Audrey Tang: Hello. Can you hear me? Hey, greetings, very nice meeting you.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s just my end. As you requested, we will not put what you have said on the record. This is going to be a one-sided recording. I’m just going to record what I have said, but that is just fine.

Audrey Tang: That would be excellent. I have visited London quite a few times. I actually have two colleagues in the UK at the moment, one in Bristol and one in London. They will be able to follow-up on detailed discussions if needed be.

Audrey Tang: One of them is working with the Dark Matter Labs with Indy Johar and friends. That’s also a more design-oriented think tank, more around circular economy. They also do policy around smart citizens and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I am very happy to learn about the APPG. I have read some ideas from the public website, but it will be great to know where you are at and what your focus is at the moment.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s my cultural translation service. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The physical passport, yes.

Audrey Tang: OK. I will first share how I have engaged other think tanks as well as government think tank groups, as yours, which is broadly comparable. I’m on the International Advisory Board of the Governance Lab in NYU led by Beth Noveck.

Audrey Tang: We have done a “Crowd Law for Congress”, which is, I think, broadly overlapping with your citizen participation task force. It covers pretty much the same ground.

Audrey Tang: We also work with data collaboratives, which I think is very much the same as your data governance task force, when it comes to data democracy, for lack of a better term, or the making of data republic social sector, working with the private and public sectors on that.

Audrey Tang: I am also on the Digital Future Society, which is the Mobile World Barcelona Capital, the MWC think tank on future things. That’s the main platform that I engage through the Barcelona network, the European, and especially post-GDPR, how to reconcile our personal data protection norms with the European norms. So I am also part of Digital Future Society’s Board of Trustees.

Audrey Tang: I am also a board member of a not-for-profit startup called RadicalxChange with Vitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, and also Glen Weyl, an economist.

Audrey Tang: That’s also based in New York, but we actually primarily work with Canadian and also MPs in Berlin to further the ideas of participatory mechanism design. These are the areas that I am passionate about.

Audrey Tang: I mostly work with the government, not for the government. Although I am a government minister, I belong to no political party. I’m working with Taiwan, but not just for Taiwan. I’m happy to work with international counterparts.

Audrey Tang: The main is simply to, through open innovation, share our norms and our approaches to data governance and citizen participation, but also, make sure that we learn from other best practices.

Audrey Tang: Our, for example, e-petition platform came from Better Reykjavik. That’s from Iceland. Our participatory budget design came from Consul that was Madrid. Our crowd law participation platform came from Pol.is, which is from Seattle, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We work with all these international communities, and, basically, Taiwan is a Social Innovation Lab for those ideas. That’s where I’m coming from.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Taiwan’s ideas around data governance is on the data collaboratives, or nowadays, there’s even a board called Data Democracy, that basically have all the citizens as curators and producers of data that collectively do sense-making from air pollution to water pollution for all sort of things.

Audrey Tang: Using distributed ledger and similar technologies to make sure that people hold each other accountable, and for personally identifiable informations, they do not submit them to a surveillance state or a surveillance capitalist apparatus.

Audrey Tang: We’re taking, as with COVID-19, a very social sector-powered part. My subtopic, if you want to use a very simple word, would be about joint controllership of data, which this is the part in the GDPR that has the least academic understanding.

Audrey Tang: Joint controllership, especially from the social sector, would be my most interested subtopic.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t matter. For me, AI stands for assistive intelligence, as I showed in the video. Assistive intelligence means that we use the kind of machine learning that automates away the chores, but do not give up our expectation on accountability as well as value alignment.

Audrey Tang: I think is exactly the same as your preliminary advices to your MPs. It doesn’t matter. I can code, but it is not likely that I will code AI or blockchain applications by myself, although I still code for many citizen participation platforms personally.

Audrey Tang: I work with Vitalik Buterin on translating those ideas into Ethereum governance. That is where my main community of data governance ideas, so that we can try out new idea, like quadratic funding and things like that on the blockchain – Ethereum, to be precise – first, for the on-chain governance.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the focus would be on Ethereum, but of course, in Taiwan, there’s many other thriving communities, ranging from IOTA to other newer-generation. Hybrid ledger, also there’s a thriving community.

Audrey Tang: Of course, I can connect with those community, but I am not directly participating in those governance.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I worked with the Siri team for six years. I know how it’s like. [laughs] Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, what’s the time commitment I’m looking at?

Audrey Tang: [laughs] OK. This is awesome. Yeah, the Digital Future Society usually meets once a year and usually around Mobile World Capital Barcelona. That’s their time commitment, one physical meeting per year, which is…

Audrey Tang: The Digital Future Society. Yeah, and I think later in the year, they’re going to have a summit as well, because Mobile World Barcelona got canceled because of the pandemic. Probably, they are trying to make up that.

Audrey Tang: In any case, I was in Barcelona nevertheless, even though the NWC was canceled. Because this is a smaller group, we did manage to have pretty good meetings. If I can time that to the visit to you, that’s just a single trip for me. It makes it easier.

Audrey Tang: We can also do remote. If it’s more than two physical visits a year, I probably cannot make it. I will have to do telepresence.

Audrey Tang: Dubai?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I see that.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, they did a retronym. It wasn’t called a blockchain, but because everybody understood it as a blockchain, they changed retroactively for it to be a blockchain. The previous president did visit Taiwan, and we talked about that, too. Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Not at all. We didn’t do that. That’s because we’ve never entered the community spread. There’s only seven deaths in COVID in Taiwan, less than 500 cases, all the time.

Audrey Tang: We’ve never had a big problem of that, and so the app doesn’t really make a lot of value. We are developing the app to help people in the UK and so on, but we don’t need that app.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure. However, as I mentioned, even though we do help developing such apps from the social sector and from our research community, because in Taiwan, we have not used most of it, what we have done is instead hold a coronavirus hackathon, the Co-hack, with the American de facto embassy.

Audrey Tang: To highlight the winners that can provide values, that are conforming to the social norms, that doesn’t sacrifice the personally information and so on. There i5s five winners recently announced. I’m going to do a write-up for a few of them, anyway.

Audrey Tang: I’m happy to contribute those write-ups. All my blogs are in Creative Commons, anyway, so it could freely reused. I think these entries are some of the ideas that we can contribute and just a begenning of good connections to our development community.

Audrey Tang: Even though most of their ideas is probably only useful overseas, we’re still very much willing to support them and help the world.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think, certainly, an open, nonlinear, and circular recovery. The pandemic and the lockdowns is an opportunity for us to think in sustainable ways.

Audrey Tang: If we just make a linear recovery and go back to the bad old days of linear economic growth, GDP competition, and things like that, that will have basically rendered meaningless these amount of time where we experience that is possible to be friendly with the environment.

Audrey Tang: It is possible to manufacture in a purpose-led way, and it is possible to, instead of owning things, to basically share and rent things as a norm, all this, I think it’s an opportunity because of COVID that we’re now on the international solidarity that is even higher.

Audrey Tang: Much higher than the climate change, disinformation, or other previous international issues that we tackled. We should not squander this international solidarity and should figure out a way to do a circular and nonlinear recovery.

Audrey Tang: I think that is the most interesting thing, and it’s what the Taiwan recovery and revitalization plan is working on. We are actively working on it right now.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Every early morning, almost now, I have video conferences with people from Canada, the US, or South America, in that time zone. Every evening, like now, I have conversation with people in UK, in Europe, and in Africa.

Audrey Tang: The hours in the middle is my usual working day. [laughs] A few days before the World Health Assembly, Taiwan hosted a milnilateral with 14 economies and countries, and with their health officials and so on, on a mini-pre-WHA meeting.

Audrey Tang: It’s very interesting, because now, with the US dropping support to their commitment to the WHO, it’s likely that people who are liberal democratic government officials can just focus on a minilateral based on open government principles, and to develop ideas and measures that do not encroach the constitutional freedom.

Audrey Tang: That is, I think, of quite appeal to many semi-democratic countries as well, because they’re at a fork in the road. If the totalitarian or authoritarian top-down approaches prove to be more effective, then that makes their top-down tendencies grow even more.

Audrey Tang: If we can show convincingly that empowering the social sector actually increase the public health and increase the mutual trust, then many of those semi-democratic countries will not see coronavirus as a necessity to drop democratic norms.

Audrey Tang: I think that is what I’m looking at, and we work with many other liberal democracy. Just a few hours ago, we had a talk with the ambassadors from the US, from France, from Australia, and also, our Digital Ambassador, Chairman Jan Hung-tze, on precisely this measure.

Audrey Tang: It’s a, what I think people’s mind is currently focused on. The French and Australians say that their contact tracing apps, they need to demonstrate that it’s privacy-preserving. It doesn’t concentrate the data, as the Singaporeans do, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They’re very happy that Taiwan is validating their basic normalcy and values. Also, the travel bubble, of course, is going to be based on that, because unless you can have accountable buy-in from the civil society from both countries to resume travel, it’s always a very risky business.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, certainly. Nobody is against sustainability. Nobody goes on a platform and podium and say, “I want the Earth to terminate in my generation.” I don’t think anyone would do that. [laughs] It’s not about…

Audrey Tang: Certainly. I think what the Taiwanese people is most wary of is, of course, over-concentrating power to any sector or any single player would end up feeling like going back to the martial law days.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who’s over 35 years old remember how martial law was like. Nobody want to go back there, because we’re an extremely young democracy. Our democracy literally grew with the World Wide Web and the Internet technologies.

Audrey Tang: We always see democracy as just another technology, a social technology that we can improve with day-to-day participation. With this much buy-in from the civil society to change democracy itself, where at the moment, the parliamentary debate is on changing our constitution.

Audrey Tang: Maybe four years from now, having a national referendum on important constitution changes and so on, this is a very robust civil society, and that is seeing democracy as something that people has control.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that will mean that the government officials is held both accountable to respond to such a call for democracy, but also need to be very inventive, innovative when new threats comes, because we cannot resort to top-down ways, either lockdowns or takedowns.

Audrey Tang: The main difference is that they also want to make citizens transparent to the state, but that’s not our platform. We are just making the state transparent to the citizens.

Audrey Tang: Even though technically we use many similar terminology, or even some of the same open source or open innovation ecosystems, I think the end result is quite opposite direction between the PRC and Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Mobile World Congress Barcelona is usually around February to March, I think, in Barcelona.

Audrey Tang: No, my colleagues, there is two designers in my team. One is in Bristol, and one is in London.

Audrey Tang: Of course, yes.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, as long as we coordinate the time zones, order the same kind of food, and the same beer, it can feel almost like we’re in the same room.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: There are physical meetings, like social ones, I can dispatch [laughs] one of my two colleagues in UK to attend. They can carry my avatar, I guess. I can just sit on their shoulders as an iPad or something like that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I sent double robots to, for example, the Internet Governance Meeting, the IGF, in Geneva in the UN building, because the UN building doesn’t usually allow Taiwanese passport to enter.

Audrey Tang: I just sent a robot and spoke through the robot. That’s still on the record, so it’s good as I physically visited.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, this is actual video of my robot speaking at the IGF 2017 and what we have said. Many people also piggybacked on my robot also, as you can see. We’ve done this many, many times.

Audrey Tang: That’s fine. I’ll send you the transcript of the parts that I said.

Audrey Tang: OK, maybe we do that next time. I haven’t. [laughs] I only recorded one side, but that’s fine. I’ll send you my side. No, I don’t. I only…

Audrey Tang: OK, of course. I’ll send you both the recording, and later on, the transcript.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: Sure, no problem. I see there is Pavilion 2.0 that’s being developed. I’m really happy to contribute. There’s a lot of previous talks, and I’m considering doing five-minute podcasts. Maybe we can just co-create on the topics.

Audrey Tang: I will just record myself asynchronously, given the time zone differences, but I’m happy to contribute content, of course.

Audrey Tang: All right, I think, yeah, I just wait for the Innovators’ Board, either the descriptions or the schedule. We’ll see how we can work together. We just, of course, you have your task forces and so on.

Audrey Tang: Given time zone differences, I will participate maybe only quite occasionally, but we will keep each other posted.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’ll send you the recording right now and transcript later.

Audrey Tang: OK, cheers. Bye.