Dane Gambrell: Like Beth mentioned, we wanted to make sure all our understanding of vTaiwan is up to date. We regularly cite the statistic of 26 pieces of legislation. Has that changed?

Audrey Tang: A few has moved from draft to actually passed by the parliament, but the number have not changed. There’s one case currently going on for e-scooters. Although it have not yet produced a regulation, but at least stakeholder agreement. I’m sure it’s like that everywhere in the world…

Beth Noveck: A national issue? E-scooters is national?

Audrey Tang: It really is because in municipalities such as Taipei, there’s dedicated bike lanes. They are keen to classify as electric bikes. Outside of Taipei municipality, there’s no dedicated bike lanes. They’re inclined to classify it as scooters and so on. It is actually a national level issue, but in any case…

Audrey Tang: No, that number have not changed much. The PO network, the internal vTaiwan-inspired community that we built, has now processed 60 cases. That’s twice a month. Those 60 cases are mostly new.

Beth Noveck: Say a little bit more about when you say processed 60 cases. You mean 60 different issues have gone through some piece of the process.

Audrey Tang: A largely vTaiwan-inspired multistakeholder process, except the facilitators are mainly career public service.

Beth Noveck: Oh, this is from the PO network.

Audrey Tang: It is from the PO network. Actually, we have a folder here that contains the rundown of all the 60 cases. The last two have not been updated there, but they will soon. You can just look at all those different cases there.

Dane Gambrell: We regularly use the examples of regulating Uber and online alcohol sales. Is there a new story we should tell?

Audrey Tang: Carl Jack Miller did the e-scooters one. It’s a OK story, I guess.

Audrey Tang: The most exciting thing is largely this generative approach that vTaiwan was able to produce new vTaiwan-like processes. Not only the PO network, but literally the fintech sandbox, the self-driving vehicle sandbox, now the 5G testing spectrum sandbox, and platform economy sandbox, general purpose regulatory.

Audrey Tang: These were all generated from a vTaiwan process, which then makes new rooms for multi-stakeholder processes that is outside of vTaiwan. It is those further on sandboxes and generative multi-stakeholder mechanisms that is seeing most of the action now.

Audrey Tang: While the vTaiwan community are still meeting every week, have moved on to a lot of new social innovations, such as pairing different supporters of different candidates to meet each other in person before the election…

Audrey Tang: Or in real-time crowdsourcing fact checks of everything every presidential candidate said or things like that which are not quite e-rulemaking or crowd law but is nevertheless a part of the democratic fabric.

Dane Gambrell: In the recent election, what role did vTaiwan play? Was it the centerpiece, or was it relevant?

Audrey Tang: As I said, vTaiwan keeps generating useful experiments… For this past election, a lot of focus of the meetups were on countering disinformation or countering astroturfing. It’s not just a US hot topic, it’s also a Taiwan hot topic.

Audrey Tang: As I said, the real-time fact checkers and the campaign donation plus Facebook Ad Library transparency project and so on were all projects that were either bootstrapped or amplified by the vTaiwan community. I’m sending you a few. This is the crowdsourced fact check. This is the voting guide. This is for pairing up supporters from blue and green camps, physically. There’s no doubt more, but these are the more famous ones.

Beth Noveck: All the links.

Dane Gambrell: [laughs] What are the demographics of participation on vTaiwan? How are you able to make it more inclusive?

Beth Noveck: By the way, before you move forward, the votely link, nothing’s loading for me.

Audrey Tang: It’s not?

Beth Noveck: It’s giving me a blank screen. Dane, is it working for you?

Dane Gambrell: I’m also getting a blank…Oh, it loaded now.

Audrey Tang: It works for me. This is just so that you can look at those real-time Facebook advertisements that all the candidates are posting. We have, of course, the honest advertisement agreement with Facebook which, by the way, US can really use. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: There is also a lot of extremely funny and/or creative pieces of bulletins such as this one, which is absolutely my favorite, which is literally a platform in the bulletin of a candidate. The community worked to digitize them for people with blindness, I’m sure, but also for analysis. Anyway, these are just some of the pre-election works that people in the vTaiwan meet-ups were working on.

Beth Noveck: I’m going to mute because all of this racket in the background.

Dane Gambrell: [laughs] What are the demographics of participation? How are you able to make them more inclusive?

Audrey Tang: A lot of it is just working with existing media. If you look at the first link, not only thousands of people volunteer online to fact-check the presidential candidates, but then it’s a partnership of easily 11 media and 3 fact-checking institutions. The way to reach out is literally through those institutional and social media channels.

Dane Gambrell: What would you say the platform’s limitations and what’s not working?

Audrey Tang: With vTaiwan, of course, whenever people realize that there’s a limitation of vTaiwan platform itself, the community works on creating another platform that addresses that shortcoming. That’s how we get the PO Network and that’s how we get the Sandbox mechanisms. As a bunch of people who meet every Wednesday evening for dinner, I think the main limitation is still just physical space.

Beth Noveck: Is it the PO network that meets every Wednesday?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s the vTaiwan community. vTaiwan is defined as really just a every Wednesday, 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM, meetup.

Beth Noveck: It begins with Wednesdays as they call it here.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a dinner party, and whomever shows up are the right people. All the procedure requirement is that they make a meeting transcript or record, and give an account of who showed up, who did what, why, and things like that. The rundown is all in the vTaiwan HackMD folder.

Audrey Tang: You can see that people come and go. They notice shortcomings in existing mechanisms, and then mostly they just start designing new ones, which is easy to get through to a lot of media stakeholders.

Beth Noveck: I think this is on the list, Dane. I’m sorry, but I’m jumping ahead. The question is, in so many places, the goal is to get to simplicity, one platform, one interface. Simple, simple, simple. It’s so hard to explain to people even how one platform works. This is multiple platforms. Of course, there is a civic tech community to support this and the PO network of trained public officials that are not afraid of this.

Beth Noveck: I’m curious about, over time, this trade-off between essentially what’s the complexity of the process and the desire for simplicity and whether there hasn’t been a push to say, “We want one thing, and one platform, and one way of doing things,” how you’ve managed to maintain this kind of complex ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: First of all, the meeting minutes, which I just pasted you here, is quite good at keeping track of who is working on what. In a civic tech community-making sense, I don’t think it’s a big problem. Your question is maybe not about the facilitators and civic tech people. It’s for everyday people, “Which platform do they want to go?” and things like that.

Audrey Tang: The answer is first that the Join platform pretty much links to everything. The Join platform having more than 10 million visitors now out of 23 million in Taiwan is, by far, the easiest to remember. That’s a single portal. The other efforts such as Votely or the fact-checking project are events-based, so they run exactly the length of the election.

Audrey Tang: Actually, the Join platform’s petition function pauses two months before the voting day. Those two months, people need something else to engage their attention. They complement each other quite well in the sense that the Join platform is seen as part of democratic process, but those experimental platforms are good for people who are more cutting-edge and even less afraid of using digital tools.

Audrey Tang: They serve as research arms, I guess, for the Join platform. We just did a facelift of the Join platform’s home page. That is also inspired by civic tech in addition to the budget visualization thing.

Beth Noveck: Helpful.

Dane Gambrell: Considering how much vTaiwan’s success depends on your personality, how will it survive if you leave? How do you guarantee the longevity?

Audrey Tang: As long as there is a horizontal minister willing to call up relevant stakeholders within the government, which is easy now with the PO network, then the binding process is still there. Actually, if you look at the minutes, I attend maybe one vTaiwan meetup out of 10. It’s not like I run the show. The community very successfully bootstrap itself.

Audrey Tang: My main function is just to ensure that the right stakeholders within the government shows up if they want them to show up.

Dane Gambrell: Many of the citizen participation and innovations are one-offs. What do you think gives vTaiwan its staying power?

Audrey Tang: Considering that it’s been running continuously for more than five years now, I think two things. One is that there’s always a outside game. If anyone in the Cabinet backtracks from the promise, the opposition party, who is always pro-open government because open government benefits opposition parties more, they will put pressure to the Cabinet.

Audrey Tang: That is how vTaiwan survived in the window between 2016, May, where Simon Chang is no longer the premier, and October that year where I become the digital minister. There was literally a five-months window.

Audrey Tang: You can see quite a few MPs in Parliament make parliamentary inquiries to the premier, saying, “We have this vTaiwan process. It’s important for it to continue. Would you like to commit that everything significant will go through similar processes?” and things like that.

Audrey Tang: If the Cabinet retracts from that, saying, “Oh, that was the previous administration,” people won’t buy it. I think this legitimacy among the MPs gives it staying power. This is evidenced, again, by the primaries of the DPP where William Lai run against Dr. Tsai Ing-wen. Of course, he is the vice president-elect now.

Audrey Tang: He was saying that Dr. Tsai was not going far enough in open government. He will make an even more strong commitment. Once they become running mates, it’s Dr. Simon Chang and Mayor Han now saying that they will be even more in the open-government processes. I think this dynamic is the first reason.

Audrey Tang: The second one is that vTaiwan is designed to be a recursive public. People who show up, they can do pretty much anything with the brand. That also makes sure that even though the host has now shifted into, I don’t know, the fourth generation of people now, there’s a continuous influx of people because there really is no limitation of what they can do with this brand.

Audrey Tang: There’s a ready community to share food. I think cuisine also very important.

Beth Noveck: I want to probe a little bit more though the question of bridging the gap between ideas and implementation of ideas and what the learning has been. The initial phase of every project like this, any engagement project, always starts with people having suggestions, ideas, complaints, “Do this, do that, the other thing.”

Beth Noveck: The difficulty, and that’s where the multi-stage, multi-part process has been so transformative and hard to do in a lot of places, is getting people to focus on what it takes to implement something, to create a workable proposal. I’m just wondering if you have any reflections at this point after……How many years has it been? Three? Two?

Audrey Tang: Five years.

Beth Noveck: [laughs] Five years? I’ve lost track of time. Just how you’ve gotten people to evolve from that thinking only about ideas to thinking about implementation of ideas.

Audrey Tang: That’s a general g0v theme, vTaiwan being just one of the meetups within the larger g0v community. The idea of g0v has always been, “Don’t ask why nobody’s picking this up. Admit that you’re that nobody.”

Audrey Tang: The idea of 沒有人, or literally nobodies, ensure that even when people stop caring about vTaiwan or any other project, the meeting minutes, the hack voters, the open-source code base, and so on are still there and ripe for people to pick up and fork.

Audrey Tang: I think this general idea of unafraid of forking have informed a lot of civic tech people to be not bound by the original visions or the original motivations of people who originally draw up the vTaiwan initial process back in 2014. None of the initial drawers of that white board is a vTaiwan regular now.

Audrey Tang: The continuity is preserved very well because people can literally just come in, people explain the context, and they can fork it. I think it’s not really about keeping the same people’s attention or keeping the same people’s motivation on continued production but making sure that people who want to work on further institutional mechanism design don’t have to start from a blank slate.

Audrey Tang: They don’t have to fight an existing authority by establishing a culture that says no. Anyone shows up is the right people, and we ensure that there’s good food every Wednesday evening.

Beth Noveck: The food being the crucial ingredient in…

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely.

Beth Noveck: Maybe I should bring snacks to my congressional testimony. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Literally, Clay Shirky shared to me in an interview that they transformative thing that changes perception about Occupy Wall Street was the food stations.

Beth Noveck: Was the food stations?

Beth Noveck: Somebody has to get the coffee. There’s no replacement for that in collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Beth Noveck: Sorry, Dane. I’m interrupting.

Dane Gambrell: How uniform has the adoption of the vTaiwan process been? Have you found that certain departments are more willing to use it or that it works better for certain types of issues?

Audrey Tang: The original envisioning of the vTaiwan process is decidedly in a initial discover stage where the government knows nothing or almost nothing about possible solutions. In design-thinking terms, vTaiwan is about the initial discovery and a incremental definition.

Audrey Tang: By the time of face-to-face consultation meetings, we will then settle on a common “how might we?” question. That is the key question that people can live with. The development of those ideas through prototyping and sandboxes and the delivery through parliamentary assent is deliberately not part of the vTaiwan process as originally envisioned.

Audrey Tang: We don’t want to contest our legitimacy with that of representative democracy. We definitely say we’re just augmenting the representative democracy in the group discovery and sometime define phases. The less any particular MP or minister know about a emerging topic, the better the vTaiwan process is.

Dane Gambrell: You’ve described vTaiwan as being in a state of permanent beta. You mentioned the new regulatory sandboxes. Are there any other recent ways you’ve evolved the process such as using new tools or platforms?

Audrey Tang: The Join platform, which founded a few months after vTaiwan, is prime example. Soon as I became digital minister, I literally, I wouldn’t say took over, but heavily influenced the development of the Join platform so that it heavily resembles three different g0v projects.

Audrey Tang: The supervise part is literally the budget visualization, the inaugural g0v project. The petition and collaborative meetings part is directly adapted from vTaiwan. The regulatory comments, which is regulations.gov, is using a lot of insights gained by topical discussions in the e-democracy, what we call liquid democracy, concepts from early g0v movements, experiments.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we put a lot of g0v project ingredients into Join platform itself and advertised to pretty much the same stakeholders, which are very diverse, for those three different functions. That is why I think they get 10 million visitors, because they did a Netflix- or Amazon-like recommendation.

Audrey Tang: “You petition for this. You may be interested in that budget. You raised a comment for this regulatory period announcement. Maybe you want to sign this petition,” and things like that. We made a national KPI to spread this to municipalities, which would then include participatory budgeting, too. Many of them already have done so.

Audrey Tang: Long story short, I think the main reason of this continued evolvement is we have not just the research arm, which is the vTaiwan, but also the deployment, development arm, which is Join platform. They inform each other because the vTaiwan community would feel, if we successfully transfer something to the Join platform, then it’s time that we experiment something new.

Beth Noveck: Audrey, the forum for the new Join site, is that all home-grown? It looks a lot like your priorities in many ways in terms of having the pro and con feature.

Audrey Tang: We got the design from Better Reykjavik.

Beth Noveck: To put it nicely, you sort of stole it, forked it, forked the concept, right? It’s not Robert’s stuff, correct?

Audrey Tang: We didn’t invent any part of the interface. We basically surveyed similar, including CONSUL, Dissident, and so on, and just chose the interface that made sense in a local context. The code base is new, of course.

Beth Noveck: Just out of curiosity, since Google Translate sucks here, is there one of these ideas or discussions…I mean, the translate works. Which one would you say is the most active if we wanted to look, to dig in? When it translates, it comes out pretty shitty looking. Do you have a sense of which one is…

Audrey Tang: The most active now or the most active any time in the past?

Beth Noveck: Maybe any time in the past is most useful in terms of giving us…

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly the                                                       second link                                                   that I posted you, which has a selection of 58 cases. These are literally all voted by the participation officers. Every month they choose two of them.

Beth Noveck: Is it just github? That one doesn’t auto-translate because it’s got a graphic on the front page.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not the one on GitHub. It’s this one.

Beth Noveck: Let me go back here.

Audrey Tang: I think that will Google Translate, but I will just check to be sure.

Beth Noveck: This one. It’s thinking.

Audrey Tang: It’s not working?

Beth Noveck: I’ll force it to. Don’t worry.

Audrey Tang: Actually, why don’t you just look at my blog? I just blog constantly about things. [laughs] Here are a selection of the cases. I think that’s easier. There’s one about a divine pig case, which is the fourth in the blog. There’s a lot of things. There’s collaboration meeting, core question discovery across sectors. Anything that’s tagged open government is something that’s from the Join platform, most of them. Here is the tag.

Beth Noveck: Divine pig case.

Audrey Tang: I think we did that tag right.

Beth Noveck: Awesome. We will take a look at this. I was curious in particular because I was trying to write something about Robert’s pros and cons feature. I was looking at one of his recent consultations, and they’re all pros and no con comments. Their most recent thing they did with the Scottish Parliament…

Audrey Tang: The pro and con comments?

Beth Noveck: The most recent thing with the Scottish Parliament, they then turned it off. The Parliament chose to do one consultation with it on and then one consultation with it off, which is interesting from a research perspective. That’s another topic. I was just curious about whether you’re seeing more balanced use of that pro and con feature, whether it’s working.

Audrey Tang: We did some improvement on Better Reykjavik. You can see, for example, the bars. It’s not proportionate to the number of comments. There’s no race to astroturf. We make sure that things float on the top by the absolute number of most likes or most dislikes. Actually, the most disliked float also to the top.

Beth Noveck: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: That means that the pro people are least happy with that argument, which is usually the best argument. There are some technical improvements that we have done. You can see most of it in the collaboration meetings that is featured on the blog because they all have a lot of pro and con cases.

Beth Noveck: That’s very helpful. The concept is a good one. I’m just not seeing, the way Robert does it, that it’s working in practice. It’s an important innovation. It’s something I’m going to talk about in terms of the ability to create a more deliberative online commenting environment.

Beth Noveck: We were also going to use your priorities for one of the things we’re doing with AARP. Again, I’m not sure that it works all that well [laughs] in this context.

Beth Noveck: Sorry, back to you, Dane.

Dane Gambrell: What do you see as the future of the vTaiwan process? How far do you think it can be taken as a means to engage citizens in policy and lawmaking?

Audrey Tang: Truth to be told, in the previous parliamentary session, there’s the Digital Communications Act that’s not passed. There’s a line in it that specifically empowers citizen-led, multi-stakeholder forums for cross-ministerial issues and making sure that Cabinet need to respond to it.

Audrey Tang: In other words, turning the binding power that I’m currently holding and Minister Jaclyn Tsai previous help into a legal requirement. That act is also a vTaiwan product. It’s a bootstrapping law, I guess, but it did not get passed for a very technical reason.

Audrey Tang: Dr. Tsai promised, in her second term, a digital ministry or council. That unit will specifically be the competent authority for this kind of digital, emerging technology, policymaking. The original wording, which charges the cabinet itself and no designated ministry or council, was therefore out of date with the presidential promise.

Audrey Tang: By the way, Mayor Han literally promised the same thing during his presidential campaign. Both parties are for a dedicated competent authority instead of just having the Cabinet take care of it. That’s why the DCA clause did not get passed.

Audrey Tang: Instead, we will probably have a institutionalization act for the digital council or ministry, and then that minister will then take care of the institutionalization of the vTaiwan binding power. My reading is that this have bipartisan, actually four-partisan support.

Dane Gambrell: Is there anything else you think we should understand about how vTaiwan is changed recently or more generally, about citizen participation in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: vTaiwan serves as the first example to career public service that collective intelligence is about signal and not noise, and that it actually lowered their risk instead of increasing it, and that they will actually not put their minister to risk if they participate.

Audrey Tang: No risk to them or their minister, it saves their time. Also, they sometimes get more credit, because they are rarely seen directly in a livestream fashion by everybody concerning this issue, and there’s a lot of personal pride in helping out.

Audrey Tang: They serve as a kind of seed within the current public service, but now, after the PO network and after the four or five mechanisms generated by vTaiwan or inspired by vTaiwan, I don’t really think that vTaiwan is anymore institutionalized and then those subsequently generated by vTaiwan processes.

Audrey Tang: Until vTaiwan’s shared bootstrapping by a law completes, currently it’s more close to the civic tech community than it is actually to my office or any minister, while they keep researching new ways to make Everyday Democracy engagement fun.

Audrey Tang: What we are doing essentially is institutionalizing the parts that worked and forgetting about things that didn’t work. That is the current situation from a ministerial viewpoint of the vTaiwan community, which keeps growing and have more people participating every week.

Dane Gambrell: Since you’ve been running vTaiwan for several years now…

Audrey Tang: I haven’t… I totally transferred the root password and everything the second I went into the government. I support vTaiwan.

Dane Gambrell: Meaning since it’s existed for several years now, thinking back to when it first began, how are you feeling about how it’s progressed?

Audrey Tang: It’s very fortunate that we chose this branding, because it includes Taiwan automatically. You can’t really write about vTaiwan [laughs] without mentioning Taiwan, just like you can’t mention g0v without thinking about forking the government.

Audrey Tang: It’s a mimetic brand where it basically says that, “Yes, we have existing mechanisms, and we don’t have to find them. If you put a “v” in front of it, then you can virtualize and make more dynamic any institution.”

Audrey Tang: That’s why, subsequently, after vTaiwan we have vMaker project and a lot of other v-something projects. There’s even a vNYC workshop. [laughs] In any case, I feel very fortunate that we chose that very flexible, mimetic, suggestive, persuasive branding in the logo in the beginning.

Audrey Tang: I also feel very grateful that the subsequent generations of facilitators didn’t do egoistic turf protection on any particular process at all, and that we were able to have each incoming facilitator try their own way of process design, and therefore enabling a lot of even non rulemaking-related.

Audrey Tang: For cyberbullying, everybody met and decide we don’t need a law for that end. It’s actually passive administration stay at arm’s length from this issue, and that then empowers subsequent ecosystems including actually the fact-checking ecosystem around disinformation.

Audrey Tang: That’s why we didn’t encroach the freedom in expression, because we can’t point at vTaiwan. We can to the president and point at iWin and point at other like the counter spawn mechanisms and say the Internet community has proved they’re multistakeholderism looks better for this kind of topics than censorship.

Audrey Tang: I feel very grateful that the facilities remain open-ended, remains a good application of open space technology.

Dane Gambrell: I think we covered a lot of ground, and that was actually all of the questions that I have written. Beth, was there anything else you wanted to follow up on?

Beth Noveck: Yeah. I just want to come back to the original question for a moment. You’ve answered this in many different ways about this question of institutionalization, and it doesn’t have to be only about vTaiwan.

Beth Noveck: What you’ve observed as someone in this field looking at other projects, some have survived political transition and elections and changes of the party, and some have not even lasted through one administration. Obviously, the PO network and the training piece you’ve talked about in the past has been very central to institutionalization here.

Beth Noveck: I’m just wondering both first about vTaiwan, to come back to that question again, but also then in terms of the field generally, what’s your sense about why some of these projects work.

Beth Noveck: Not surviving forever doesn’t mean they don’t work. They change into other things, that’s fine, but why some things last and other things don’t, and what it takes to institutionalize a project like a sort of culture change like this.

Audrey Tang: I’ll answer from two angles, one from the very top level, like presidential buy-in, and one from the very grassroots level like norm change. The presidential buy in is essential, and which is exactly why people in a g0v community designed a vTaiwan-inspired process that is called the Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: I talked about this in other places, so I don’t have to repeat myself. The Presidential Hackathon is crucial, really, because without the Presidential Hackathon there really is no easy way for people in the President’s office to feel the necessity of a binding process.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that if five teams every year, if they propose something that’s really useful, and last year, one of the winner teams is literally part of the g0v communities asked to redesign the open data platform so that open data become not just another tick-box, but rather a structured way for civic tech just citizens and career public service to have a structured conversation.

Audrey Tang: They just redesigned this whole data.g0v.tw interface, which went online – I don’t know – last week? It’s very important that the President herself went through this process including a judging process, the workshops, the ceremonies, and so on, so that she can see how exactly do social innovations like this help her deliver her platform, her campaign promises, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I think any mechanism that include the mayor or the president, not as the final rectification part, but a part of the process, is essential. vTaiwan in particular has raised to the level of presidential debates or the presidential references and, as I said, parliamentary inquiries to a prime minister.

Audrey Tang: That is important, because then people become aware that without binding power there really is nothing left to such collective intelligence devices. That’s one.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is about norm design and norm change. The g0v community deliberately stayed away from political parties. There was a time where people really suggested that the g0v movement form a new political party, and the rough consensus was that we don’t do that, because then it becomes exclusionary.

Audrey Tang: In every large g0v hackathon, including smaller vTaiwan meetups, you can easily find people from five different party affiliations. That don’t even include the party that I’m now more or less affiliated to, Can’t Stop This Party, or the Unstoppable Happy Party, formed by a few YouTuber comedians.

Audrey Tang: It’s like the Best Party. I mean literally, like the Icelandic Best Party.

Audrey Tang: The more serious institutionalized parties, they see vTaiwan as providing benefits for them and not detracting them from their representative process. Because that, they participate in the norm change instead of fighting against this thinking that they’re threatening representative power or political party power.

Audrey Tang: We see many collective intelligence tools have this, especially ones based on blockchains, with all due respect, with this idea to take apart existing representative mechanisms. That will face a lot of headwind if a new administration or a new mayor comes.

Beth Noveck: Yes, see e.g. Madrid. For me, it comes back to it’s both the institutional headwind, but it’s not just the attack on power. It’s the failure to comprehend the need to create things that are implementable, that are doable, not just to come up with ideas.

Audrey Tang: That’s social innovation, citizen-led applicable things.

Beth Noveck: Do you have favorites out there at the moment as you look around, like “I love this project” or things that you’re most excited about in terms of other examples?

Audrey Tang: You mean non-vTaiwan examples?

Beth Noveck: Non-vTaiwan examples. There are obvious global movement projects like Ushahidi or Safecast. Curious what’s on your radar screen, either in terms of good tools and technology, really good process, or other characteristics that’s on your radar screen.

Audrey Tang: Aside from being on a international advisory board of a certain GovLab… I am board member of three international NGOs. We got the civil service ministry to reinterpret the rules so I can join as board members of international NGOs, one of which is the Consul Foundation, now reincarnated in Amsterdam.

Audrey Tang: The Consul/Decidim communities is still very much on my radar, not the least because it seems that the developers’ community are still quite eager carry it forward, metric or not. Also, that this Consul/Decidim forks seems to bring those two communities in a generative, and not so adversarial, network relationship. I spend quite some time thinking about Consul and Decidim. That’s one.

Audrey Tang: I’m also a board member in RadicalxChange – Glen Weyl, Vitalik Buterin, Danielle Allen, and folks. This is less about designing any particular mechanism, but rather using the Etherum communities, like bitcoin, to try out new mechanisms, and then applying it to, say, Colorado. It resembles very much how vTaiwan/Join relationship works, although on an international level. I think about RxC also quite a bit.

Audrey Tang: I’m also very soon, after DC, flying to Barcelona for the Digital Future Society Mobile World Congress. These folks are less about citizen participation, but are definitely open for innovation around governance, especially now, with 5G, AI, and everything else.

Audrey Tang: I’m paying attention there, too, because that’s where you see ideas like this pan-European congress of citizens being bandied about, or this whole of France conversation should get deeper, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: While on implementation level they’re a little bit in a sketching stage, but there are sufficient interesting stakeholders, including Telegram, and so on, that are worth the implementers if we can get some mechanisms out from the other international NGOs, including, of course, RadicalxChange and Consul/Decidim, but also GovLab, that I’m bridging across.

Beth Noveck: Dane, any things we forgot, details, etc.?

Dane Gambrell: I don’t think so.

Beth Noveck: Audrey, anything we didn’t ask you? I know you’re interviewed constantly and get to talk about this all the time. The last quick question is what do you think is useful to you in terms of what hasn’t been said, what audiences haven’t been covered, or what would be helpful in terms of gaps?

Audrey Tang: This really old, by now, idea that civic participation and social innovation is two sides of the same coin, so much so that the White House used to put them in the same office, is still very relevant.

Audrey Tang: Too often when people design for gov-tech they take a civic participation view, and when people propose something radically decentralized, they take a social innovation view without learning the language of the other side.

Audrey Tang: The reason why we are doing our NAP, the National Action Plan, for Taiwan’s open government plans is precisely to align the NAP process, including multi-stakeholder forums, to product the first working draft by Dr. Tsai Ing-wen’s inauguration so she can refer to it in her inauguration speech in May.

Audrey Tang: Then the NAP will last four years, instead of two years, to align exactly with her second presidential term, and thereby showing that our gov-tech, or open government plan, is both binding in the presidential promise sense and also grassroots in a co-creation with civic tech processes sense. This deliberate alignment is a very old lesson, but it’s still worth repeating.

Beth Noveck: Thank you very much. I’m grateful for the offer of the more time. Unfortunately, I’m behind, so I don’t have it. What we’re going to do is we’re going to circle back with drafts so you can see them, number one.

Beth Noveck: Number two, again, also if you’re willing, no obligation, but I’ll send you the draft of the testimony that I’m working on, a lot of which is astroturfing, but it will discuss vTaiwan. Again, they’re interested in astroturfing, and so that’s the hook for me to talk about this.

Audrey Tang: I see that. I have literally nothing between Friday and Sunday this week, and so I’m happy to offer more time.

Beth Noveck: Pick up a hobby.

Audrey Tang: Well, this is the Lunar New Year. By the time that I arrive in DC, which is February 9 until 15, we can also be in the same time zone and maybe talk more.

Beth Noveck: That’s right, or even have dinner or something if you’re there as long as six days. That’s great. Let me ping you back about that very shortly. I’ll be in DC after I get my act together.

Beth Noveck: Thank you. Thank you, Dane. Let’s save the chat, if you don’t mind, because there are a lot of links in there, and if we don’t copy and paste them…

Audrey Tang: No, of course, and also send me a copy of the recording so I can help you with making a transcript.

Beth Noveck: We’ll do that. Thank you. That would be great.

Dane Gambrell: Yes, I’ll do that.

Beth Noveck: Talk to you…

Audrey Tang: Good luck with the class, Professor.

Beth Noveck: Bye.