwan is no exemption. There are taxi drivers around the minster of transportation and so on. We thought maybe using the same civic technology but a scale-downed version.

Audrey Tang: We need to get people from different aisles and different values to see the same evidence, because we believe that we are not really targeting Uber as a company, but really sharing economy as a meme. At the time, the meme is like "algorithm dispatch cars better than laws, so we should follow algorithms, not laws."

Audrey Tang: This is like a normativity challenge. After that, we see the passengers and drivers just spreading this virus around. Just like in public health, you cannot really have a negotiation with the flu, because it’s not even in the same category.

Audrey Tang: What we can do is to inoculate people. To make people see all the difference sides through deliberations, so that they will not be subject to divisive campaigns in the future.

Audrey Tang: We use the same focus conversation as we did in Occupy, which is by starting to work with the Wikipedia community to curate a neutral timeline, and the factual basis of data around transportation, and we take a month to ask what people feel about those same facts.

Audrey Tang: That is often ignored in policymaking. We leave no time for people’s feelings. The truth is people may feel differently to the same set of facts. I can feel happy, you can feel angry, and people’s feeling can change over time. It’s very difficult to change people’s ideas or ideologies, but it is possible to change people’s feelings when you stay in the feeling stage for long enough.

Audrey Tang: This is what we focus our conversation around, after which, of course, we have a real multistakeholder’s discussion IETF style, Internet governance style. The best ideas are the ones that resonates with the most people’s feelings. We solve the problem where the language in the government, the private sector, and the academics is different from the people on the street.

Audrey Tang: Without checking feelings, those grow into very different pathways. Ideas in that scenario become ideologies that blinds people to new facts and to each other’s feelings. When we say open data in Taiwan, we don’t just mean open government data. We also mean open social sector data, we also mean open private sector data, we mean open algorithms that can work across all those data silos.

Audrey Tang: Through this kind of curated effort, we use AI-powered conversation to talk with basically all the stakeholders, all the taxi drives, Uber drivers, passengers, and so on, spread through WhatsApp or whatever the same link to the pol.is system for a month.

Audrey Tang: What you see here is basically your avatar among your Facebook and Twitter friends if you log in or among famous people if you don’t. You see where they start this idea of using cars that are private to carry passengers.

Audrey Tang: The beauty of this system is that it’s entirely augmented. It doesn’t add to the risk or to the labor of the public service. It’s entirely augmented, which is whenever rough consensus is reached, we conclude that feeling phase.

Audrey Tang: It’s self-moderating in a sense. It works very simply. Starting from one position, you see one fellow sentiment from the fellow sentiment. You can click agree or disagree. As you do, your position moves to the people clustered around your same reflection.

Audrey Tang: Mathematically speaking is to say a claim is clustered and dimensionally reduced to two-dimension principal component. This is like we’re proving the math. After answering a few agree or disagree, you can also show your own feelings for other people to agree or disagree.

Audrey Tang: What it doesn’t have is a reply button. Without a reply button, it’s impossible to troll people. It’s impossible to post cat pictures or make ad hominem attacks.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t agree with sentiments, the only thing you can do is propose something more nuanced, more eclectic that you hope will resonate with more people. Very interestingly, that makes mobilization really easy. We don’t have to pay for user study groups and so on, because people naturally call on your families and your friends to ideate the feelings.

Audrey Tang: This one is actually from an experiment we did with partners involving Bowling Green in the US, but it’s the same for all the different conversations we’ve held so far without a lot of conversation on pol.is. People agree to disagree like five things, but that’s it.

Audrey Tang: If you watch mainstream media or social media in some forms, you will think that that’s everything that people talk about. People spend a disproportionate time under the perception that people are different from one another.

Audrey Tang: In this kind of AI part of conversation, people actually spend far more time on the consensus they miss as they discover that they have a lot more in common with people they thought they were enemies, because the social fabric encouraged this kind of consensus statements.

Audrey Tang: This gives an overview effect, that you can check in on everybody’s feelings, and discover that people all care about very similar things. In this kind of situation, we bind ourselves to use the consensus as our agenda.

Audrey Tang: We only talk about things that people has consensus on, and nothing else. That environment, when we live stream this consultation, it’s impossible for the stakeholders to not show up because otherwise, they would be villains of the story.

Audrey Tang: Because all the people who participate are watching the live stream, so people are held accountable by their words. When Uber said, "We will work with all our drivers to obtain professional driver’s license," they cannot take that back. The same for the unions.

Audrey Tang: Basically, when people already have a common will, this is stronger than any party’s political will. People have to be bound by their ideas that respond to those feelings, which makes ratification really quick and really streamlined.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t matter which party is in charge of the government, it just gets ratified because that people find it’s self-consistent. It obviously works, and now the question is can we scale this conversation? Can we make that all municipalities and through evolution, all townships, just run this for their local developments and so on, without resorting to a national scale innovation lab?

Audrey Tang: That is my main work as the official minister. Right after the Uber ratification, I was invited into the cabinet to do the Public Digital Innovation Space or PDIS.

Audrey Tang: Now PDIS very interesting, because my working condition is outsourced, after I get an invitation in September 2016, I started a one-month public consultation period, where everybody got to ask me questions, including journalists and so on, but I only respond publicly, and when I respond to anything publicly, along with the question, it is sent to thousands of subscribers.

Audrey Tang: It’s a public AMA exercise, so that everybody follows on each other’s previous questions. At the end, after one month of consultation, people converge on three pillars of my working condition, which I then use to negotiate with the premiere, saying that, "This is the people’s will. I am just channeling that collective intelligence." I had not a contract, but rather a compact with the cabinet, a covenant if you will.

Audrey Tang: That is the result of the month-long conversation. The three compacts are voluntary association, radical transparency, and location independence. Voluntary association means that I don’t give, or take, any orders from the cabinet.

Audrey Tang: Everything that I do is by the common will of the people who volunteer to join the PDIS office. We have officers from every ministry volunteering to join my office. They rank themselves, they score themselves, their administers still pay their salaries, and I agree with the secretary general, that I will not poach more than one person from each ministry, if somebody want to work with me.

Audrey Tang: In any case, this means that my office itself is the demonstration in multistakeholder governance. The second thing, the radical transparency comes into effect because a lot of lobbyists really want to meet the digital minister. When anyone meets me individually, I always keep the full record, a full transcript.

Audrey Tang: In the case David Plouffe, speaking for Uber at the time, it’s actually on 360 record so that if we put it on a virtual reality glass, you can relive that negotiation and conversation. This is still lobbying, and I’m still meeting with journalists and so on, but it’s for the benefit of everybody. It has to be radically transparent.

Audrey Tang: Even for the internal meetings that I hold at, I’m a chair. I also publish everything that everybody said after 10 working days. As far as I know, I’m the only administrator in the world doing this radical transparency thing, because it’s against the rule of the freedom of information law for all the jurisdictions around the world.

Audrey Tang: All the FOIA law says you can request any information from the government after a policy is made. Before the policy is made, it is a privacy of the public service, and you are not entitled to ask about the tentative discussions before a policy is made, which is the same all around the world.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan’s FOIA law, there is a kind of excuse and escape clause that says if the officials in charge deem that it is good for the public benefit, they may disclose drafting stage materials. That is not often used, because you have to get all the ministries’ and agencies’ approval, all the way to the premiere.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s my working condition, so my working condition is that everything I see is of public interest to release, no questions asked. Because of that, I cannot touch on state secrets. If they run a military drill, I just take the day off. I don’t know where the bunkers are.

Audrey Tang: In exchange of that, all the meetings that I chair, I get to release everything after editing, for 10 working days. That puts a drastically different dynamic between the minister and the public service, because previously, if there is an innovation from public service, and it works out, it’s always the minister’s credit.

Audrey Tang: If it doesn’t work out, it’s always the civil service to blame for not executing very well. It’s the same around the world. With this structure, it’s exactly the reverse. If things works out, the journalist discovers who exactly was the original public service person who proposed this innovation, and they get the credit.

Audrey Tang: If things don’t work out, I’m the only minister in the world doing this, I always take the blame. Because of that, it’s a safe innovation environment for the public service. If they don’t deliver on those innovation because of budget or whatever, the social sector, the private sector can take over exactly where we have left off because you have all the context of policymaking, of our decision.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, we use a cybersecurity hardened...why is this not working? I’m going to have to reconnect. Yes, so we use a cybersecurity hardened working environment, called Sandstorm, which I hope that the visual will return soon.

Audrey Tang: The idea, very simply put, is that we use exactly the same tool that people use in private sector and social sector collaboration. That’s like Dropbox, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Docs, and Kanban, Slack, all the digital tools, except they are free software. They’re running with a cybersecurity-hardened system that is audited.

Audrey Tang: It’s open source, audited by the top white hat hackers for half a year, and saying that, "OK, anything you throw on top of this sandbox system, there’s guaranteed to be no cybersecurity issues." People in public service can write their own apps to order lunchboxes together, whatever, and share it with a single workspace.

Audrey Tang: Basically, anyone with a gov.tw email can use this system for free, and all the innovation that happen in one municipality or in one ministry automatically be listed on this app market for every other ministries to use.

Audrey Tang: People get into this habit of horizontalism of cross-aisle conversation, which is why we have one team of participation officers, or POs, in each ministry, to talk about emergent issues that suddenly become a topic.

Audrey Tang: For example, in this particular case, we have a petitioner through our e-petition system that says the tax filing system is explosively hostile to use for Mac and Linux users because they was using Java applet, which is a deprecated technology. It used to be really good, 10 years ago. It has not changed for 10 years.

Audrey Tang: People’s expectations have arisen, thanks to Apple. People no longer find it bearable to use that particular technology anymore. When he proposed this, 80 percent of the things on the Internet is saying, "The minister of finance should resign or things like that," because really, it’s a bad experience.

Audrey Tang: After our participation officer, not even two days, 36 hours after the e-petition, responded by saying, "Everybody who complains automatically get an invitation to the co-creation workshop two weeks in the future in the financial information sector." Suddenly that turns the atmosphere around.

Audrey Tang: 80 percent of the people started offering constructive criticism. Only less than 20 percent of the people are still saying, "The minister should resign," or something like that, because they really see that their complaints are being turned into co-creation proposals.

Audrey Tang: Eventually, after five co-creation workshops, we co-created next year’s -- that’s this year’s -- tax exporting system. This is a very good example, and we’re redesigning our digital healthcare system, and all the other major systems, maximizing the impact using the same idea and the same portfolio.

Audrey Tang: Basically, this is where we hope our collaboration meetings, just the space itself encourage people to think creatively. Because I’m here every Wednesday, 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, it opens every day to 11:00 PM. It has a resident chef, a kitchen. It’s a really nice and cozy place.

Audrey Tang: If you visit, sometimes you’ll see those self-driving tricycles roaming around from MIT Media Lab. Basically, every Wednesday you can talk to me and say "I want to bring these new," I don’t know, "Sentient beings, non-sentient beings, around to co-create with people," and because it’s all open hardware and all open source.

Audrey Tang: Actually, local college people really loves it to change the light to surround the tricycle, or something like that, to convey how the AI feels about the environment, and to share the data with the people around.

Audrey Tang: We think of AI and autonomous vehicles not as something that’s huge, that’s far away, that’s remote, but rather how wolves and early hominids co-domesticating to dogs and humans. We co-domesticate through a norm co-creation by a lot of this kind of weekly iterated conversations.

Audrey Tang: We turn something like this, into something like this, through the idea of sandbox. I will conclude my talk, just by explaining the idea of sandbox using the terminology from g0v, of a fork of the government.

Audrey Tang: You will notice that all the digital service ideas that I propose are actually not breaking the law, or the rules. It’s just a better delivery, better implementation, and better service, but what if we can take the laws and regulations, and also do the same fork and merge? That brings things to a very different level.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we didn’t invent it. The UK did the fintech sandbox. Singapore adopted it, and so on, but mostly they’re in specific verticals. What about you can challenge any municipal rule? What about you can challenge any national law, other than money laundering and funding terrorism?

Audrey Tang: Other than these laws, what if you can challenge everything? That’s our one-stop shop, sandbox.org.tw. For any innovators, we can pinpoint a social, economic, development, or environmental problem, and say, "That’s because our current regulations and law sucks and I want it to be rewritten in exactly this way."

Audrey Tang: They get a free pass to experiment for that for a year. That is the new innovation system that we install in Taiwan, starting this year. In January, we will pass a platform economy sandbox, so people can rent their private parking spaces, and not be charged the taxation of the parking lot.

Audrey Tang: Fintech technology, fintech Sandbox, so that people can use your mobile sim card for KYC, instead of using their photo ID, or using their telecom bills to calculate the risks of their loans, instead of relying on previous transactional history, of which there are none for young people.

Audrey Tang: Or people can propose that there’s unmanned vehicles, and it’s owned by the ministry of economy. In other countries, they’re owned by ministry of transportation, which will mean that the cars, ships, and drones are of different sandbox rules. For the ministry of economy, it’s all the same.

Audrey Tang: The ministry of economy says you can have cars that flies, and you can have ships that goes on the ground, and so on, as long as it solves a local municipal issue. You get one year to break the law, essentially, and have the law operating in your version, in a limited testing period.

Audrey Tang: If it goes well, then, of course, you can scale out, you can scale up, for another year, and then we’ll have a multisectoral discussion on whether this actually has a positive social impact, or whether it creates negative externalities. If it’s a good idea, it would just become a new regulation after 60 days of public commentary.

Audrey Tang: If it requires a law change, of course, the MPs may want three years, or four years, to deliberate about it. During the deliberation, it’s essentially a monopoly for you, if you continue the business model and so on, while waiting for the parliament to reach its decision.

Audrey Tang: Of course, after the parliamentary merging in the law amendment, of course, we will have competition, but this is a lot of head start. It is not a good idea -- if this is something people decides that it’s really not solving a social problem, it’s probably not a good market fit -- at least it’s open innovation, so the other innovators learn from this mistake.

Audrey Tang: We thank the investor for paying the tuitions for everybody and then, people try a different angle the next time. It builds upon each other. It’s the spirit of open innovation. How do we determine the social issues or environmental issues or local development issues? What does that even mean?

Audrey Tang: When I said, every Wednesday, I’m in the social innovation lab...Actually, every other Tuesday or so, I tour around Taiwan to all the rural, indigenous, remote islands and the other places, to talk with their local social innovators. For example here in Hualien, the indigenous people in Taitung can also teleconference in.

Audrey Tang: Wherever I visit in Taiwan, the 12 ministries involving social innovation are always in the social innovation lab, after enjoying some drinks and food, [laughs] and watch the live stream of me interviewing, in an ethnographic style, the local people’s needs and the local people’s life and so on.

Audrey Tang: Because they see through my eyes and the people there also see the people in Taipei, it creates a connected room between the national government and the very local innovators. Because it’s truly multistakeholder anything that gets asked by any innovators here, usually it’s the purview of multiple ministries.

Audrey Tang: Traditionally, if they had asked the minister of one particular ministry, they would say, "I have to consult with the interior, the health and welfare," and so on, "and the indigenous council before getting back to you," which may be, like, five months afterwards.

Audrey Tang: Now, because all these people are literally sitting next to each other, it’s impossible for them to say, "I’ll have to consult with the minister of the interior," that’s right next to them.

Audrey Tang: They talk amongst themselves and very quickly, after two weeks -- we use two week assay iteration cycle -- they have to either say, "We reinterpret things in your favor, so you can do your experiments without breaking the law," or they will say, "I really have no idea, so you have to enter a sandbox experiment." That’s either this or that.

Audrey Tang: Very quickly, it changed the perspective of the public service, because, previously, when an innovator comes to them to ask for a reinterpretation of existing regulations, it’s either one day to reject them or one week to work the interpretation. Now, it’s either one week to rework the interpretation or one year in the sandbox.

Audrey Tang: Almost always, 90 percent of this time, they choose reinterpreting the regulations. That gives the social innovators a lot more room to have a conversation. If they do do the sandbox thing, of course, we have closed fields for people to view the simulations.

Audrey Tang: Just like in a zoo, you can see those newfangled unmanned vehicles running around in the Shalun Smart Green Energy Science City, which is right next to the high speed rail station in Tainan, so that you can just simulate all those different traffic ideas and so on, and see in real time how they react for an extended period of time before we release these animals for domestication in the wild.

Audrey Tang: At the end of the sandbox period, we run the same AI part of the conversation. We share with everybody the data that it has gathered. We ask what you feel about this year of collaborative experimentation. We ask for the decisions, how the field test have already went and, always, we find the same shape, over and over again.

Audrey Tang: Whether there’s a strong consensus of it remaining in that local vicinity or a strong consensus of saying, please move elsewhere. It’s not the right solution of things. This is a radically new collaborative approach that lowers the risk and time involved for the ministries compared to the bad old days where they work in the silos.

Audrey Tang: When I tour around Taiwan, of course, I also find people taking action without even waiting for the ministries to take action. This is another of the g0v projects the environmental agency. If you change the O to a zero, you get into them, considering environmental agency. This is what people care about, the air quality, PM2.5 in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: More than 2,000 people, actually, installed these in their balconies, in their schools and so on, to get a real-time sensor of their IoT devices but not just IoT. They also upload it to the public cloud, which then uploads it to a distributed ledger to make sure that nobody can modify those numbers after the fact. After that, we see this kind of innovation is very rare in Asia.

Audrey Tang: When I talk to all the UN-related bodies, many other Asian countries tell me that they won’t let this network grow to be 2,000 nodes strong. If it’s 200 nodes strong, they will try to poach the leader to the government. If they refuse, then maybe, they get disappeared because they really challenge the legitimacy of the environmental agency.

Audrey Tang: If the environmental agency group reports one number and your neighbors report another number, of course, you’re going to trust the one that you participated yourself, even though it’s a lower quality sensor. Because of that, it’s very rare in Taiwan because we have an expanding civic space. The government takes the approach of, "we can’t beat them, let’s join them".

Audrey Tang: We manufacture low-cost, high-precision sensors for them, but we also see this as a map of digital gap in Taiwan, a digital divide. We set up points when the people don’t have the resource to go to, indigenous places, places in the mountains.

Audrey Tang: We also talk to the citizen scientists and they say they really want a point here to tell the air pollution from outside Taiwan or from inside Taiwan, domestically. There’s no way the citizen scientists can install an AirBox there, even if they’re very good at drones and so on. It’s impossible to stay there forever. We can because we have wind turbines.

Audrey Tang: That’s electricity generators, power plants, over there. We can install those sensor networks as part of the complementary action. The beauty is this, it’s all open hardware. It’s all open source. It’s on GitHub. You just download, put it onto Raspberry Pi, and then, you can do it yourself, as people have done over the world.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t change the source code, it uploads to the Taiwan network by default, so we kind of have the numbers of all the atmosphere and meteorological data.

Audrey Tang: We have a website dedicated for this, the Civil IoT project at CI.taiwan.gov.tw, that is basically, collective intelligence, meteorological, air quality, earthquake, and disaster prevention, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We have single websites like this, CI for Collective Intelligence, AI for AI Taiwan, SI for Social Innovation, Smart Taiwan for the Smart Taiwan plan, and also, Bio Taiwan. The medical industry says, "You really should call it biomed.taiwan because bio and med are different things." Biomed Taiwan goes to the same website as Bio Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what we’re doing is now is breaking across ministry and municipality and national government because this says nothing about the level of the government or the departments. It is one, single message that is collaboratively curated by everybody.

Audrey Tang: Through this, we solved not just our local social and environmental issues through economic approaches but using the SDGs as a map to unite the efforts together. Just by saying "Taiwan can help", we mean specifically, 17, 18, which is the availability of reliable data that people from across sectors, across jurisdictions, can trust the data.

Audrey Tang: Then, based on the data, we encourage cross-sectoral partnerships. Then, based on that, we make open innovations that we, then, export, not as colonizers but, really, co-creators. Just download it on GitHub and then, we devise something together in a way that has free access to science and technology.

Audrey Tang: When I joined the cabinet two years ago, based on these ideas -- with a contract -- the administration asked me for a job [laughs] description, because they’ve never seen anything like this before. Instead of a job description, I just wrote them a poem, a prayer, which I’m going to read to you as a conclusion.

Audrey Tang: To me, it means the shift from IT or ICT to digital, the shift from the sectors separately as attack or an innovation, or whatever, into the humanity as a whole. This is digital transformation for me. This is, literally, my job description. It goes like this.

Audrey Tang: "When we see the Internet of Things, let’s make it an Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience, and whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let’s keep in mind and always remember that a plurality is here." Thank you so much.

Christine Nakamura: Now, why did I accept to moderate this session?

Christine Nakamura: Anyway, I learned a lot but, in any event, it’s quite fascinating stuff. My first question, I’m going to start with a question. We have prepared questions, but I don’t think any of these count.

Christine Nakamura: My first question is, is it, this collaborative governance approach, does it work because Taiwan is a small, compact jurisdiction?

Audrey Tang: So far, the partners that we work with like Iceland or Madrid or Barcelona, to some degree, and Paris, which is kind of its own country, are always because in the north most to the south most in Taiwan, from Taipei to Kaohsiung, high-speed rail, it’s just an hour and a half. In this kind of place is where people have firsthand experiences.

Audrey Tang: Like when I said we set up a zoo for autonomous vehicles, people can actually take less than two hours always and just get to the zoo. If we say broadband is a human right, we actually deliver. No matter where you are in Taiwan or the rural islands, if you don’t get 10 megabits per second, it’s my fault.

Audrey Tang: Because of this configuration, people can have firsthand experience much easier compared to other jurisdictions with larger landmasses. I do think it’s the necessary condition for innovation but it’s not a necessary condition for the scaling out. You see the AirBoxes being adopted everywhere. It’s just necessary for the initial innovation.

Christine Nakamura: Given Canada’s landmass, I almost think it’s impossible. What do you think?

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, we ran workshops teaching this kind of thing to public service in NYC. Then, this time, just today and tomorrow, we ran a two-day workshop with some people from the city here and from the Ontario government and from the civil society organizations, caring about very different things.

Audrey Tang: We mix them up, so that in each table, we say, "If you see people you already know, please move to another table," so that every table is composed of complete strangers. Our student’s attendance told us that this is the first time that they actually sat down, face-to-face, and talk about governance to its different levels and different sectors in a society.

Audrey Tang: If we can foster that culture here, in a municipality, I’m sure that this collaborative governance model can work.

Christine Nakamura: Any questions?

Audience Member: If we look at what’s happening in the United States with, let’s say, fake news becoming a popular term, even though we have a very public Internet, the reality is, a human can only make one voice but a human that programs can make many voices on the Internet and another person can’t tell the difference between real and not real.

Audience Member: We have mainstream media being told by the president of the United States that it’s fake. Then, we probably have lots of fakeness happening on the Internet. Do you have an idea of how we can move towards something that actually solves that issue? It doesn’t just divide?

Audrey Tang: Actually, I can talk for hours because I just ran a global cooperation training program with the US, just before I come here, on this issue of disinformation. I’m going to pull up the slides and take a couple of minutes, if it’s OK with you?

Audrey Tang: I’m glad that you used the air quotes because both my parents are journalists and I consider the F word when applied to the news, fake news, an affront to journalism. It basically degrades people’s association on people who produce news, so that journalists have to find another word for their work, which is not a natural state of things.

Audrey Tang: I always say misinformation when it is just controversial or not true or intentional, intentional not true but a parody, so it doesn’t actually cause harm. It has to be intentional, and then, false, and then, causing harm. All three conditions must be met before we call it disinformation. Before those three conditions are met, we just call it misinformation.

Audrey Tang: That’s the standard terminology of the Taiwan administration now. We no longer use the F word as of October, this year.

Audrey Tang: It is an administration-level resolution and the president said that in her October 10th speech. Misinformation is, of course, something that is global, that has come on. We see that misinformation affects trust on all the sectors of life, not just the public sector. Taiwan, as I said, is forced to innovate without sacrificing the freedom of speech, and assembly.

Audrey Tang: Just because we still remember martial law, nobody wants to go back there. Freedom of speech is seen as instrumental in nearby jurisdictions but in Taiwan, it’s a core value. Maybe three generations down, it will be seen as instrumental but now, it’s a core value. We need to tackle this problem without hampering the journalists, parody, satire.

Audrey Tang: We came up with this very small but effective idea of timely response on government turf. The idea is that all the platforms the government built, the Join platform, e-petition, budget visualization is the one. If you participate, you have to have an SMS account and an email account. You can remain pseudonymous, but you cannot create 5,000 identities out of the blue.

Audrey Tang: People have some assurance that people who post there are actually human beings. We have a lot of anti-troll and anti-bot technologies deployed on those public consultation platforms. We say to the citizens, "Nothing you said on Facebook is binding. You have to come to the government platform for it to be binding."

Audrey Tang: Of course, it is on the distributed ledger if you really want to audit it. On the other hand, it is binding, and we give a timely response. Within one news cycle, if on the morning news, you see disinformation about the government or anything that we do, by noon, guaranteed, in four hours, you will see a clarification.

Audrey Tang: People learn to term this, not as a real-time tactic game, but as a turn-based game, like bridge or chess. People learn to wait for four hours until noon or if they hear some disinformation at noon, wait for four hours until dinner. The government always come up with a proper clarification that adds our piece to the puzzle and that clarifies the matter.

Audrey Tang: People learn to be patient and not to be taken by outrage. This is a first line of defense. Our second line of defense is what I talk about, it’s roughly speaking, SDG 17, which is open government. If it does escalate to disinformation, what we have found is that it’s because people are doing AB testing on end-to-end encrypted channels like WhatsApp or LINE in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That means that they send people who are most susceptible to conspiracy theories or whatever, and then, basically, test the virility of their message. They do that for weeks before the public search engine or anyone discovers about it. They choose the most viral strain and then, just propagate it on the public media.

Audrey Tang: That’s what they do as a business. Then, the way that we discovered that we can fix the problem is there is a g0v project, also.

Audrey Tang: There is a g0v project for everything...

Audrey Tang: There’s a g0v project, called cofacts. I don’t have automated translation here but basically, it says, "Do you know that your dad is spreading rumors?" If you refresh, it turns into a different, like, "Do you know your colleagues are spreading rumors?" It’s not gender biased in any way. What it is, it is a bot.

Audrey Tang: If you add it to LINE, and you’re working to put it on WhatsApp and other end-to-end encrypted channels, you can add it as a friend on the end-to-end encrypted messenger. You see a rumor or a possible rumor. All you have to do is to send, to forward it to that bot. That bot comes back to you, whether it is true or not.

Audrey Tang: The bot is, literally, called Is It True or Not, 真的假的 in Mandarin. Only about 50k or 60k people in Taiwan have installed this. Because I’m a veteran in spam war, in 2000, that’s exactly how we solved junk mail. We asked a small portion of people to flag to the base of possible junk mails.

Audrey Tang: We built Spamhaus and other projects to collect those flags, so people who receive other mail from the same Nigerian princess or whatever...

Audrey Tang: ...can know that this has been flagged multiple times as junk for other people. It is not by one legislation. It is not by one algorithm. It’s just by people voluntarily putting their time to flag and check for junk mail. Exactly the same is the cofacts.

Audrey Tang: With cofacts, you can see all the trending rumors and all the trending end-to-end encrypted channel things in the current Taiwan population, in Taiwan’s end-to-end encrypted channels. What it does, essentially, it’s not just crowd-sourced fact-checking, but it actually exposes them to the public light before it gets really viral.

Audrey Tang: While they’re still testing it, we can already see what exactly is being tested. We know exactly which groups that it is being penetrated, too. Also, it gives all the rumors a public URL.

Audrey Tang: Just like vaccines is made out of virus strains that lose potency, if it becomes a social object that people can discuss on social media and ridicule how ridiculous this is, then, after it mutates into a more viral strain, people are naturally inoculated against it.

Audrey Tang: We have a fostered culture of people just asking is it true or not to any rumor that is on the Internet. There’s a reliable bot that can check this for them. In public health metaphors, [laughs] we do timely response as a first line defense. If they become disinformation, we have vaccines that basically make social objects out of viruses. It prompts people to do criminal action or whatever.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we have other technology to do law enforcement, as well. We never confuse the three levels. If we apply everything to the law enforcement level, of course then we would curtail the freedom of speech, which is why we have very different stages and different ministries in charge of those three things.

Audrey Tang: This is very condensed version of my talk, but I hope that did answer your question.

Audience Member: Thank you.

Audience Member: Interesting. That’s a good question.

Audience Member: Yeah.

Audience Member: Will you answer his follow-up?

Audience Member: How do you feel about Fox News on that question?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry?

Audience Member: It’s not about rumors on the social Internet, but somebody that propagates that misinformation, like Fox. How does this system deal with that?

Audrey Tang: Mainstream?

Audience Member: Yeah, mainstream.

Audrey Tang: Mainstream channels that creates divisive messages, right?

Audience Member: Take the fake news and propagates that in a broader medium.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, we have two lines of defense. First, I think we’re the first Asian jurisdiction to teach media literacy as part of basic education.

Audrey Tang: Instead of the teacher holding the authority in a certain voice, printed in a certain font, and the student have to accept a standard answer, which is a very East-Asian thing, [laughs] we rewrote the curriculum entirely so that the children are encouraged to fact-check the teacher.

Audrey Tang: The teachers are encouraged to show the various different Fox News or whatever channels when talking about not just news or journalism, but about the civics, about economy, about social scientists, and all the other studies. The teacher no longer holds authority of the final standardized answer. The teacher become a co-learner to the student.

Audrey Tang: What we have found is that with this kind of co-learning relationship with their teacher for a year, the child learns to swim in the flood of misinformation.

Audience Member: Bravo.

Audrey Tang: That is what we really need to do. We’re now, after proving that this works, people who are first graders or first graders in junior high and senior high which we are really sure that it works, we’re extended to life-long education as well. We are putting a lot of effort in life-long education so that people who are not digital natives can also learn to swim. That’s our first line of defense.

Audrey Tang: Our second line, of course, is the NCCE and the Fair Trade Commission, if the broadcaster or whatever really don’t do the fact-checking. Usually, their excuse is that there’s nothing to be fact checked with.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have the Taiwan Fact Checking Center, TWFCC which is a member of the IFCN at Poynter which is a network of all the fact checkers around the world. They get fast-tracked acceptance into membership after just three months of its founding. It’s a collaborative effort by lots of very well trusted NGOs.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, if they publish something that is fact-checked that’s wrong, not only is it ground for the broadcasters to not repeat that mistake. They have no excuse of not consulting the TWFCC. Actually, IFCN also affects the ranking algorithm used by public social media. That is the third line of defense.

Audience Member: Bravo. That’s really great.

Christine Nakamura: Yes. I’m going to ask you, we get a lot of hands going up about the cards.

Audience Member: Really fascinating. I’m assuming that if you are relying on the wisdom of the crowds that you need to have representation in the crowds. The second question I have is, the questions themselves, how they’re formulated, how they’re researched, how they’re framed is at least as important as the answer.

Audience Member: Yes, very much so.

Audience Member: Can you tell us about the nuances and how you actually match those two things representationally framing the question?

Audrey Tang: Yes. This is very important. We want to be seen as complimenting but not reinforcing representative democracy. If we don’t compliment them well, I don’t get to be a minister. [laughs] If we do reinforce that, it will reinforce the old power model. It’s a very fine line to walk just like everybody who work in the Internet governance knows that it’s a very fine line to walk.

Audrey Tang: Our basic theory, very simply put, is that at a beginning of every consultation that we run we begin with a simple diagram that I’m sure that everybody here has seen before. This is the standard design thinking diagram.

Audrey Tang: Design thinking diagram is discover, define, develop and deliver. We say this entire crowdsourced collective intelligence thing is just to get the right "How might we" question, nothing more and nothing less.

Audrey Tang: Everything after the "How might we" question, is the regime of the parliamentary system, of the representative democracy, of whatever the structure that’s there, because it concerns the allocation of resources, rapid prototyping.

Audrey Tang: Everything before that, the divergence of views and feelings, the convergence of common values, that is the purview of the collective intelligence. Nobody can test that, because even the parliamentarians themselves have to hold public hearings.

Audrey Tang: Unless they want to go out of business, they can’t pretend that first time that it’s not important. What we’re saying is that we have a much more scalable way to listen and to have people listen to one another. Compared to the old way, where using radio television, you can speak to a million people, but you can’t listen very well.

Audrey Tang: Using this line of argument, we’re able to co-exist at the moment, peacefully with the representative democratic system by acting on re-presenting the stakeholders themselves, and not claiming to represent the stakeholders. That’s the first answer.

Audrey Tang: The second thing, which is about the legitimacy of the agenda setting power, the agenda is set in three ways. First, it can be done by an e-petition. Anyone who collects 5,000 genuine signatures, verified by SMS and everything, gets to have a face-to-face conversation with the ministries involved.

Audrey Tang: If it’s cross-ministry, then I get involved as the minister in charge of open government. 5,000 signature is the threshold, that’s the first way. The second way, of course, as I said, is that during my office hours and social innovation tours, you’ll agree to be on the record about exactly how you want to change the existing regulation or law to the benefit of everybody.

Audrey Tang: If you are willing to publish exactly how, then you are part of our open innovation system. Then you get to set the agenda of the social innovation national action plan. The third way, which was just recently introduced, is referendum. We actually don’t know how that works, because we’re going to have our first meeting for referendum.

Audrey Tang: There will be 10 referendum topics at the end of this year, so I will tell you how that fares after we actually have our first referendum season.

Audience Member: Minister, the second part of the question is how do you ensure representation for underrepresented groups, indigenous people, seniors, etc.?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we go to them. The whole methodology rests on the idea of what we call assistive city tech. Instead of asking them to go to the website, like the Taipei City, the municipality did the early prototype of fair distribution of social housing to people who suffer from mental illness, autism, single parents, or people suffering HIV, indigenous people, homelessness.

Audrey Tang: Had it been non-assistive civic tech, it would be dominated maybe by three young indigenous people and nobody else. [laughs] Nobody else has the time to participate in an online discussion. We’re not working like that. We’re working in a rolling survey kind of way, to find the actual stakeholders through the social workers to actual people.

Audrey Tang: The Taipei City did a lot work around that by having real-time sign language translators. When we did participation budgeting with migrant workers, we hired four translators concurrently.

Audrey Tang: For people paralyzed at home, we used real-time live streaming, and we can use sign language or whatever to feedback through an online Slido system. We maximize the inclusiveness, is what we’re saying.

Audrey Tang: What we do online is merely a record of what actually happens when we put people who otherwise cannot meet eye-to-eye in a way that can relive the conversation. Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality is going to be a large part of it, once we actually get there, maybe two years in the future. Now we’re just prototyping with whatever technology we have at the moment.

Audience Member: Brilliant. Thank you.

Christine Nakamura: Anyone else?

Audience Member: I have two questions. The first is I found it really interesting, that diagram that you had where you had really the class string around the convergence, and then it tapers off. My experience has always been -- and I think it goes back to your question -- how you phrase the question, at what level of abstraction.

Audience Member: It’s very easy if you’re skilled at building consensus, you abstract up to the level where you can build that consensus.

Audience Member: Then when you move to operationalize the decision, that’s where the strands of decision making, the strands of opinion start to dissipate. I’m very interested. Ultimately, what is the decision rule once you get to that point? That’s one question.

Audience Member: The second question is this assumes society of culture that believes in democracy.

Audrey Tang: And values democracy.

Audience Member: And values democracy. What insights do you have for bringing this into an authoritarian state?

Christine Nakamura: Let me remind everybody this is Chatham House rule.

Audience Member: There’s no authority nor attribution.

Audrey Tang: In any case, I’ll handle the easy one first.

Audrey Tang: Very simply put, the binding power of this agenda setting exactly as you said, is to abstract enough that we find common ground. It’s the old idea of overlapping consensus.

Audrey Tang: If you have people with different ideologies, if you phrase it fine enough and abstract long enough, you always find points of consensus. That is the case.

Audrey Tang: We even use the term "rough consensus" intentionally. You don’t have to have fine consensus -- everybody signing an MOU or something -- rather they just have to give consent. We generally just aim for "rough consensus" of what people are going to do.

Audrey Tang: Case in point, we’ll use a real case to illustrate. There was an e-petition, 8,000 people strong, of changing Taiwan’s time zone to GMT +9, the same as Japan. There was a counter petition, 8,000 people strong, of Taiwan remaining in GMT +8. Without going into referendums, that’s the most political you can get on the e-petition platforms.

Audrey Tang: On the surface, it’s impossible to reconcile. They’re both 8,000 people strong. What we have is a pro-and-con discussion under each conversation of e-petition. You cannot reply. All you can do is upvote and downvote.

Audrey Tang: If you see something that you really disagree, your only recourse is to post something brilliant in the other column for other people to upvote you. People can only have a civilized discussion.

Audrey Tang: Then we harvest the one that has the highest number of upvotes and downvotes respectively. Use it as the agenda for the real face-to-face conversation.

Audrey Tang: `

Audrey Tang: In that, people have a lot of wonderful, brilliant excuses. "You will save energy." "Overall you will increase tourism." "You will help the labor market." "It will facilitate international trade," whatever.

Audrey Tang: What they did not expect is that the ministry of economy actually goes and produce evidence that says that "If we switch to daylight saving time now or one in the future it will actually not save energy. Here is the open data to prove that." The ministry of labor says it will not increase tourism unless you break labor laws.

Audrey Tang: Basically, people get educated every time a ministry responds substantially to their maybe in parody, not serious ideas. People learn to trust that Taipei administration takes people seriously. This is the first idea, that the government need to trust the people first.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that when they receive that and they do come to a face-to-face conversation, we asterisk it out so that both sides agree that what they really want to do is to make Taiwan seem as unique in the world. That is the common theme that people can agree on. The GMT thing is really just one implementation detail.

Audrey Tang: After agreeing that there will be a large upfront cost and a somewhat large recurring cost as calculated to the dollars, then people say, "Given the same resources, maybe we can channel it for better use to make Taiwan to be seen as more unique in the world."

Audrey Tang: Even if people who are originally signing the +9 petition see that there’s jurisdictions with multiple currencies. There’s jurisdictions with multiple time zones if they have a large land mass. It doesn’t actually make Taiwan that unique.

Audrey Tang: You will, of course, make international news for 15 minutes, and then everybody forgets about it, right?

Audrey Tang: It’s not a particularly effective solution. Even the petitioner agree with that, and then we start brainstorming how we can use open government for diplomacy, how we enhance human rights through Sustainable Development Goals, value-based diplomacy.

Audrey Tang: The minister of culture, of foreign affairs, of everything, committed their resource as a collective response to all the 16,000 people. The binding power is always back to the individual ministers, of course, but the premier gets a synthetic document after each consultation. Each one is on Friday.

Audrey Tang: The next Monday, I bring it personally to the Premier and other ministers without portfolio, other horizontal ministers. We collectively set a boundary of the response. Then each individual vertical ministers and command resources to make that happen.

Audrey Tang: At the end of it, there is some administrative decision making, that is mostly still the premier takes the main responsibility. The premier can say, "What you guys have done is brilliant. You already committed to solve those things together. All I have to do is stamp on it and say we’re going this way."

Audrey Tang: Usually more often than not, the premier says, "OK, we commit the resource on it." That is the final narrative.

Audrey Tang: Now the hard question.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan used to be under authoritarian rule. I still remember martial law. If it takes us 30 years to get here, I’m sure it takes other places 30 years to get here too. Also, even after becoming an official minister, I still did a virtual lecture in the Hangzhou Academy of Art.

Audrey Tang: Of course, they don’t call themselves civic tech community there. They call themselves social enterprise innovators.

Audrey Tang: I don’t fly there, I just appear in virtual reality. They have to wear googles to see my avatar. The beauty is if I pull down the HTC Vive, I see people in Kaohsiung sitting in the empty chairs. People in Hangzhou have also joined. For all the rules, it’s like watching a video. Because of this, it’s my first performance in Hangzhou.

Audrey Tang: Afterwards when I did the same thing in UN Geneva, in the UN Internet Governance Forum appearing through a telepresence robotics, they’re just watching a movie, even though it’s recorded two seconds ago. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It is a real way to work in parallel with the existing Westphalian system on diplomacy and focus on sustainable development goals. So far, when I introduce this kind of self-governing tools to people under the PRC jurisdiction, I face no obstructions because it’s a part of SDG 16. It is rule of law. It is things that all UN members have signed, themself, in 2015.

Audrey Tang: I mean them no harm at all. I just want to bring technologies that brings accountability and more transparency to people. I think that the CCP, so far, has not obstructed any of my work.

Christine Nakamura: Other questions?

Audience Member: First, thank you very much. This was amazing. As you look at what you’re developing, it’s effectively a series of horizontal. Whether industry or government, it’s always set up very much vertically. How do you see the evolution of whether a corporate structure or government structure against what is effectively going across all of those pillars?

Audrey Tang: There’s multiple books written about this. There’s "New Power." There’s "Death of the Gods." There’s Manuel Castells who have studies this effort for decades. When I said we’re teaching the children how to swim, I’m not using this only metaphorically. I’m literally saying that it is a boundless space. It is not the rule like on the land where you have to scale a mountain or you have to climb vertically.

Audrey Tang: The gravity works differently in water as it does in cyberspace. If we have sufficient number of digital natives who think horizontally, who never feels lonely because whatever thing they care, they can find a community somewhere in the Internet. Then they get the idea that the Internet, itself, enables this kind of horizontal sovereignty.

Audrey Tang: Of course, everybody says distributed ledger governance now, but before distributed ledger governance, we already have a lot of those self-governing entities in the Internet.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that, at the moment, it’s coexisting but as more and more people become digital natives and if we can survive the digital transformation by bringing people who are not yet digitally capable using a tool that they are comfortable with. Like in a public service, we always use styles like this because people are used to paperwork.

Audrey Tang: If we introduce digital transformation exactly in the same tool that they are used to, then to see the horizontal power is something that’s complementing it instead of decimating their vertical power. This is going to be very gradual. I call myself a conservative anarchist for this particular reason.

Audrey Tang: It takes generations. I know I won’t see the end of it in my lifetime. Every part of it is an increasing trust among people who traditionally would not trust each other had it been in a vertical siloed structure.

Audience Member: Thank you very much for your very insightful thoughts. I have a follow-up question related to inclusiveness, digital transformation, and digital literacy. I would imagine you actually, and the people you work with, have a large amount of information and data of who participates.

Audience Member: You probably have a lot of insight into how aware the underrepresented groups are. Do you have any insights into how you bring that digital transformation accelerated, and do you think it’s applicable beyond just Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Beyond what?

Audience Member: Just beyond Taiwan. The strategy to be able to...

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah.

Audience Member: ...this acceleration.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I think that the language is always the main thing. At the end of this year in Taiwan we’ll have 22 national languages. Previously, it was just Mandarin. Now, it’s all the 16 first nations. It’s Taiwanese Hakka, Taiwanese Taigi and all its variations.

Audrey Tang: In any case, [laughs] they are all going to be national languages. What we have found is that people who say I want to learn calculus in an indigenous language, if we satisfy their needs in this way, and we partner with a lot of social enterprises like the Mozilla Corporation -- is one of our main partners in this -- through their Common Voice Project, we get people from all around Taiwan, and around the world in deed, to contribute their voice data in a public domain, so that we can train the AI systems through transfer learning, we can translate one to another without too much effort.

Audrey Tang: When they hear the words in their own native concepts, when we can do cultural translations in addition to linguistic translation through artificial intelligence that really honors their tradition, then they feel empowered, so that they can be like what Maori people does at the moment through the Maori constitution that it’s shaped as a treaty.

Audrey Tang: We see in New Zealand a river given legal personhood that they can have a seat in the board. They can sue for harm, because the recognition of the spiritual culture that the Maori people have.

Audrey Tang: Through our transition just for indigenous people, we’re going there also in Taiwan so that we first honor our different cultures, but because those cultures connect to all the Pacific islanders, as well as other people with other cultural traditions, Japan for example, then we spread this culturally outwards, just like 4,000 years ago the sailors shipped from Taiwan all the way to New Zealand through their culture, it’s the same cultural heritage.

Audience Member: First off, thank you so much for coming and for the talk. I’m with Next Candidate now, which is a startup incubator here, but I spent the last three years working for Ontario’s first Minister of Digital Services in Open Government. This is totally amazing and inspiring to hear.

Audience Member: I have many questions. The one I’ll ask is I’m curious about how or whether you were able to engage people at scale. What I found was we put a lot of effort into participatory stuff, participatory budgeting, big consultations on welfare reform or on big, new policies.

Audience Member: We had a really hard time cracking, say, 50 and 20,000 people participating even through digital channels where we really upped our game. We just couldn’t figure out how to get it, how to scale it to take it to the next level. I’m curious about how you...

Audrey Tang: How to mobilize half a million people. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The old poet, Leonard Cohen, said, "There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in."

Audrey Tang: If the government admit that there is a crack, that we really have no idea what to do, then the civil society has a chance of taking the government’s role.

Audrey Tang: That is always my main idea as a channel. Through radical transparency, people can see the context of policy making. Then the civil society can contribute with social innovation.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that, first, by admitting that the government is currently powerless in certain things and, second, using the psychology of the Internet where if you post a good question on the Internet, nobody respond to you, but if you switch another account or ask a friend to post a really bad answer, all the experts are going to jump in to correct your mistake.

Audrey Tang: Then we’re saying we invite people who care into the kitchen to be co-chefs.

Audrey Tang: So, co-creating with the people is the most effective way to turn mass mobilization into something positive.

Audience Member: Yeah. You’ve already talked about this in a few different ways, but I’m thinking of one of the most recent referendums that’s a really big deal was Brexit in the UK.

Audience Member: How do you see that functioning in a different way than it actually unfolded in the UK? As far as I understand, from the demographics, most of the older people voted no. A lot of the youth voted yes.

Audience Member: I could see that if this was taking place in a digital way, the numbers might have been quite a bit different. How do you see that? Have you thought about that and how they could have done it differently?

Audrey Tang: We’re now facing it with our own referendum, of the 10 referendums at the end of the year, 5 of which is around marriage equality. Our constitutional court already ruled that people with any sexual orientation must enjoy the same right and duties as any other people.

Audrey Tang: This is already done with the constitutional interpretation. The debate at the moment is on the term with the term "marriage." What does it even mean? The older people believe that marriage is the social construct. The state only recognize it after the ceremony is done, which is the old civil code.

Audrey Tang: People of my age or younger remember marriage as something that you just go to your local city council and register. You may or may not hold the ceremony, which just makes it a state construct.

Audrey Tang: It is very different for personal experiences. It is just how marriage is defined has changed across generations. The very fact that we’re having the referendums, the fights for the definition of the term marriage highlights that need for intergenerational solidarity.

Audrey Tang: There is a team of g0v volunteers around cofacts around marriage equalit, seeing all the rumors and sometimes just honest mistakes spreading on the end-to-end encrypted channels by one way or another. and create neutral responses that makes equal sense to both sides. There is a dedicated task force doing this as we speak on social media.

Audrey Tang: This is the same as the time zone. How do we move at the speed of trust? Is it compromised and we dial forward half an hour into the future, nobody will be happy.

Audrey Tang: However, if we reframe the discussions so that people can see a higher common goal, like a respect of common values, that creates a new ground for conversation.

Audrey Tang: I cannot say that whether this will be a success or not, because we’re still one month away from the actual referendum. We’ll have more information next month.

Audience Member: Minister, before we close, I know people want to ask more questions, but we’re already five minutes past time. This is a very simple question. From your view, what do to you see Canada’s innovation and digital agenda or how we’re progressing? How does Taiwan see it?

Audrey Tang: Canada is culturally close to Taiwan with the idea of putting the social, environmental, and economic values reinforcing each other rather than taking a part of each other.

Audrey Tang: With the same legacy of having to work on transitional justice on indigenous and intersectionality, with the same diversity-based and feminist values and our president being one eighth indigenous and not anyone’s wife or daughter but just earn the presidency by her own merits resonates strongly with what we hear from the Canadian Innovation community.

Audrey Tang: We cannot say the same for, for example, Estonia who has no paper legacy record. They’re literally founded after the Internet.

Audrey Tang: We have a lot more in common in Canada in the sense that we have to walk slower, longer, but, at the end, more scalable path of innovation to take care of all the sectors.

Christine Nakamura: Thank you. On that note, I’m going to ask everybody to give a great round of applause...

Christine Nakamura: ...and a special thank you to Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Toronto. Director General Hsu, thank you very much...

Christine Nakamura: Thank you. That concludes our evening tonight. Thank you very much for coming.