Tom Nagorski: ...gently encourage those who are mingling at the back to do so quietly. Informal in the sense, if you want a cup of coffee during the proceedings, feel free to head back. With respect to our esteemed guest today, if you can at least be quiet in the back, or come up and take your seats.

Tom Nagorski: Welcome to all of you, those in the room and those watching via the webcast. Delighted to have you with us here. I’m Tom Nagorski. I’m the executive vice president of the Asia Society. Welcome also to the delegation from Taiwan that is here.

Tom Nagorski: I’m going to go away from my prepared remarks. I was going to say, this should be an interesting program, and go through the things that you’ve already probably read in the flier. Danny Russel and I have just had the privilege of the pregame discussion with Minister Tang. I can tell you, I just upgraded from interesting to fascinating.

Tom Nagorski: We’ve just had a taste of it in the room next door, a lot of things that quite frankly, I don’t think I understand.

Tom Nagorski: The minister was asked several times if he would please speak slowly as he goes through some of the things that will be covered in the discussion today. Just quickly before we get started, a couple of words about goings-on here, because there are many good ones to talk about.

Tom Nagorski: Some of you may know, but if you don’t, we are just one week into our fall season of India, which opened here with a lot of fanfare last Friday. The anchor of that season is a magnificent exhibition of Indian art, Indian artists who have not been shown together in this fashion for several decades.

Tom Nagorski: The show is called “The Progressive Revolution -- Modern Art For a New India.” It is a landmark exhibition of artists who were known around the time of independence as the Bombay Progressives. It has already been highlighted by the New York Times, New York Magazine, Art Forum, and others as a must-see show for the fall arts season here in New York.

Tom Nagorski: There was a big review, and a very positive one, in today’s Wall Street Journal. At any rate, we hope you’ll spend some time with it today, or at any time during the fall in the galleries. Also, you can check asiasociety.org, or fliers that are around here.

Tom Nagorski: There are under that heading, Season of India, a lot of very strong, interesting programs across culture, policy, and business that are coming on the India front. Next week, as you probably know, as New Yorkers, you know that UN General Assembly season is upon us, which means first and foremost, that it’s impossible to move around in Manhattan.

Tom Nagorski: Somehow, people still make it here for all the events that we put on. We have somewhere between seven and nine -- it changes, it seems, by the hour -- leaders from Asia who will be in this building in the week beginning on Monday.

Tom Nagorski: Still tickets available for the following, the prime minister of Nepal, the foreign ministers of Pakistan, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, the 92-year-old man who has been called recently the Comeback Kid of Asia, Mahathir Mohamad, back in power as prime minister of Malaysia. He will be here next week.

Tom Nagorski: There may be others still to come. Please be in touch with us the old fashioned phone way, or at asiasociety.org for the latest. A special mention about October the 9th, which is the date on which we honor our 2018 class of Asia game changers.

Tom Nagorski: These are people and institutions who are having transformative impact in one way or another across the part of the world we care about. That evening, down at the tip of Manhattan at the Cipriani Lower Broadway space, we do the honors.

Tom Nagorski: It is an incredible group of nine Asia game changers this year, and tickets are available for that. I highly recommend it. It’s the first year we’re doing this. Also, that afternoon, here in this building in the auditorium, we do a public program with several of the honorees, including, I should say, just confirmed, Indra Nooyi the CEO at PepsiCo.

Tom Nagorski: The first Indian to ever head a Fortune 500 company. I think also the first woman of color to do so. We are honoring her not only for her leadership in business, but also in philanthropy, and her work on behalf of girls and women around the world.

Tom Nagorski: She will be here that afternoon and evening, along with several of the other game changers. The Afghan girls’ robotics team, you may have heard about their endeavors. The leader of the incredibly brave group, the White Helmets, in Syria, the great Chinese environmental champion, Wong Xu, and many more.

Tom Nagorski: That’s October the 9th, afternoon here in downtown that evening. Now, to our guest this afternoon. Audrey Tang became Taiwan’s digital minister almost to the day two years ago. First digital minister in Taiwan, one of the few anywhere in the world.

Tom Nagorski: We believe the only transgender minister, or at least the first one anywhere on the planet. Audrey Tang led Taiwan’s first e-rulemaking project. Here, we get into the things I don’t understand so well.

Tom Nagorski: Well, this, I do. She serves on the Taiwan National Development Council’s open data committee, and she is a K-12 curriculum committee leader. If you’re wondering what sort of background is required to become a digital minister somewhere, Audrey Tang’s road has taken her via Apple, although not physically.

Tom Nagorski: We just learned she was actually never in Cupertino, but worked for Apple anyhow on computational linguistics. She was at the Oxford University Press, where her work was on crowd lexicography, and at Socialtext, where she did social interaction design.

Tom Nagorski: All impressive stuff, and then one other interesting piece from the bio that’s not in your programs, junior high school dropout.

Tom Nagorski: Go figure. Audrey Tang will give a brief presentation here, and then be joined by Danny Russel, who members and visitors here will know, Vice President for International Security and Diplomacy here at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

Tom Nagorski: Danny Russel served most recently in government as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He also served as the White House’s special assistant to the president during the Obama administration, and National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs.

Tom Nagorski: We are on the record. Again, welcome to those watching via the webcast. The Twitter hashtag, if you are so inclined, it is #AsiaSocietyLive. Please, a warm welcome to the Asia Society, here from Taipei, digital minister Audrey Tang.

Audrey Tang: Hello, everyone. Very, very happy to be here. Let’s see if this clicker thing works. Oh, it does. That’s great. Thank you for the excellent introduction. I worked with Apple, not for Apple. This is a very important distinction, as I currently work with the Taiwan government, but not for the Taiwan government.

Audrey Tang: You will see why in a few slides. In any case, my talk today is about digital social innovation. Unlike many people today who work in Asia on furthering democracy, I’m an optimist. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old.

Audrey Tang: That was 1996. I discovered that the future of human knowledge is being created on the World Wide Web, and my textbooks were all out of date. I told my teachers I wanted to drop out of high school and start my education on the World Wide Web.

Audrey Tang: Surprisingly, all my teachers agreed with it. Then on the World Wide Web, I discovered this wonderful community called the Internet Society that has a very strange idea of governance. It’s called rough consensus, radical transparency, where anyone can join.

Audrey Tang: It’s an open, multistakeholder system. That’s the first democratic governance system that I know. It would be another six years before I get my first voting right. That is my tribe. What I’m doing now is to take the lessons I learned when I was 15 years old to the governance system.

Audrey Tang: This corresponds very neatly to the sustainable development goals, because in SDG targets 17.18, 17.17, and 17.6, we talk about the idea of people that working on common goals that are pre-agreed, but not so much on the pathways, on how to get to the goals.

Audrey Tang: Of utmost importance is that people understand the available data, the evidence, what their actions influence, the environmental and social spillovers and things like that, in order to encourage trustworthy and effective partnership.

Audrey Tang: In fact, that is what the digital minister in Taiwan, my mandate is to do. It’s through open government, social innovation, and youth engagement, to make sure that people can have a meaningful input -- the values of Taiwan, the plural part is the important part -- comes from the inaugural speech our president gave two and a half years ago.

Audrey Tang: She said, “Before, democracy was often understood as clash between two opposing values. Now, Taiwan’s democracy must become a conversation between diverse, a plurality of values.” That, we took as our guiding idea, guiding philosophy.

Audrey Tang: In the previous century, governance systems were often thought of as people who organize, among, for example, people interested in environment and people interested in development through different agencies, different councils.

Audrey Tang: Among these organizations, arbitrate through them and into some sort of compromise in the middle position. That governance structure, that system is bankrupt after the advent of social media and of a hyper-connected world.

Audrey Tang: People don’t need the government to organize themselves anymore. With the right hashtag, tens of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people, just organize out of nowhere. It is impossible for the government, or indeed, the legislation, to set up new committee for each and every emerging issue.

Audrey Tang: We find ourselves in a lot of tension if we still want to govern the old fashioned way. Digital governance, or collaborative governance, learns from the Internet Society, and asks a different set of questions.

Audrey Tang: Instead of how should we organize people, and what is fair between those organized people, we now ask, so we have different positions. What are some of our common values that we can agree with? If we can agree on some common values, can we deliver innovations that works for everyone?

Audrey Tang: If the government keeps asking these two questions, various other interests that seem to be in opposition with each other will soon come into consensus. I will use one particular example that I personally participated in and that some legislators here have participated in as well.

Audrey Tang: Four years ago in Taiwan, there was a demonstration. It’s a demonstration in the sense of a demo, of showing how to do something, not in violent protest. It was around the MPs at the time refusing to deliberate substantially the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA.

Audrey Tang: Since the MPs were on strike, the people just went and occupied the parliament, and did the MPs’ work for them. That’s the legitimacy theory.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we experimented how to use civic technology to enable anyone working with other 20 NGOs, each tackling the CSSTA from a different angle, to just type in their company name or the trade they’re doing, and know exactly how they will be impacted by CSSTA, and have real substantial dialogue around it.

Audrey Tang: It’s called the Sunflower movement. It is a quiet, silent, nonviolent revolution that nevertheless shaped how Taiwan people perceive politics as something that people can substantially contribute without waiting for the government to organize.

Audrey Tang: Supporting the Sunflower Occupy was this movement called g0v, or G-0-V, that started two years before the Occupy in 2012. The g0v movement, which I’m a part of, is this radical new idea called forking the government.

Audrey Tang: Forking, in computer science, means taking something that’s already there, that’s going into one direction, and going off to another direction, while relinquishing, abandoning the copyright, so that it could be merged back into the original branch.

Audrey Tang: g0v systematically looked at each and every government services, like our Legislation is ly.gov.tw, like our Executive Yuan is ey.gov.tw. Every website ends in gov.tw. The movement says if there is something in the public service that you don’t like, well, you can go off and make your own version by changing the O to a zero.

Audrey Tang: g0v’s shadow government version of the legislation is ly.g0v.tw, and so on. Basically, you don’t have to google for our work. You just go to any government website, change the O to a zero, and get into the shadow government.

Audrey Tang: It’s all open source, open data, interactive, and so on. This is the inaugural project of g0v, budget.g0v.tw. Back then, people found the national administration’s budget, 500 pages PDF, very difficult to understand.

Audrey Tang: The g0v people, using the same data, build a visualization where you can zoom into the keywords to the topic areas you care about, and have a real conversation about people interested in the same areas.

Audrey Tang: Because they abandoned the copyright, this year, we merge all this work into the national administration, so that for more than 1,300 ministerial projects, you can see the KPIs, the procurements, the research proposals.

Audrey Tang: Anything associated with those 13 different projects, ask any questions, and have a career public servant have a real dialogue on that particular budget item as a social object. This demonstrates one of the ways that the civil society can just fork of a public sector service, and have the public service merge back their contributions.

Audrey Tang: The g0v communities, using this ethos, supported the occupiers back then, based on this idea of free software. In Taiwan, when we say free software, or 自由軟體, we always mean free as in freedom, not as in beer, because we know that freedom is never free.

Audrey Tang: Our parents’ generation or our grandparents’ generation paid dearly for the freedom of association, of assembly, of speech. We have to keep using the free software to keep it free, which is why we always only use the free and open software for this kind of endeavor.

Audrey Tang: During the Occupy, the main way that we did the deliberation on the street, and also recording it online, it called the focused conversation method. It’s invented in Canada about 12 years ago. It separates a discussion into four stages.

Audrey Tang: The facts or objective stage, where people gather around evidence that are not disputed by any party. Very importantly, the feeling stage, where for a while, we talk about nothing but each other’s feelings, checking in on each other’s feelings, and make sure that the feelings are properly resonating within the people who attended the Occupy or the discussion before we move onto ideas.

Audrey Tang: The best ideas are the ideas that takes care of the most people’s feelings. The decisions, then, is easy, just to take the ideas that are self-coherent, and check with the stakeholders. Then we can make it into law.

Audrey Tang: This is called crowd law. There’s hundreds of events that we did, the crowd law campaign, and things like that. You can just google for crowd law and find a catalog of the hundreds of attempts that we did in conjunction with communities around the world.

Audrey Tang: Because of time, I don’t have time to show all the four steps. I will just show the feelings part. For example, back in 2015, we used AI-powered conversation called Polis -- it’s an open software -- to talk about this idea of UberX, or people without a professional driver’s license carrying passengers and charging them for it.

Audrey Tang: Just on this neutral description, we spent three months with all the stakeholders to make sure it doesn’t offend anyone, and everybody is welcome to join. We sent this link to everybody on their mobile phone, and just in one glance, they can see what their friends and families, their Twitter friends, their Facebook friends, stand on this issue of UberX.

Audrey Tang: To express their feelings, basically, they look at their friends and families and other people’s, citizen’s feelings. “I feel that passenger liability insurance should be mandatory for riders of UberX private vehicles.”

Audrey Tang: They can agree or disagree, to resonate or not, on this statement. As they press agree or disagree, their avatar, the blue circle, moves in the crowd to identify the tribe or the cluster that they identify with. We don’t look at the numbers here. We’re just measuring the diversity of possible feelings and reactions.

Audrey Tang: The magical thing is that, because we don’t jump to solutions, we just check in with each other’s feelings. There is no reply button, so there is no room for trolls to perform. It’s impossible to troll this system. All you can do is to propose more nuanced, more eclectic feelings for other people to resonate with.

Audrey Tang: After three weeks, we always find the participation something like this. To the right are the divisive statements that people generally agree to disagree. People spend far more time and far more energy on the left, which are the consensus statements that the ministries hold themselves to account.

Audrey Tang: We agree to respond point by point to anything that resonates across the aisle, across the population. People compete still, but they compete for resonance. They compete for feelings that represents the most people’s feelings.

Audrey Tang: Then we meet with each stakeholders one by one in a live stream session, checking with them. “Here are the common feelings of people. Do you agree? If you do, is there something that you can do to help furthering these feelings? If not, why?”

Audrey Tang: On this way, the interpretation or ideas become very feasible, because it’s based on common goals and common feelings. We set up the public digital innovation space as part of my mandate in 2016 to scale this conversation. We both scale out, as in teaching the municipalities internationally on how to run this system.

Audrey Tang: We scale up, by giving it more binding power through e-petition and so on, which I will talk, and deeply, by having in our K to 12 education, in our high education, this kind of consensus-making as capstone projects for people to focus on environmental and social issues as part of their basic and higher education.

Audrey Tang: I’m a radically transparent digital minister. All the meetings that I hold, that I chair, I publish a full transcript, after editing for professionalism and taking out some in jokes.

Audrey Tang: Then we publish online, two weeks to the day after each meeting. You can see hundreds of meetings. Anyone can ask me questions, including journalists, but they don’t get exclusive answers. The answers need to be shared with everybody.

Audrey Tang: Also, this is Mr. David Plouffe, speaking for Uber at the time. Lobbyists are subject to the same standards. It’s not just on the record. It’s on 360 recording record. Any one of you can just put on a VR and relive the conversation.

Audrey Tang: I think is very important, so that the other stakeholders see Uber not as a nameless, faceless thing, but we actually regulated Uber. You can now call Uber legally, and it can call taxis through the apps and so on.

Audrey Tang: They are in a symbiotic relationship now, so people can have their feelings checked also by the stakeholders’ feelings, as captured by the radical transparency records. To make sure all the career public service is in line with this kind of work, to reduce their fear, uncertainty, and doubt, we introduced the idea of POs, or participation office.

Audrey Tang: They’re a team of people in each and every ministries, by national regulation, that their job is just to engage with people with emerging views online, before they take to the street. Their job, very simply put, is to meet monthly and talk about the emerging issues that we should proactively engage the civil society with.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s a virtual team, it’s literally like 60, 70 people now. We share the same virtual workplace. People generally consider each ministry is a reliable partner in cases like this. There is no silo effect, just by the virtue of going through 40 or so cases.

Audrey Tang: For each petition, for example, the one on the right is the petitioner last May who petitioned saying, “The tax filing system is explosively hostile to the users.” It’s purely negative energy. There is no useful information in this petition.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we looked at the people who commented, and 80 percent of which are just saying, “The Minister of Finance should resign,” or something like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s not very helpful.

Audrey Tang: Because of the participation officer network, we just send an invitation to everyone who complained publicly, saying, two weeks from now, everybody who complained, just by the virtue of you posting a complaint, are cordially invited to the Ministry of Finance to co-create with the participation officers the next year’s tax filing experience.

Audrey Tang: Just like that, the wind has changed. Everybody afterwards, their posts, it’s 80 percent of it are constructive criticisms. They are actually offering their professional help.

Audrey Tang: We had very successful four co-creation workshops that, together with people who complained on the right-hand side, they just get invited into the kitchen and become chefs or co-chefs, and totally redesigned our tax filing this year, which has a 96 percent approval rating.

Audrey Tang: The other four percent, of course, still understand that their input will be taken into consideration in a fully radically transparent way for next year’s tax filing experience. These are some of the ways that we’re trying to get people who commit to different sides of the SDG into the center, which is innovation to the common values, to the good of everyone.

Audrey Tang: The place we hold collaboration workshops, I must show it to you. It’s my office in Taipei City. It’s called the Social Innovation Lab, within the Taipei Contemporary Culture Lab or C-Lab. This was collaboratively designed by hundreds of social innovators.

Audrey Tang: That soccer field was drawn by people with Down’s syndrome. It turns out they are brilliant artists. I’m here every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Anyone can come to talk to me, as long as they agree to have the conversation published on the Internet.

Audrey Tang: Rough sleepers, social workers, people working on social impact, they can just come to me. It’s not just they come to me. I also come to them. Every other Tuesday or so, I tour around Taiwan, going to rural places, indigenous places, and so on to the left.

Audrey Tang: Then people can dial in through video conference, but any time I go there to do this kind of investigative journalist or ethnographic research, the 12 ministries related to social innovation are standing by right there on the Social Innovation Lab to the right.

Audrey Tang: Anyone on the field asking, why is ministry whatever introducing something that we don’t feel here, they can give a real back and forth conversation through teleconference and video conference. The other 11 ministries then learn that this is to be resolved in this way.

Audrey Tang: Because of radical transparency, people just co-create the social innovation plan that basically says the SDGs are the common index. We’re going to index all our work, that the basic and higher education need to index this as part of their capstone and university’s social responsibility programs.

Audrey Tang: Our Minister of Foreign Affairs joined for the first time to offer this as international help. Because of time, I’ll just use one last example. When I was touring around Taiwan, I found many people caring a lot about the air quality in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: They set up all those very low-cost measurement devices on PM2.5 and other air quality issues in their balcony, in their schools, in their homes.

Audrey Tang: The interesting thing is, it’s entirely grassroots. It’s 2,000 or so points by the time I learned about it. It’s one g0v project. I wish the Environmental Protection Agency can complement their work. In any other place in Asia, the government will feel threatened in legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we just join the civil society by committing to set up the places where they don’t have the measurement devices, by helping collaborating their devices, by producing more high precision devices for them, and also developing algorithms to weed out noise.

Audrey Tang: At the end, what we committed to is this civil IoT project at ci.taiwan.taidwan.gov.tw, that aggregates all the water quality, air quality, earthquake prediction, disaster relief data, everything into the same super high computing center for the civil society’s contributions to be snapshotted and stored on distributed ledgers, so they know that the government will not change the numbers the day before the election.

Audrey Tang: People have general trust about distributed ledgers that we can hold ourselves into account, no matter where the sensor and the data came from. This is how we can then develop the evidence base, like climate change and other action plans, with other people in other communities without bilateral, multilateral pacts.

Audrey Tang: It’s just people discovering these open source platforms and making use of it. Finally, I would like to read you my job description. Two years ago, when I joined, I don’t have a contract. I had a compact or a covenant with the government.

Audrey Tang: My working conditions are voluntary association. I don’t give or take command. That is radical transparency. Anything I see, I can publish, but I don’t see any state secrets, and location independence. Anywhere I am, I am in my office.

Audrey Tang: With these three covenants, they asked me to write a job description of what I am going to do. I wrote them a poem about my job description, which is my vision about digital social innovation. It goes like this.

Audrey Tang: When we see Internet of things, let 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.

Audrey Tang: Whenever we hear that the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here. Thank you so much.

Daniel R. Russel: Please. Minister, Audrey, thank you so, so much. That has to rank as the world’s best job description.

Daniel R. Russel: Blown away. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for joining us today. What a great treat, and what a fun presentation. I’ll remind you that we’re on the record. The minister and I will talk for a while, and then we’ll open it up to questions from the room, as well as from the great beyond.

Daniel R. Russel: Let me ask, or remind you all, who are brandishing phones to set them to stun, so they don’t actually ring while we’re talking. Now, at the beginning of your presentation, Audrey, when you said, “Let me see if I can get this clicker thing to work,” I felt great relief wash over me, and thought, “OK, I can relate to that feeling. Maybe this will be at a technological level that I can handle.”

Daniel R. Russel: In fact, your presentation was very lucid. I thank you for that. I wonder if I can start, in keeping with your job description, with the being part of it, with the human part of it, and talk a little bit about who Audrey Tang is.

Daniel R. Russel: You’ve had such an extraordinary journey, one that’s marked not just by innovation, but by tremendous personal courage. You told us at lunch, as Tom mentioned, that you had left school in junior high school.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Daniel R. Russel: I know you went, however briefly, to California when you were only 19. You, as you alluded to, were a very active participant in the Sunflower movement. You made the huge step of coming out as a woman, and you’ve got a compact with the...

Audrey Tang: Administration.

Daniel R. Russel: ...government, with the administration, that allows you to do these incredible things. Who are you? What drives you? What are some of the principles that have taken you in this fascinating and valuable direction?

Audrey Tang: More factoids. I live with six cats. I’m really a cat lover, part of the reason why I voted for Dr. Tsai when she ran for president. She’s a fellow cat lover.

Audrey Tang: Really, she’s really progressive, even in her progressive party, in terms of marriage equality and also environmental protection, animal welfare, animal right, even and things like indigenous rights, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Personally, I think my journey is that of going through two puberties, going through a long period of living mostly with animals, and also my work with the indigenous language community trying to revitalize their identity in a very Han ethnic-centric society, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think the overarching theme is what we call intersectionality, which is a big word, I know. The idea is that I have some vulnerable parts, parts that I suffered when I was being bullied when I was eight years old, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I can relate to the part that are vulnerable in each of us, who suffer social injustice. On the other hand, I also have this empathy part, which allow me to relate more to people’s lived-in experiences, and organize these into words, into movements, into poetry.

Audrey Tang: By combining the organizational part and the vulnerable part, this intersectionality allows me to be a channel upon which the people who are suffering from environmental or social injustices can amplify their messages through me.

Audrey Tang: Then reaching a common understanding with the career public service and what we can do together as a society.

Daniel R. Russel: Thank you for that. Just to be clear, your six cats are all carbon-based mammals, right? None of them are digital?

Audrey Tang: They’re not crypto kittens on the Ethereum blockchain. I have some of that as well, yeah. [laughs]

Daniel R. Russel: Just checking. I think what I’m hearing is that your own experience, your life experience, and your experience as a transgender woman, is germane to your focus on good governance, collaborative governance, open governance, the freedoms that you’ve been championing.

Audrey Tang: The word I use to describe is scalable listening, or listening at scale. When sufficient time, two people can always merge their horizons to reach some level of understanding. The existing technologies, before the Internet, radio, and television, makes it too easy for one person to speak to millions of people.

Audrey Tang: Very difficult to listen to a million people, let alone having millions of people to listen to one another. The Internet can change that, but only in a very humble, very calm, and very ambient kind of way, that makes us focus on each other’s life experience more, instead of distracts us away with notifications, manufactured addiction, or things like that.

Audrey Tang: Which is where the digital governance thing is focused on, and how Taiwan is shaping our strategy around AI, data, and distributed ledgers.

Daniel R. Russel: Could you talk a little more about how you see technology influencing and impacting on social issues in Taiwan in advancing equal rights? I know that, for example, the law on same-sex marriage is still percolating.

Audrey Tang: It’s constitutionally recognized. It’s just at the end of the year, we’re going to have a few referendums about the exact wordings, like whether to use the word marriage or not. The same right has been recognized by the constitutional court.

Daniel R. Russel: I’m interested in your view of how technology has, in fact, impacted. That’s one example. Are there others?

Audrey Tang: Yes. In Taiwan, when Dr. Tsai talk about in her campaign broadband as a human right, many other governments say it, but Taiwan has a unique geography that let us actually deliver it. We’re well on the way there now.

Audrey Tang: Anywhere in Taiwan, or in any of the islands, Pescadors and so on, if you don’t have broadband Internet connection, it’s always the government’s fault. We think it’s a great equalizer, if everybody have access to the same high speed AI computing devices that I just mentioned, for all the high students to be able to correlate their activities with the air and water quality around their schools.

Audrey Tang: It would be a great unequalizer, if only some people have access to the connectivity and the computing power.

Audrey Tang: Basically, it’s all very driven by equality above respecting the local cultural needs and social needs, and about making the education -- at least in the K-12, but also more and more in higher education -- to participate in what we call the open source-based way of education.

Audrey Tang: They’re using hardware that we’d call it Arduino or Raspberry Pi that are hardware that anyone can make themselves without paying a patent or royalty fee. The same goes for software, same goes for cyber security, same goes for many other pieces that make technology work.

Audrey Tang: The end goal is just to disenchant or demystify technology itself so that every child can feel that they own the technology, that personal computer remains personal, and not something that they have to subscribe to.

Daniel R. Russel: Audrey, what about the other end of the spectrum, the older people, the Luddites, and the people, whether it’s the rural populations or the less educated in societies, who tend to be left behind by technological innovation. How do you enfranchise them with your programs?

Audrey Tang: I think we should not ask them to come to technology. We should go to them with technology. In the e-petition platform, for example, there is two cases where it’s strictly local. There’s a South Taiwan popular tourist destination called Hengchun.

Audrey Tang: They petitioned for a helicopter to be stationed there to serve as ambulance cars, because they are just too far away, 90 minutes drive, from a major hospital. Because it’s a strictly local issue, all the five different ministries, their participation offices, we all went to Hengchun, and have a real conversation with the people there.

Audrey Tang: The technique we used, very simply put, is that there is a room where stakeholders have a more expert conversation. In the town hall, which is me, we watch the live stream of the conversation that’s happening on the screen, but me serving as an ESPN anchor, describe in lay language, in Taiwanese Holo, what does this play even mean to the local people.

Audrey Tang: The local people, all they have to do is to walk to the town hall, or to join you through instant messaging or whatever. Some people do protests. Where I am, there’s SNG, there’s reporters. Because it’s not live streamed back to the deliberation room, it doesn’t disrupt the actual discussion from happening.

Audrey Tang: Whenever people make constructive criticisms, ideas, or whatever, I bring it back through a kind of channeling device back to where the mind map is growing in the people there. People perceive the people outside not as protestors, mobs, or whatever, but actually, active contributors to the mind map. They’re mapping.

Audrey Tang: At the end of it, we agreed the common value is that people should trust their local clinicians more. We allocate a lot of fun to build a new hospital, where we can fly doctors in, instead of flying patients out.

Daniel R. Russel: Interesting. What are some of the points of resistance that you are encountering to elements of this set of programs, whether it’s Join, vTaiwan, or open government? Who’s pushing back?

Audrey Tang: Mostly, it’s the career public service, who initially thought it is something extra to do, something that they don’t have much credit. The Minister would take all the credit if things go well, and if things go wrong, they are always to blame, and so on.

Audrey Tang: When I went into the cabinet, the PDIS, my office is deliberately one person from each ministry. I’m allowed to poach one person from each ministry. Theoretically, I can have 32 staff. Now, I have 22. Anyway, it is a truly multistakeholder team.

Audrey Tang: I don’t give them command. Anything that PDIS does, it is to the benefit of all the 22 ministries involved. Because of that, people start to see, with radical transparency, career public service actually gets a lot of credit.

Audrey Tang: Previously, they proposed some very good ideas, but the minister just say no to each of them, so they never see the light of day. In Taiwan’s Freedom of Information Act -- I’m sure in other countries as well -- before people reach a decision in the government, we’re not compelled to publish the drafting stage, the back and forth, within the ministry agencies.

Audrey Tang: Because I said anything I can see, I can publish, actually, the career public service gets a lot of credit for communicating with civil society with innovative ideas. It’s still radically new. If things go wrong, it’s always my fault. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: People in the career public service learn that they can innovate and propose ideas that even have just five percent chance of succeeding, and having me absorbing most of the risk, or having the president herself, through presidential hackathons and things, activities like that.

Audrey Tang: We have cross-sectoral collaborations that basically, the career public service writes the entry, give it to the civil society people, who enters the competition. They say, “OK, we are just here to help the civil society.”

Audrey Tang: Actually, they wrote the cases themselves. Every year, we select five cases. There is no prize money, no reward in monetary terms, but rather the prize of winning the president hackathon is to be merged into the career public service, our annual budget the very next year.

Daniel R. Russel: Fascinating. You’re sitting next to a lapsed career public servant. I appreciate your forbearance here.

Daniel R. Russel: In my own career in government, I found on many issues -- certainly, issues dealing with national security and international relations -- that it was important that the internal deliberative process remained confidential.

Daniel R. Russel: That was key to not only protecting certain national security sets of information, but also, creating an environment where there was the willingness to innovate, to experiment, to contradict, to challenge the conventional wisdom.

Daniel R. Russel: Setting aside national security information, how do you maintain the willingness of the team to take a risk with an idea that may instantly be shown to be a bad idea, or try something that runs against the grain of what’s currently popular? How do you protect that space for really open and honest internal discussion?

Audrey Tang: Quite a few means. If I had go in with radical transparency and a live camera, I would get nowhere. When I talk about publishing the transcript two weeks after each meeting, every participant is allowed to edit.

Audrey Tang: People who feel there is a power imbalance usually choose to appear as nicknames, so if things go wrong, you don’t know which public service member there is. If things go right, they can come to the journalist and say, “Hey, I proposed that.” [laughs] It’s the best of both worlds.

Audrey Tang: Also, but still on the national security aspect, my radical transparency compact says I don’t look at anything that is state secret, anything that is top secret or confidential. We don’t know. We don’t know how that will interact with national security matters. So far, it’s mostly about domestic matters.

Daniel R. Russel: I get that you’re cordoning off the national security sensitive information and so on. There are other forms of cyber crime, of challenges to the security of systems, the integrity of an administrative process. Have you had problems? Have you had the experience of being...?

Audrey Tang: I’m going to talk geek for a bit. My first action as the digital minister is to recompile the Linux kernel used in the government systems. Recompiling the kernel is a technical term that means that we used the secured, peer reviewed open source operating system to harden the security of our internal communication tools.

Audrey Tang: If the public service in the 14 days of editing, the journalist gets most of the copy, then it will destroy the trust that the career public service place on me. I have to personally ensure the cyber security of the system that we use.

Audrey Tang: The system’s called Sandstorm, by the way, sandstorm.io. Aside from introducing that, we also commissioned top notch white hat hackers, people who are expert in computer security, won the second place internationally in DEFCON to attack the system.

Audrey Tang: This is not just some black box penetration testing. This whole system is open source. They pore through each line, looking for vulnerabilities, looking for security holes.

Audrey Tang: It’s only after half a year of this white box testing that we’re reasonably sure that this is OK against all the cyber security threats, that it has a full audit, and so on, so that people can innovate on top of this platform.

Audrey Tang: Which is why we used the same Google app-like collaborative spreadsheet, collaborative document auditing, the kanban board, chatroom, you name it within the secure enclave, so that career public service can just write a few pages of simple web programming to create a system for ordering lunchboxes together, or something like that.

Audrey Tang: Giving the freedom to innovate without worrying about cyber security.

Daniel R. Russel: You’ve talked about cyber security. You’ve talked about safeguarding the code and the system. What about safeguarding privacy? What are some of the other concerns? Transparency, yes, but on the other hand, how do you calculate the things that could be put at risk by this radical transparency?

Audrey Tang: As I said, people choose to record their utterances by voluntary association. They only reveal the part of themselves or their speech that they are comfortable of revealing. At an extreme example, I’ve had office hours where journalists interview me, but they change their mind about the questions they ask.

Audrey Tang: In the transcript, you’ll see me answering questions, but all the questions are redacted. In some extreme, it could be like that, which is funny. Usually, it’s the other way around with journalists and ministers.

Audrey Tang: In any case, we do allow people to basically edit away their speeches and utterances, if they feel their privacy, it is at risk. I think as a general point, if people have informed consent of what they put out there in the public domain, we see private data as not an asset to anybody involved, but rather as the beginning of a relationship.

Audrey Tang: The GDPR from the European Union talks something like that. If you put data in the government storage, the government begins a relationship with you that you can ask the government to disclose what kind of purpose it’s using.

Audrey Tang: Is it using out of purpose? What kind of update mechanism is there? Can I take it to somewhere else for storage, and things like that? Taiwan is totally in line with this kind of what we call data agency algorithms and attitudes.

Daniel R. Russel: Let me switch gears, if I can a little bit. You talked a bit in your remarks about your own experience in the Sunflower movement. I lived through that movement from the vantage point of Washington, DC, since I was working at the National Security Council at the time.

Daniel R. Russel: The developments and the progress or lack of progress in the cross-strait relationship, was then and will always be of real importance and real interest to policymakers in the United States, particularly, but elsewhere as well.

Daniel R. Russel: The Sunflower movement was not merely a protest about the fact that the members of the LY weren’t at their desk and doing what you wanted them to do. It was very much about the cross-strait trade services agreement itself.

Daniel R. Russel: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about whether, in any way, there’s in your view a digital component to the cross-strait relationship. How, if at all, does your work, these platforms, relate to the dealings and the prospects of the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland?

Audrey Tang: Just for the record, the Sunflower movement is not my idea at all.

Audrey Tang: I did not know that it would happen. I was just called there to supply the communication facility of this protest this night. I had no idea that they would climb over the wall and break into it. The communication facility, I thought I would just lend for a couple years. It ended up to be 22 days. I had no idea.

Audrey Tang: In any case, I think there is a component of digital in this relationship. The example I showed, the AirBox, or the g0v air visualization platform, many people in, for example, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, or so on, really want to know what really is going on with the air quality there as well.

Audrey Tang: Just as why the Reporters Without Borders chose Taiwan as their headquarters in Asia, that’s because they have a safe place in which to publish the results, without worrying about retaliation from the government and so on.

Audrey Tang: There is a lot of collaboration between the civil society, focusing on water and air quality, and the citizen scientists across Asia, but of course, in those cities appearances as well, where they see Taiwan as somewhere that can safeguard their data, and publish and contribute to the climate science, without worrying about retaliation or revealing their identity there.

Audrey Tang: I think in that, I personally worked on the Freenet platform back in 2000 and 2001. It was the precursor of the Tor platform, which is widely used nowadays for people in more restricted Internet environments to safely voice their opinions and send their messages out to the international journalist community.

Audrey Tang: While I don’t work personally on the same technologies now, I do maintain the same ethos and support that people who work on...It’s really SDG16 as well. An accountable, rule of law system, where people can safely publish their evidences that’s related to their environment.

Daniel R. Russel: Do you follow what is occurring in mainland China in terms of the harnessing and the application of AI, of technology and connection with the Communist Party’s own goals for social control and social stability?

Audrey Tang: They are on a very different track.

Daniel R. Russel: Can you envisage the kinds of innovative platforms and programs that you’re developing and applying being adopted or integrated, even at the local level, in the PRC?

Audrey Tang: People don’t usually call themselves civic hackers in the PRC, for obvious reasons.

Daniel R. Russel: Or if they do, they only get to use that once.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, that’s right. They operate under the umbrella, for example, of social enterprises, and things of a still social, but less threatening, moniker. We do offer through the social innovation plan basic trainings, basic know-hows of how to use these digital technologies, curriculums that we’re building with the Digital Nations network, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: All of this are available on the web. The particular thing with our technology is that it’s not reliant on a so-called cloud provider, either Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. It can all be run on a very cheap, simple PC.

Audrey Tang: That powers, for example, the Occupy. It was powered by intranet, running just a couple laptops. I think this is important so that people can learn to self-organize, maybe not a political setting, maybe just in a socioeconomic setting, but still understand that in the digital governance approach, it is possible to listen to millions of people.

Daniel R. Russel: We talked about cyber security. We understand that you’re setting aside the...

Audrey Tang: State secrets.

Daniel R. Russel: ...state secrets and the confidential information. Where have you had problems? What have been some of the issues? Does your own role as a transgender woman generate pushback and controversy?

Daniel R. Russel: Are some of the policies that have been produced through open government, or some of the issues that have surfaced through vTaiwan and other platforms, have they created problems that perhaps you hadn’t foreseen?

Audrey Tang: Many. There was an e-petition, 8,000 people, that petitioned Taiwan to change our time zone from plus-eight to plus-nine. The media loved this story throughout the mainstream media. Immediately, almost, there’s a petition of 8,000 people strong that says Taiwan should remain in GMT plus-eight.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of frenzy, of buzz, around this. My methodology, again, when this kind of controversy happens, is just focusing on the common values, as I said in the very beginning. We did invite people who petitioned for both sides into co-creation workshops.

Audrey Tang: Where they both, after a morning of very loud conversation, and also each ministry explaining exactly how much changing one hour would cost in terms of energy, in terms of tourism, in terms of everything. They had no idea that public service is very professional every single way.

Audrey Tang: Then they agreed the common value is that they want Taiwan to be seen as more unique internationally, like we have some unique value proposition, some unique thing going on. Then even the original petitioner agreed that changing the time zone is perhaps not the best way to further this goal.

Audrey Tang: Maybe the media would report it for the day, and then, there are countless multiple time zones. There are countless multiple currency systems. It’s not a strong enough identity.

Audrey Tang: People said, “If we’re going to pay a large one-time cost, and a not-so-long but still sizable ongoing cost to implement this, why don’t we use the same budget to make Taiwan unique in a way that’s cultural, in a way that’s open governance, digital governance. Maybe we can export the system, like Estonia does,” and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It became the consensus for all the 16,000 people participating in the petition, although there was controversy. There were also people who can advocate for the rough consensus that we reached at the end.

Daniel R. Russel: I see. Thanks. I was guessing that maybe the debate was going to land on GMT plus-eight and a half.

Daniel R. Russel: That’s not where it went.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not a compromise.

Daniel R. Russel: Speaking of time. we’re about at the point when we should open up the floor to questions and take some from Twitter. Before I do, I’ll abuse my moderator privilege by touching on one subject that I haven’t heard from you about, which is the participation, the role, and the issues with private industry, the private sector.

Daniel R. Russel: How do companies in Taiwan or abroad play in this open government, innovative strategy?

Audrey Tang: As the digital minister, I’m semi-diplomat to those several semi-sovereign multinational entities, such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, and friend. It’s very interesting, because they are also struggling with their own legitimacy theory.

Audrey Tang: Just like the Internet itself certainly doesn’t have a navy or army, but they found themselves being arbiter and organizer of people’s movements, just as we in the public sectors do. I think in many concrete cases, like in Taiwan, we see the use of AI, of bots to spread disinformation.

Audrey Tang: We’re in the front line of it. We see folks using bots to, for example, con people into buying counterfeit goods, which they pay upon delivery, and found that it’s broken. There’s nothing to return to. I’m still an optimist in doing those semi-diplomatic missions, because early 2000, I went through the spam war -- which is not a real war in a real battlefield, just a very complicated issue.

Audrey Tang: Back then, people thought email was being destroyed by people who abuse the fact that you can send an email for $0.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the solution during the spam wars was not from us, the technologists, who implemented strong cryptographic measures, nor from large email hosters, like Gmail, nor from governments which passed the laws on unsolicited emails, nor from the consumer protection authorities, nor from the educators.

Audrey Tang: It’s everybody doing a little bit in a coordinated action that increased the cost of spam a little bit along the way. It reached a point where it doesn’t earn anyone anything to send spams. Then we don’t see much spams anymore after that.

Audrey Tang: This kind of multistakeholder open negotiation, it does take time. It took five years back in the spam war. We think that it is always better than one single actor dominating the field by basically passing draconian laws that makes everybody else go into the black market, or anything like that. We’d rather engage in a serious, ongoing discussion of Internet governance.

Daniel R. Russel: That’s terrific. Thank you very much.

Daniel R. Russel: The floor is open. If you’d like to ask a question, I’ll ask you, please briefly identify yourself. Please make sure that it’s actually a question.

Daniel R. Russel: Please keep it brief. The gentleman in the back, please.

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Jonathan, and I work for CRIA Society. Thank you so much. That was really interesting. Lots of tools to help overcome political apathy and learned helplessness with the whole process.

Audience Member: I wonder if you’ve experimented with taking it a step further, even, gamifying certain types of civic engagements, and that kind of way to make it more exciting and enticing, to bring people who are still not really excited into this.

Daniel R. Russel: I’m sorry, just to repeat the question to get it on the record. This is Jonathan from the CRIA Society asking you about whether you can gamify some of these initiatives.

Audrey Tang: Yes. There’s this project called Holopolis. The reflection stage technology is called Polis. Holopolis basically use virtually reality, immersive reality technology to get people in the IMAX Theater state of mind, and put people into each other’s shoes by first starting on the International Space Station, looking at the Earth.

Audrey Tang: It’s called the “overview effect.” We know as a fact that it makes people better people, just looking at the Earth as a single object, and then zooming in into the environmental system, and viewing, for example, a construction project from the viewpoint of an indentured animal.

Audrey Tang: Or, for example, I had this conversation with young schoolchildren by shrinking my avatar into the size the same as those first graders or second graders. In virtual reality, it’s much easier to make empathy, convey empathy, in a way that is not just a game, but it’s still fun, of course.

Audrey Tang: Really, it is an immersive engagement tool that put people really in the place, and give voice to a river, a history, or an indigenous nation that perhaps have no voice to speak on their own, but could be done with the Holopolis project, with the virtual immersive reality.

Audrey Tang: Three people from my team is going very soon to Spain to Madrid to prototype the next step of this gamified system in Medialab-Prado. If you’re interested, feel free to join the Holopolis project.

Daniel R. Russel: Do you have a cat avatar that you can use at home?

Audrey Tang: Yes, I actually do. I actually do.

Daniel R. Russel: Fantastic. The gentleman in the very back, please.

Audience Member: Earl Carr, representing Momentum Advisers, and also an adjunct professor at NYU. Thank you, Minister Tang. I really enjoyed your presentation. I had the privilege of taking a group of graduate students to Taiwan this summer for the first time, and they absolutely loved Taiwan.

Audience Member: I had a question. Last year, 2017, there was a large scale ATM theft case in Taiwan, where a network of criminals used malware to essentially, I think it was, 41 ATM machines throughout Taiwan, and stole something like 2.6 million. What kinds of projects are you doing to prevent these types of things from happening again?

Audrey Tang: They’re an international network. The fact they are discovered in Taiwan says something about our cyber security capabilities. They’ve been operating everywhere. There is the Cyber Security Act, which is the cornerstone of this. We thank the legislator for a very difficult conversation, and finally passing the Cyber Security Act.

Audrey Tang: It lists as critical infrastructure the essential services, like banks, that keeps the society functioning. It basically says the cyber security industry, the cyber security community in Taiwan, people who are white hat hackers should have every incentive to remain white hat hackers, and contribute to society.

Audrey Tang: Occasionally, gets meeting with the president, for example, and gets cherished as useful and productive members of a society, instead of going into the criminal route. The pride, the self-esteem of the cyber security community in Taiwan, is now at the highest point in history.

Audrey Tang: We make sure that there is sufficient HR, like human power, in each critical infrastructure, as well as the ministries that manage these critical infrastructures. We make sure that they’re paid well, they have very good career advancement strategies, and they participate in the international CERT and other communities, and provide their contributions.

Audrey Tang: Just the team of hackers who audited by Sandstorm system filed three CVEs, which is like medals that honored their work. Just making sure they’re respected, and we have significant training in the college level for people who are interested in defending the reality of the cyber plus physical world now.

Audrey Tang: I think this is really the cornerstone upon which radical transparency can be built. Without this foundation, it’s impossible.

Daniel R. Russel: Ambassador Elliot, there’s a microphone coming.

Audience Member: Hi, I’m Susan Elliot, and I’m with the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. My question is, this is a really interesting and innovative endeavor of the Taiwan government and yourself.

Audience Member: Are there other governments who are interested in doing similar things, have you had collaboration with other countries, and looking forward to seeing more kinds of digital ministers in countries like the US and others?

Audrey Tang: We have a lot of collaborations. The year before I become digital minister, of the 12 months, I spent 5 of which in Europe. I worked very closely with people there.

Audrey Tang: For example, in the Etalab, the state lab of the French government, and actually trained the activists using this methodology. Then they went off and did Nuit debout.

Audrey Tang: It is a very interesting relationship with state lab with civil society people. We also take inspiration from Iceland, from Estonia, from Madrid after the 15-M, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s this coalition of democratic cities. There’s an EU program called D-CENT, for decentralized policymaking. Now, there’s also DECODE, that brings data in and so on. We maintain a very strong connection with both the academic and also the practitioners in the municipalities.

Audrey Tang: It’s mostly municipalities, because it’s the right amount of people and political willpower that make it happen. That’s it. This June, we also held a workshop in NYC with people joining from 18F. We also met people from USDS, from the New York City government to introduce this methodology.

Audrey Tang: We’re bringing it Ottawa, I think, this November. We’re making a curriculum together.

Daniel R. Russel: Let me take a question from Twitter. This is from...

Audrey Tang: Yes, from the beyond.

Daniel R. Russel: Can established, entrenched power truly concede to emergent changes? Won’t established budgets, careers, fiefdoms reinforce, resist, and deny self-organized solutions?

Audrey Tang: Internet itself was like that. There was a lot of established interests. I’m sure that here, there is AT&T and friends, who, I think, opposed the very idea of installing a plugin to your phone system. Had that not been allowed, this whole idea of modem would not be possible.

Audrey Tang: Without a modem, there is no Internet. There are some preconditions upon which the established system need to see that this emergent system is complementing -- but not reinforcing -- their hierarchical power.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, my philosophy of voluntary association says before the career public service is ready for any of it, I certainly don’t go to the Ministry of Defense and say, “Starting tomorrow, you’re going to do things my way.”

Audrey Tang: That’s not my philosophy. They only come to me when they see the danger or the risk of not engaging is larger than the potential fear, uncertainty, and doubt that they have internally of engagement. That is the philosophy of participation officers.

Audrey Tang: We’re certainly not saying we’re replacing the existing establishment overnight. We’re mostly saying, like Buckminster Fuller is wont to do, and wont to say, is that you don’t fix, hack, or patch an old system. You make new systems that, in some cases, make the old system obsolete. It is a natural progression. It is not by fighting with the existing system.

Daniel R. Russel: Career bureaucrats could be made obsolete, but you’re not going to fight with them?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right, over time.

Daniel R. Russel: I got out just in time.

Daniel R. Russel: More questions. Yes, the lady right here.

Audience Member: Hello, I’m from Taiwan, and I’m a visiting scholar in New York. I have a question for you, because right now, the news that Google, they claim to return to China market. They already have a Dragonfly, the research, because they’re sensitive.

Audience Member: Some keyword, like a student protest or human rights, sends the keyword. Also, to tricking the browsing results apply to which number to research that, the sensitive concept? What do you think, as freedom can be trending for the business, what benefit for the big company, like Google?

Audrey Tang: Many Googlers who are my friends are very concerned. They’ve brought it up in their internal governance mechanisms. Being their company business, of course, I cannot comment or reveal what it is actually going through.

Audrey Tang: I will use an example, like when I started working with Apple, as a liaison with the open source community. Back in time, for anything related to basic language research, AI research, whatever, Apple doesn’t publish anything.

Audrey Tang: They don’t actually get a lot of credibility or trust from the academic community of the things that they are producing, or how they’re producing, in a very basic sense of the programming language they use.

Audrey Tang: After quite a few years, people who work as liaisons and the people who work within Apple, eventually convinced the top management that it is actually to their benefit if they worked more in the open, and more to share their research results with the research community of programming languages and artificial intelligence, which is the direction Apple is taking now.

Audrey Tang: I think it all boils down to the individuals.

Audrey Tang: Just to come back a little bit to your remark, I am not saying the career public servants, the people, are made obsolete. I am just saying the hierarchical power structure is being supplemented a little bit and rendered obsolete, but people are still people.

Audrey Tang: People can act in their conscience, in the values they want to uphold. They collectively define the company or the brand that they work with.

Audrey Tang: I think one of the great mismatch of our time is that we use the words that we use on people.

Audrey Tang: Like, we say, “attract investment,” to nouns that are not people. Our institutions are collective fictions, our brands.

Audrey Tang: People treat people as if they are functional entities, like “human resource,” and things like that.

Audrey Tang: If people within an institution can think of themselves more as individual actors, organize, and make their thoughts known, as many friends of mine in Google is now doing, I think there is every hope that their governance system, still within that institution, will deliberate and will change its course for the better of the common will of the people working there.

Daniel R. Russel: Let me follow up on that good question about Google and China with a slightly philosophical question, which is that for a generation, there’s been a conviction in the West that freedom is an essential condition for real innovation, that the scientific method is founded on the sanctity of facts, the sharing of data, the integrity of the data, etc.

Daniel R. Russel: That led to a widespread assumption that, for example, in mainland China, that only with political openness and reform could innovation, science, development, and even business genuinely flourish.

Daniel R. Russel: That premise has been called into question, and is debated now, with a lot of evidence suggesting that even while the political system is becoming more controlled, innovation, development, research is flourishing within that political stricture.

Daniel R. Russel: Where do you stand on that debate, and what is your experience telling is likely to be the future?

Audrey Tang: First, I think innovation means very different things to many different people. The common dictionary definition is just, it has to be new, it has to be replicable, and that’s it. What counts as innovation, I think, is very different. As I mentioned, very different tracks.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, when we talk about innovation, we always say that it must be for the social good, for the common good of everyone. If you make innovation in one particular domain to the sacrifice of other domains, like focus on one sustainable goal to the detriment of the other goals, we don’t call it innovation. We call it a mistake.

Audrey Tang: Seriously. This is just common political language in Taiwan. On the other hand, in many other jurisdictions, in many other systems, people may just call the linear progress innovation, ignoring the massive externalities that it can cause to the society and the environment.

Audrey Tang: What qualifies as innovation is different in the different academic and political communities. I still that open innovation, the ethos that the Internet itself embodies, is not entirely gone in PRC.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Great Firewall. They still allow people to collaborate on GitHub, which is the most important open source collaboration ground, recently acquired by Microsoft. Basically, what this says is that if it cuts the connection to one of the greatest nexus of open innovation, it is to the detriment of whatever innovation means there as well.

Audrey Tang: The innovators there still have a strong enough societal mandate, so that they cannot actually shut GitHub off. I think it’s not as polarized as dystopian at this point, but of course, we’ll pay close attention.

Daniel R. Russel: Thank you. Thank you very much for that. Yes, the lady with the black dress. You, yes.

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Matios. I’m at Columbia University, representing the student-led think tank called European Horizons. We just opened a chapter in Taipei University, by the way.

Audience Member: What I’m really interested in is that obviously, the models that you’re proposing, which are incredibly interesting, are proposing a new form of democracy, or a new form of participation, a more open form of participation.

Audience Member: It also known that exists a certain digital gap with everything between the offline and online world, and particularly between more developed and less developed countries, although I hate to use that dichotomy.

Audience Member: There is, of course, a danger that while the countries that can afford the infrastructure, the knowledge, and the education of society to participate in this kind of digital and more open kind of democracy, where does that leave the countries that cannot afford?

Audience Member: There is an upfront investment necessary. Where does that leave the countries that cannot afford this? When you mentioned the collaborative partnerships, you were mentioning France and Canada, which are very developed countries.

Audience Member: Where does that leave the countries that are not there yet, and how can partnerships be established to improve that?

Audrey Tang: That is a great question. Last November, I believe, I spoke about this very topic in the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in UN Geneva. Because of certain passport issues, I had to send my robotic avatar into the Internet Governance Forum. For the rule of proceeding, they were just watching a video, except it’s recorded two seconds ago, and that has a camera with it.

Audrey Tang: In any case, through telepresence, I think panel I attended was on landlocked, least developed, and also small island countries, which doesn’t have a lot of Internet exchange points, where it costs a lot to exchange information to Facebook, to Google, or to any of the data centers.

Audrey Tang: Certainly, those companies are not going to set up data centers any time soon on those small islands or landlocked countries. I think it is pretty unique that Internet is designed with these scenarios in mind originally, because it’s a post-nuclear resilience network.

Audrey Tang: Many of the tools of the early Internet, like the email, functions perfectly, even if you’re cut off from the wider Internet, or you only have a very thin connection. That was, indeed, the case during the Occupy.

Audrey Tang: During the Occupy, the entire 3G and HSDPA channels were so saturated that we had to rely on intranet technologies, with very limited exchange capacity to the outside, to run most of the communication network and collective decision in the occupied area around the Legislative Yuan.

Audrey Tang: Which is why we think that the technologies we’re proposing, all based on the idea of decentralized web, all based on the ideas that it can run on very low-cost, Raspberry Pi level hardware, open hardware.

Audrey Tang: It could also be of help to landlocked or small island countries that basically want to set up virtual town halls, or about collaborative governance systems, by linking the campuses together without paying for a very expensive outbound link to the great or larger Internet.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we can leverage the latest development on distributed ledger, decentralized web, and things like that. Technologically, we already have a prototype of a solution. We’re, of course, very much willing to work with our partners in many other countries, and perhaps UNDP -- why not? -- to try to pilot these kind of governance systems.

Daniel R. Russel: Great. Thank you very much. The lady right in front of the former questioner had a question.

Audience Member: The other lady in black.

Daniel R. Russel: Yes.

Audience Member: I also have a finance question. When either individuals, groups, or countries come to you for a solution, and you come up with a solution, I’m concerned or wonder who pays for those air quality controls, the helicopters, or all the solutions you come up with.

Audrey Tang: The air quality sensors, they are done by private sector companies with a social mission. I was just visiting Edinburgh. They called it social enterprises there, but here, they could be B corps or whatever.

Audrey Tang: They are basically for-profit entities with a clear social mission to make something happen to solve a sustainable development goal challenge. I am also the minister with the mandate to work with social innovators, entrepreneurs, and anyone who want to make a business out of solving an environmental or social need.

Audrey Tang: We SDG-index their work, and put it on a dashboard that I don’t have time to show. Basically, we play matchmakers to people with environmental or social needs, and build sustainable business models for the companies who are interested in solving these needs to thrive, and also export it.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Taiwan Water Corporation recently, through the president hackathon, established a relationship with AI researchers to detect the water leakages early, so that they don’t have to wait a year and a half before repairing a new leakage point.

Audrey Tang: They shrunk the time by tenfold, because we SDG indexed this work, because we build a sustainable business model out of it. The team is now in New Zealand, because they did not have a water shortage problem. Because of climate change, they now do. The team was just there.

Audrey Tang: It shows enormous trust to just share data about water pressure, about water quality this way. Of course, the taxpayers in New Zealand probably pay for the initial cost of producing these data, but it is entirely voluntarily association, because there is a business to be made there as well.

Daniel R. Russel: Great. Thank you very much. Yes, there’s a lady with a scarf right there.

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Charlie Su. I’m from Taiwan, and work and live here for a little bit. I think this is an interesting platform, very transparent. I think my question is, what’s the percentage of the cities that have involved in this platform, do you think?

Audience Member: Then second of all, I think Mr. Russel, he asked this question about, for the senior people, or older people, or lower educated people, you answered that question that you approached them. I guess the question I have is, if it’s not a specific issue, it’s just general issue, how can they express their opinion through your platform?

Audrey Tang: The first question, the national e-participation platform, or the Join platform, has five million users in a country with 23 million. It’s a sizable population. The age and activity map looks like this. If you’re in a college, or if you’re in a senior high school, there’s a lot of participation. If you’re retired, there’s a lot of participation, because people with more time on their hands.

Audrey Tang: We’re not seeing much exclusion, domestically and across different counties. It is true that it’s mostly national issues. If it’s local issue, it has to solicit national interest. That is why the two local issues we dealt with are both in popular tourist destinations, or in marine national parks, because everybody wants to visit there. It is to the welfare of everyone.

Audrey Tang: We’re now working through the second issue you mentioned, through what we call the Regional Revitalization Plan. I don’t actually know how to translate 地方創生, so I will just translate it with whatever.

Audrey Tang: The original revitalization plan is basically saying in each town, in each county of around 50K to 100K of people, they build their own self-governance system by making use of this e-participation platform. We provide it for free, but mostly for archival, indexing, and education purposes.

Audrey Tang: They still run with analog tools to collect what people feel. We don’t call it deliberative democracy, just calling it 參詳 (tsham-siông) with people. [laughs] Just sitting down and having a chat.

Audrey Tang: Basically, this idea of regional innovation is our next step of scaling out. It is taking the same tools, same basically culture, the same ideas, the same archival and same level of automation, but empowering the young people in those different townships and counties to be able to collectively determine the identity of their neighborhood.

Audrey Tang: Build an ecosystem out of it, so that they will wish to remain and identify with that particular place. It is an instrumental part of the regional revitalization tool. The Regional Revitalization Plan compromises of many other ministries as well.

Daniel R. Russel: Thank you, Audrey. We’re coming perilously close to the end of our allotted time, and so I think I’m going to let the Internet have the last word.

Audrey Tang: Very symbolic.

Daniel R. Russel: We’ve got a question from online. You’re a champion and a trailblazer in harnessing digital technology and innovation for the benefit of society.

Daniel R. Russel: Can you comment a bit on the dangers from the use of social media and other digital technologies for political disruption, for political efforts that undermine democracy, as we have seen in the case of the 2016 here in the United States?

Audrey Tang: Disinformation campaigns, computational propaganda, precision persuasion, these are a reality of our times. Taiwan’s concerted effort to work with this disinformation is somewhat unique, certainly in Asia, in the sense that we don’t sacrifice anyone’s freedom of speech in our responses.

Audrey Tang: Instead, what we build was a rapid response system from each ministry and every agency. Nowadays, when our system detect that there is a disinformation campaign starting, within hours -- like three hours or four hours -- there is a clarification or a point-to-point response from the responsibility ministries on the homepage of the administration.

Audrey Tang: Then we partner with civil society friends who are not paid by the government, for sure, and they can also correct the government’s mistakes. They set up independent fact checking organizations that are not just publishing written reports, but actually have bots, for example, that you can add as a friend on the WhatsApp-like setting.

Audrey Tang: If you see something that you wonder whether it’s disinformation or not, you can just send it to that bot, which does a crowdsourced, validated audit trail of fact checking for you, and let you know whether this has been clarified or not.

Audrey Tang: At the end, what we’re trying to do here is using the basic education system and lifelong education system to have a sense of media literacy and critical thinking in people. Back in authoritarian days, it’s very easy to people to accept one standard answer, if it’s printed in one font, or spoken in some authoritarian voice.

Audrey Tang: This is what disinformation is piggybacking on. It is basically printing with that font, with that voice, just not with the same content, and trying to get into people’s mind, as a virus of the mind, through a mimetic back door, if you will.

Audrey Tang: Now, what we’re doing now with this kind of real-time clarification and multilateral consultation that’s very public is that if you sit down and listen with people with different ideas for a long enough time, it builds the immune system, an inoculation in the human brain, so that one cannot be motivated by divisive PR campaigns in the future, because you have considered the different positions of the stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: This is the culture we’re bringing to the table, and we’re also bringing all the different automated reply detection and evaluation systems to the table. We connect with the international fact checking organizations and similar endeavors in an effort to make disinformation more like a distraction, rather than a serious problem undermining democracy.

Daniel R. Russel: Great. Well, Audrey Tang, I can’t speak for everybody. I will say I feel like my IQ has gone up by several points just listening to you today.

Daniel R. Russel: I can speak for everyone in saying thank you, and particularly telling you that I think we all found what you have shared with us today not only interesting, and not only informative, but also inspirational.

Daniel R. Russel: I want to let you know that you have an open welcome at the Asia Society.

Daniel R. Russel: We very much admire and appreciate both your personal courage, something that we all respect, but also the professional work that you’re doing, which is clearly on the cutting edge of where societies need to go in order to build faith in public institutions, and to refit them for the challenges of the digital age we’re living in now.

Daniel R. Russel: Please join me in thanking Audrey Tang.

Daniel R. Russel: Thank you so much.