Darice Chang: Hi everyone, thank you so much for coming to our livestream. I’m Darice Chang, I’m a writer with Ketagalan Media. I am here today with Ms. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister. She is the youngest minister without portfolio, and she is also the first transgender minister. Thank you everyone for being with us today.

Audrey Tang: Thank you, very happy to be here.

Darice Chang: Tell us a little bit about how you grew up. As I understand you were sort of a...child savant.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I started computer programming when I was 8, because I was born with a heart defect (that was fixed when I was 12) but I couldn’t really do sports. So most of my interests are indoor interests. So when I was 8 I encountered this "programming" thing. I found a programming book without a computer, so I was programming on paper until my parents got me a computer. And then afterwards I was just very attracted to computer science, because that year (1989) was the year of the personal computer, when computers became democratized and affordable. Coincidentally it was also the year of press freedom in Taiwan. Both of my parents work in the press around the time, so they lived through the time when Taiwan really didn’t have press freedom; and enjoying this blossoming of press freedom and expression, our generation really is the first generation to enjoy that personal technology from personal computers and also the freedom of the press and the freedom of speech.

Darice Chang: Oh okay! Thank you so much. Tell me a little bit how you grew up to be interested in the intersection of democracy and technology. What unique educational experiences, or work experiences, have shaped your views?

Audrey Tang: Sure! so between 1989 which is freedom of the press, and 1996 which is the first presidential election, Taiwan’s democratization worked slowly but surely. The idea is that instead of a sudden revolution, instead of a sudden change like in many other countries in the Third Wave of democratization, the president at the time Lee Teng-hui orchestrated a very gradual transition to peaceful democracy. I think part of the reason why we have electronic technology and digital technology was that 1996 was also the year that Taiwan enjoyed the World Wide Web in a very accessible form at a very low-cost, so everybody can dial in to the websites of the presidential candidates and see what their platforms are, and so on. So I was actually helping out with a presidential campaign at the time as a way to participate in the democracy for the first through the intervention, if you will, of the web and "Bulletin Board System"(BBS). And that’s how I got interested in the interaction between the technology (especially the World Wide Web) and democracy, especially the presidential election.

Darice Chang: Can you explain a little bit how that ties into your views as a "conservative anarchist?

Audrey Tang: Certainly! An anarchist is basically someone who believes that people work better if nobody forces anyone to do anything; if people work upon their own volition. I think the long years between 1989 and 1996 basically means that instead of jumping to a direct presidential election and jumping to a direct representation election, people had a lot of time using bottom-up methods. We were doing a lot of community involvement with people at the time, doing a lot of locally based deliberations at the time. So I would say that because of enabling digital technologies, that kind of direct democracy and deliberative democracy grew the same time as representative democracy in Taiwan. This is kind of unique, because in many other countries representative democracy has been around for hundred of years. The deliberative digital democracy only became possible after the invention of personall computers and the World Wide Web. For Taiwan it’s the same, they have the same level playing field. This is why this kind of bottom-up democracy grew with representational democracy. So people in Taiwan naturally believe there is a place for the civil society in the shaping of the political agenda. And this how I define the term "conservative-leaning," meaning conserving what we think is important, like equal access, like human rights, like traditional values, and how they carry into the digital world, that needs to be conserved. Also the freedom of expression that defines the beginning of the internet needs to be conserved into the new century.

Darice Chang: So you would view the freedom of speech, et cetera, as things that are like traditional values, though these were things that we suppressed, for example, at the founding of the Republic of China.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I mean traditional values in the sense of traditional values of the internet, because when the internet was invented, it was also a very top-down organization with DARPA of the U.S. Department of Defense. But they quickly saw that its actual value lies in the cross interaction between academia, between the public sector, and also eventually with the private sector. So they opened up the control of the internet to a what we called multi-stakeholder model, which basically means anyone who uses internet gets a say on how the internet is being built. This is what I think is the defining characteristic of what we call "internet governance," which is the idea that you don’t have to be a representative of anyone, and anyone can represent themselves in the internet’s making. So when I say traditional, I really mean within the 40 or 50 years of the internet’s tradition.

Darice Chang: What inspired you to come out of retirement and join the ministry?

Audrey Tang: Well, I think working as a kind of understudy minister, as a intern minister, for the previous minister Jaclyn Tsai (蔡玉玲) for almost two years now, was basically a collaborative method following the end of 2014. There is a new nation agenda about the cabinet at the time. The new premier at the time, Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國), said the government, the cabinet especially, needs to adopt crowdsourcing as its direction, meaning that traditionally things were all decided by the government, in the government. It’s for the people, but it’s not with the people. So he says "okay, now we have work with the people, and include all the stakeholders in the early stage agenda setting." It is easy to say that, but nobody really knows how to do that, right? So people interested in internet governance were recruited or invited to join this new kind of crowdsource agenda setting, and that’s why I decide to collaborate with the cabinet at the time. But at the time I was really an adviser for the administration and training the public servants; now I’m still doing more or less the same thing but with different title.

Darice Chang: So do you think that they made that policy because of the Sunflower Movement, or they didn’t have to do deal with that at all?

Audrey Tang: Well, I think the Sunflower Movement showed that it’s possible, right? But then the end of year election showed that it’s desirable. It’s like people have a will to elect the people who respect this kind of bottom-up agenda setting. So of course the prime example is Mayor Dr. 柯文哲 in Taipei city, who explicitly set open government civil participation as this platform. But to lesser degree, also for the other mayors who got elected because they are supported by the occupation or joined the occupation themselves.

Darice Chang: Moving on to our next topic which is about government work. So what projects are you currently working on to increase public participation in government?

Audrey Tang: My new role has open government as my main duty. And open government, in my view, includes three parts. One is transparency, making what everything that the government is doing as transparent as possible and make it so that everybody can view it as early as possible. And the other part is civil participation. Now that people have access to what we’re doing, I would invite everybody to contribute their facts and feelings and more ideas into the policy-making process. Finally, it’s accountability. People, after they propose these ideas, they would like to know what actual actions got taken because of their inputs. And again the government, once we publish everything, we also want to know what kind of people are interested, who are the really missing stakeholders that weren’t discovered in the previous processes, so all these things held each other kind of accountable in the sense that everybody knows what everybody’s promises that gets fulfilled.

Audrey Tang: So what I’ve been doing concretely is to make sure that, for example, all the regulations before this cabinet were announced maybe 7 to 14 days before its passing. 7 to 14 days is very difficult for people to have a good understanding and dialogue with policy makers. So most of the time they don’t say anything, or say a lot of things on the streets, right? So they didn’t say much through the official channels, because 7 or 14 days are really too short. So one of my work is to ensure that now there are 60 days for all regulations, but also within the 60 days the ministry has to make substantial response to the public comments that were collected during the 60 days. And after that, we are working on the transparency of the budget allocation, so that all the national plans, all the ministry’s plans, that use taxpayer’s money now must be disclosed, like how much percentage is completed every month or every quarter and how much did this align with the original proposal, and then we also invite everybody to comment on what exactly gets done during this budget plan and budget execution.

Darice Chang: At your panel on World Design Capital Taipei 2016 you mentioned the need for a tool to “collect more public opinions.” How do you moderate against rampant populism, problems such as “trial by public opinion,” or having the most fringe opinions become the loudest opinions?

Audrey Tang: We use a combination of strategies. One is that we used this tool called Polis (pol.is), which is a two-dimensional representation of everybody’s feelings on a particular topic. And the idea is that you go to this website, and it shows you one sentiment of the public policy where you can press "Yes" or "No." As you press "Yes" or "No" your avatar (your Facebook profile or Twitter profile) moves in this space to where people who share very similar opinions with you and you can see in the cluster. So it even if 5,000 people get mobilized to vote exactly the same, there would just be one dot in this two-dimensional map. The map speak to the diversity of opinions. So what we’re saying is that we’re collecting how diverse, how differently, everybody views the same facts. And then we show it back to everybody, including the minority and majority, and then we say after a month time, we’re collecting everything above the threshold into our agenda. But the threshold is defined, as for example in the case of the private car dispatch system like Uber, currently we have a majority group with 60% and minority with 40%, so we say now the threshold is 80%---you have to propose any sentiment to convince 80% of a superior majority of the people in order to be included in the agenda of the next decision-making. And that was calculated by taking all of 60 and then half of 40, so no matter how much you mobilize like if you mobilize 80/20, the threshold will become 90. So the idea is that no matter what you still to convince the "majority of the minority group." This basically prevents people from proposing radical opinions but rewards people with eclectic thoughts, so we got very high quality opinions at the end of the 3 week or 4 week period.

Darice Chang: So the system allows people in the majority to give feedback and try to convince people who don’t agree previously that their views are more persuasive.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Basically, by the end we have thousands of people participating with hundreds of ideas, so nobody could really read them all, right? So we ranked them by consensus, like if you manage to convince people who are similar to you, then the highest-ranked group opinion gets visibility, and then the cross group consensus gets most visibility. Contrast this with Facebook, in which the most divergent views often gets the most popularity just by the sheer number of shares and the sheer number of comments, whereas one like in the social media it encourage the most divisive, the most divergent view; in our space we encourage the most convergent view.

Darice Chang: Can you explain again how that the cross opinion works?

Audrey Tang: Basically, the idea is what we call in mathematics the principle of component analysis. The idea is that if you propose some very radical opinions, a lot of people would vote "Yes" but also a lot of people would vote "No", right? It’s divisive. People who vote similarly, like in Amazon for example, if you shop for a book or for a few books, they learns about your reading habits and recommends the books similar to the books you have read, right? So we do the same but just with the votes on each other’s sentiments, so after you voted for the initial nine questions, you can say maybe none of the these groups represent my true feelings. So it’s like an open questionnaire---it’s like typing, "okay I think this is in doubt," and what you have wrote then becomes a subject for other people to vote on. People are naturally clustered around people who votes similarly, which is how we show your Facebook profile among your friends; and then you may also discovered that your Facebook friends or Twitter friends are actually on the polar opposite of the two-dimensional map; it’s just you never talk about this public policy issue over dinner. But this has two effects: one is that it lets people understand that these people aren’t enemies, they are not just faceless aliens who committed brutal things like we often see in the presidential campaign, right?

Audrey Tang: So these are your friends, it’s just on public policy you haven’t deliberated over dinner, and now you know. And then the next thing is that it shows it’s possible to converge. At the beginning of each interaction, often you see people clustering in four corners with very little overlap between them. But because the mechanism rewards the opinions that converge people’s views, it ranks to the top. So whereas people vote for the things with 70% consensus, then they would get competitive and think, "OK! I can prove something that wins 80% consensus," and once somebody has 80% someone would want to think "but I can do it better, I can do a 90% consensus point" and so because we reward the consensus, people spend their time thinking of how to convince people who host different positions, so we then get much more nuanced views out of this system.

Darice Chang: Taiwanese bureaucracy is known to be conservative and very risk-averse. How would you move them to try to do something different?

Audrey Tang: I think the most important thing is that people are risk-averse because they really don’t know what will happen when they fail. This is the same as startups: if the cost of starting a company is very high, then it means the cost of failure is also very high. In Taiwan as well as in many other places when we talk about startup policy, the policy makers usually focus on how to lower the barriers of setting up a new company, so that if you set up 10 and fail 9 of 10, you don’t feel much of anything because of the cost of failing is low. But in Taiwan’s public servant system, the cost of failing is unpredictable because it all depends on how the popular media frames it and how the judicial process and finds them, and so on. Because of the unpredictability of risk, most public servants, when they’re making decisions, they overestimate the risk to the maximal amount, right? Like they assume the worst thing that will happen and then choose the minimum course of action that will avoid this maximum kind of risk. So it’s not about minimizing risk really, it’s defining risk. It’s about making sure that if this policy fails, then after another 60 days we can go back and do a revision; and if this policy is a bad idea we have 60 days for people to voice their opinions. So it’s not shameful if you have a draft that doesn’t take care of many stakeholders, because those stakeholders will show up and tell you: "Hey! You missed our voices!" and it’s okay to revise, whereas previously because of the old system that only allows 7 days or 14 days of opinion expressing, it has to be almost perfect before it could be announced to the public. Because nobody really has a voice on anything, and once it pass if you forgot some stakeholder, they would let you know on the street and that risk is very high, right? So by basically spreading the risk to the early stages of policy-making, we make the risk containable, definable and also share part of agenda setting power but also responsibility

Darice Chang: So basically you guys are putting all of the risk at the beginning when you are making the policy?

Audrey Tang: At the moment it’s already at the end, so we’re trying to spread it gradually toward upstream at the beginning.

Darice Chang: Are there concrete programs they’re doing this too? Or it’s just like through po.lis and platforms like that?

Audrey Tang: There are two main platforms: there is the vTaiwan, the experimental platform that the g0v and other civil society communities are carrying. The agenda setting, the process even, it’s collaborative defined, with the civil society and with the top private sector. But for normal, everyday regulations we have the "join" platform, (https://join.gov.tw/) which not only allows the regulations to be debated every day, but also has petitions so that people can collect 5,000 countersignatures and propose that their voices to be included in the agenda of everyday rule-making. This is basically how we install an institutional mechanism for people’s voices to be systematically processed. Again, for the petition we also have 60 days before each ministry have to make a substantial response. So if you go to "join.gov.tw" you will see a lot of petitions that was made and was handled very well by the ministries and that has resulted in concrete regulation changes or law changes.

Darice Chang: How is this different from for example "Change.org" or more platforms like that people can propose petitions?

Audrey Tang: This is the most similar to "We The People" at the White House, right? It was a presidential order that says all ministries has to respond. I think the average response time of "We The People" is around a hundred and twenty days. Within 4 months or so they will get a concrete response. But for things like Change.org it all depends on who takes the petition, right? It’s possible that people don’t take the petition, and the petition is just a way for people to make friends to meet similar minded people. But there is not a political mandatory empowerment that says the ministry must respond after 60 or after 120 days. So I think the biggest difference is on the political empowerment of this petition platform.

Darice Chang: Are we doing anything or are you doing anything to get the word out about the availability these platforms?

Audrey Tang: We’re doing it right now, in the media and on several other places we try. But I think the most important advertisement is really up to each ministry, because once one ministry like the Ministry of Health and Welfare which did really well with the first two petition cases, each petition case they handle well they create trust for those 5,000 people, and those 5,000 people, after they have another policy contribution, they’ll be like, "okay, they handled our petition very well, so now I’m motivated to propose even more interesting or even more radical proposals." I think word of mouth is really the first thing we want to encourage. And the first thing that we want to increase the quality of those responses, and then for the platform participants to speak for the platform. And kind of on the flip side, if the ministry doesn’t handle the petition well, if they just follow the procedure but they really didn’t say much of anything, then 5,000 people may get a disillusioned and so no amount of advertisement will bring back their trust. So we think we ’ll just focusing on the quality of the responses.

Darice Chang: Is there for example collaborating with different media to get the word out about these platforms? Because I know a lot of people when they read the news they look very angry and very impassioned about whatever it is they read, and they want to do something. It seems like it’d be a good platform for that.

Audrey Tang: I mean, at the end of every huge media cycle we always get some kind of petition. Not always 5,000 people strong, but some of them are 5,000 strong. A concrete example, there was one right after one typhoon because some cities have this half-day holiday, like this half-day that people used to have to go to work but in the afternoon because of the typhoon you have to go back home. It creates an issue of coordination. There are actually two petitions, each 5,000 strong, saying let’s do away with this half-day vacation, half-day holiday. So I think this is a very real time response for people to think about repercussions of what will happen if we introduce such a policy. It’s not just something that’s a reaction out of the media taken out of situation, but we invite people to think through as they were petitioning to write down what they think will take for this to happen.

Darice Chang: We are going to move on to the startup environment in Taiwan. "Go start companies” seem to have become a fashionable trend in Taiwan. As someone who has worked with and founded startups before, what do you think of this trend?

Audrey Tang: I think it’s a nature part of Taiwan, and as I said already, actually I think the main work that the government should do is to make failing easier. Because if you spend a lot of time and capital to set up a company, a lot of efforts a lot of hoops to jump through, and then you fail, the failure will feel like something that is disappointing. But if it is trivial to set up a company, if it’s trivial to get some initial buy-in to your venture and so on, then it doesn’t really feel like a failure, it feels like some learning experience. And then people can proudly say, "I failed 9 times and then I am still asking another round of angel money," because each of those startups failed in the very early stage; that it didn’t meet the market; that it is not a good fit, and so on. But there wasn’t much to lose in each of those cases, so then people wouldn’t need to spend a lot of time just just starting up, right? People can just develop their ideas develop their networks and so on. This is my main thought.

Darice Chang: There is much talk about how Taiwanese companies need to “go global.” What do you think about that? What’s stopping them from going global? How can our international audience be helpful?

Audrey Tang: Well, this is a very complicated topic that has a different answer to each industry sector, right? I’m not going to, because of time limits, to go to detail of that. But in the upcoming digital national plan, we try make infrastructure such that no matter what the industry that a startup or an established company looking for digital transformation is in, they will have the same basic infrastructure for them to, for example, have affordable bandwidth; to have an affordable way to communicate to the international audiences; to have affordable chance of getting capital from outside to recruit talent to Taiwan; or simply find all these protocols. So if you’re watching this and interested in joining a startup in Taiwan then the startup visa and all the implementation plans that follows startup visa will make it much easier for the foreign talents to join the startup in Taiwan and vice versa. And I think really once you are in Taiwan, Taiwan is a very attractive place and you will want to stay for the medicare and for the food.

Audrey Tang: For these things we don’t have to work too hard or too much to interfere with the public sector, but for the initial point of contact that’s what we can focus on.

Darice Chang: So as a minister without portfolio do you actually have any sway to making this happen, for example, making the entrepreneur visa more accessible or easier?

Audrey Tang: Well, it is actually the purview of the National Development Committee which is headed by the commissioner but also minister with portfolio Dr. Chen Tien-Jy (陳添枝) and so that is his job, but I’m kind of an advisor on anything digital related, so if there’s something digital related I just advise on these matters.

Daniel Lin: At our co-working spaces and maker spaces, we tend to attract a very international crowd. I am just wondering about your thoughts on the interaction between virtual communities and physical communities, since a lot of international visitors are digital nomads who can work anywhere they want, as you have done frequently. So I was wondering what your thoughts are between physical and virtual?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan actually have a pretty friendly teleworking regulation, which the vTaiwan public deliberation project have deliberated last year. So last year when I was still an advisor to the cabinet, we actually talked about exactly how teleworking is going to work in Taiwan for people. Not only that we’re pretty friendly in teleworking at the moment, we’re also working on the implementation as a set for the startup visa, and of all the implementation details in a way that attracts more foreign talents. We understand that a lot of this is actually not about regulation. Even if we have very advanced regulations, a lot of it is in the culture. It’s true that in Taiwanese culture, there is some celebration of diversity in terms of gender and so on; people generally see it is okay. But in terms of languages and in terms of cross-cultural pollination, well, we can still do better. This is why we have a lot of startup events like pitches and all these trade events to facilitate more people to listen to more ideas, not just English speaking but also internationally in any language really; and then we have a lot of cultural events from all sort of different cultures happening in Taiwan. And it is true that it’s mostly around the six major cities, but we’re trying to, as part of the digital nation plan, to have each of the six major cities play a regional development leading role so that they can also help the other town and cities nearby to internationalize and to basically put everything on the web, so that people can still follow from afar, so basically it’s to create a much more friendly environment for teleworkers and people who visit Taiwan, decided they like it, but they don’t spend all their days, every day, every year in Taiwan but still follow up on what’s happening in Taiwan.

Daniel Lin: I found out that for a lot of these visitors, once they’re here they find Taiwan to be a very friendly place to live, very high value and they want to stay. And then since they’re living here, they want to contribute something to the society, but they find that actually there is a lot of confusion and frustration trying to either get settled here in terms of everyday living, or actually working with the government. I was wondering if the government has any new initiatives or do you have any opinions on how this can be facilitated?

Audrey Tang: I think the major change is not happening from the public sector, but is from the machine learning sector. As of last month the there is been a major breakthrough in the English Mandarin bi-directional translation quality. If you use any of the online automatic translators, there’s been a new technique where they train the machine learning algorithms so that now it actually gets it right most of the time instead of wrong most of the time, when you do machine learning of our regulation and stuff. I think this is very important, because in my office what we call public digital innovation space, our website, is English first. We only really have English websites, but we’re able to use automatic translation through machine learning to also present a Chinese version of our website, and this wouldn’t be possible even just two months ago. So a lot of machine automatic translation, both in your pocket in the form of-- you can scan a menu and it shows the correct English translation which happens offline, as well as in online translations, I think that’s really going to speed up the communication, so now you see a regulation that may affect you and you have 60 days to comment; empowered with this kind of automated translation we can actually do a lot. In my public dialogue board, I actually get input from Spanish from Madrid and so on, and they also use automatic translation and see that the quality much better nowadays, so that’s actual legible, and that we can engage in serious public policy discussions using our own native languages by the mediation of machine translation.

Daniel Lin: I’m curious using machine learning do you think is possible to use it to influence policy in terms of having an AI kind of analyze everything and then gives options that the government can use?

Audrey Tang: Actually the po.lis system I described is a machine learning product. They use machine learning to learn how people cluster together and so on, but I think equally important is that we can’t really make the decisions that are value judgements through artificial intelligence; what they can do is play the role of neutral facilitator, a neutral moderator, or a just a tireless secretary to collect all these opinions. It is also important that its the source code, it’s algorithms, must be open sourced for everybody to inspect and then to modify, because otherwise we have another black box in the regulatory pipeline, and nobody wants that.

Daniel Lin: Do you think the international community in Taiwan can help in advancing the government’s initiatives?

Audrey Tang: I’m sure that people here who live here and like the environment in Taiwan are already doing a lot of cultural cross polination of ideas and citizen diplomacy and things like that, so I would say just continuing on whatever they’re here doing and basically bring the same sense of passion and what you experience in Taiwan back home, and maybe attract more people to do more exchanges. Because although social medias and online communities are very good nowadays, it always start with very high bandwidth face to face conversations, which then you carry on part of it online; but it still has to happen with a very high bandwidth face to face meetup. How to engage in this way and make this way happen, how to organize meetups, that is the communities’ expertise and so just keep doing that.

Daniel Lin: You mentioned before in the government there is a lot of risk assessment going on, and that tends to drive out a lot of creativity because they’re afraid of trying new things. And so how do you think it’s possible to attract more creative people into not just government business and even influence to the culture and so that the attitude would be changed?

Audrey Tang: Defining risk, which I already talked about, is one thing. And the other thing is to make it fun--I mean I’m officially a minister who work for fun, right? When the premier asked me why am I aiming to join the cabinet, is it out of duty or out of obligation, or out of social mission, or out of maximizing impact--you know the usual reasons; and like no, I’m just joining for fun. It is important because fun really is the kind of reinforcement that doesn’t get tired over time. If you are curious about something and you learn something every day, that curiosity grows and it doesn’t fade with time. If you are empowered with a sense of duty or obligation, once you do the same thing for ten years, it’s going to wear out, right? But if you are still learning after 10 years you’re just a better learner, right? You still have the same passion of learning, so the passion of learning is really what we’re trying to do both in my office where we have people from five different ministries and institutions, and working together to improve their ministry’s missions, but in a way that feels like this ministry is always saying it is doing something, but the other ministry is already doing 80% of the job; it’s just they never talk together. This kind of cross-pollination is by itself very enjoyable, so this kind of learning organizational experience is what I would encourage any large scale organizations, not just governments, to adopt.

Daniel Lin: In terms of education, how are these digital policies gonna be influencing not just education within the government but overall population with the kids?

Audrey Tang: There are two things. Before I joined the cabinet I was a member of the "K-12 Curriculum Committee" and our main product is a curriculum guideline, which is going to be in effect by 2018. And in the 2018 curriculum, that is the first time that the national curriculum agenda put autonomous and communication and then the common good as our driving values, basically saying that the school are not there to teach things; school is there so the people can learn things. It gives the learning motivation back to the children and to the learners, and this is why we’re starting as early as high school to have people to use the university system to pick their own curriculum, to start computer science and data science education as early as high school, and then infuse all the education tools with digital tools. What we’re trying to get at the curriculum committee is basically saying, nobody can predict when a child enters the public school system at 7, what will the world be like when she or he gets out of the system at 18. Nobody knows, not even the teachers or professors know, so what is the most important thing is that during the 12 years, each learner know how exactly to learn things, and that is the core competence that we’re trying to get at. It’s the same not just for the "K-12" people, but for the general populations as well, so it is important to publish as much as possible, like our interview, which is a public education material under creative common license, under open license so that people like me who decided to drop out of school can still see it on the internet and engage or participate in learning.

Daniel Lin: Going back to the international community; for example within education they are trying to put their kids into school but I found a lot of them are actually trying to home school now, because they’re not sure if the education system is about to be changed. And on top of that, a lot of them are having issues trying to get visas, besides even the ones get married locals they’re having issues with citizenship. So how is the government addressing this?

Audrey Tang: The issue of citizenship, permanent residence, and visas in general I think is very high on Minister Chen’s list. And so every week I hear what is being done, what’s left to be done, and so on. I’m sure that a lot of these things will be worked out pretty soon. Which is not my job that I care about very much, but what is my job is to communicate the facts that the government takes these issues very seriously, and is working on it. Also, as of a few years ago, actually home schooling is legal in Taiwan. We have three laws pertaining to experimental schools, so it’s either through the community, through some NGOs, or by yourself. Anybody can submit a home schooling plan, and it doesn’t have to be 100% home school; you can spend two or three days at school, and other days at home as long as it passes the review board of your local city, then you can design your own curriculum and apply that throughout the whole K to 12. So it’s really up to each learner to design their own curriculum now. This is news to many people because all those laws and regulations are new, so my job is to make sure that everybody knows that it is there now; make full use of it! And if you find something wrong, we have a system to correct ourselves to making a new revision of it.

Darice Chang: First question is from anonymous: In reply to your recent tweet to @realDonaldTrump about climate change, how do you view climate change and what are you working on, or would like to work on, to help?

Audrey Tang: Personally I care a lot about climate change; in the past 12 months I spent 4 or 5 of those in Paris. I cared deeply during the time the Paris Agreement on climate change was going on, but I was in my private capacity at the time as an independent expert. Now at the end of the year in early December I’m going to visit Paris again for the Open Government Partnership Summit, and I’m the part of the summits talks about how civic technology, how government technology, can help the civil society organizations to tackle the inevitable problem of climate change. I think after the hottest year (which was last year) and then this year, there really is no any dispute or any questions from the scientist that the earth is warming faster than we predicted, and that the risk defining as 10% of a catastrophe happening may be earlier than we anticipated. So civic technologies in terms of analysis of what energy patterns and so on are going to be instrumental part of it, because we have to act on the data now to tackle it. And as a data technologist, I do whatever I can to help to facilitate the interchange of data between all the different governments because they all collect and make decisions in a very different way, so the harmonization of data formats, not just for climate but for everything, and it is something I care very passionately about, and what I’m trying to do as a part of the open API and open data effort here in Taiwan, so that our data can be shared by international scientific community. Of course the international scientific community cares about a lot of things, but climate happens to be on top of everybody’s priority at this moment.

Darice Chang: Is there any particular data from Taiwan that you feel would be a special importance to the international community?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan of course we have a lot of data on biodiversity. Taiwan has 10% or something of all the marine species, and in Taiwan we also have unique measuring points around all the offshore islands and also on the islands itself for regional climate and regional pollution levels. All these things we work very closely with civil society to publish in a way that is useful for our nearby countries and to the global international community. I’m not a climate scientist myself so I can not comment on specifics but I work on the infrastructure and the data formats so that if any of those scientists needs for example hosting or cloud infrastructure and so on then I’ll just do whatever I can to help.

Darice Chang: Are there any troubles you run into in this capacity?

Audrey Tang: No, so far I think Taiwan really has a very good cloud infrastructure and we are the top of open data index globally. After all, this means that our basic data is open so basically on top of this we are now trying for more international exchange to make sure that not only our data is opening, with the open formats in an open license, but it can be processed by common tools of the international community.

Darice Chang: Do you feel like Taiwan’s exclusion from the United Nations have hampered our efforts to contribute to be international society at all?

Audrey Tang: As an anarchist, I respect the United Nations. I submitted a paper, I couldn’t be there, but it was presented by my co-author at Habitat 3, a conference about the right to the city and make sure the process is where the commons decide the city together and so on. I respect a lot of what the United Nations is doing, but then again just like any other organization, it has engagements that it can uphold, engagements that some of the parties may not uphold. So I also participate very heavily in what we called multi-stakeholder organizations, and prime example being the internet itself, and the internet governance forum and so on, that also decided something concerns everybody on the planet, but in the way that is not really representatives of each country talking about their country’s own matters, but also any stakeholder declaring their stakes and participate in this kind of forum. They were economic forums, as one such forum and there is many other forums like this, so my previous engagement before I join the cabinet, was mostly with these multi-stakeholder forums and I intent to continue that which is not hampered by Taiwan’s relationship with UN.

Darice Chang: Would you consider yourself as a feminist? According to you what is the status of women in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Well, we have a women president. I will not comment on other countries; the idea of feminism in Taiwan has gone through the same waves as other places, right? There is equal right, equal pay and equal treatment, and then it’s about not being defining by specific gender roles, and then it’s about a more proactive inter-sectional way that sees many minority groups were in the places women were a few decades ago. So that people who are activists in the feminism movement now contribute their expertise in the LGBT movement and other minority of movement, in Aborigines and new migrants and things like this. So basically the idea of the intersectionality means that the feminism activists understand what is like to be oppressed, what is it like to be suppressed, what is it like to be seen as an "other" and now they’re gradually mainstream they can use the same experience they learned to help people still in that position.

Darice Chang: So you would consider that yourself a feminist or?

Audrey Tang: I mean I learn from some of the great feminist like Judith Butler and so on. So I would say that I inherited part of this tradition. But I also inherited many other traditions.

Darice Chang: How involved are you in the transgender and LGBTQ politics in Taiwan? Have you been able to speak about these issue with the Executive Yuan or President Tsai?

Audrey Tang: I think President Tsai is unique that she includes LGBTQ and in fact marriage equality to be a very concrete part of her agenda or platform during the presidential campaign. And it was very brave for me, that’s one of the reason why I voted for her. That wasn’t the majority opinion for her party at the time, it was slightly moving toward majority in a tendency but not a supermajority, so she is in a sense setting agenda for her party by declaring this public presidential agenda. So it doesn’t really need my convincing, she is already there, exactly! I think the most I can do is basically be an example of what a transgender person can contribute to policy not because of my transgender status, but because of my training as a computer scientist, as a digital policy maker, and things like that--and that this is normal; this not something people should over-focus about, and being normal, I think it is the opposite of being an other. Most of the suppression and misunderstanding and bullying at everything stems from being an other, right? So just by "de-othering" the LGBTQ community I think it’s my existential contribution.

Darice Chang: Next question is "What kind of music do you usually listen to?"

Audrey Tang: My favorite music which is on a loop for the few months now is Hamilton the musical. But Hamilton the musical is not one specification, right? I mean it has hip pop in it but it also has a lot of other musical genres, even things like Beatles was in it. So I think I enjoying this blending of musical traditions and then creation out of existing traditions, like using hip rap to communicate policy is something that Lin did and nobody really did that in the major way before him so I enjoy this kind of creations.

Darice Chang: What is Taiwan’s plan for the future of work in an age of ever improving automated manufacturing and AI machine learning? Could Taiwan introduce a UBI? and we might need to explain to our audience what UBI is.

Audrey Tang: The UBI is basically unconditional basic income or universal basic income; there are many other expressions, but the idea is a basic income for all. UBI is a very complicated policy issue, people in all spectrum of the politics have propose UBI in one form or another. But the first this is not of any of our national agenda at the moment; we do not think that we have the capacity at this moment to support UBI for everybody. On the other hand, it is true that with aging population and with ever more automation everything, it is true that we have to disentangle the idea of work and the idea of a job.

Audrey Tang: It used to be that people’s work are their job, but more and more we’re seeing people doing very creative work but outside of their day job. We’re more and more seeing because of the opportunity of teleworking, people have a work-life balance that’s different from people before the advent of internet of teleworking. And we’re more and more seeing the machines are not only taking people’s jobs, but creating the jobs that weren’t there before. So all these are the trends we watch, and is part of the 8 year digital nation plan, we’re trying to make sure that no matter what underlying technology changes, the society itself values innovations, values creation, and values inclusion, defined as getting people were not the part of digital revolution into a position created by those automated tools and so on.

Audrey Tang: It’s not that we’re switching overnight to UBI, but creating climate in which UBI would be possible. Whether UBI is to be introduced I think it’s up to political climate of the day; it probably would require something like a referendum and we both know what the previous referendum of UBI went! So there is some time before we can get there. But it is important as part of education system, for example, that we don’t teach people to become machines, we don’t teach people skills that are going to be automated by machines, and we don’t teach children they have to fulfill a job in the society in the sense that all the jobs are being drastically changed sometimes overnight through machine learning. So people still work in a creative way that is to make art, but not this idea of people tying to a job forever. I think we need some disentanglement from our culture before we can move to any direction including UBI.

Darice Chang: What was your initial reaction to the US presidential election and how do you think it will affect your current work as Digital Minister?

Audrey Tang: I wasn’t very surprise actually. There was an interview in August in which I said, you know, I think there is a lot of similar dynamics of occupy movement and Trump’s campaign, in the sense that they were both master of social media and the way of using social media to mobilize outrage interaction. So I’m not very surprised. I think it will of course change part of my job in the sense of that now I have to work with the realization that the preparations of previous administration in the US is probably going to be changed--sometimes slightly, sometimes a lot, with the new administration, so we have to do our homework and this is just part of my job.

Darice Chang: How does the US administration affect your job as digital minister?

Audrey Tang: To take a very concrete example, a lot of my policy work centers around preparation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Of course I’m not the negotiation minister that would be minister Deng (鄧振中), but as part of TPP there is a lot of intellectual property harmonization, like the Digital 2 Dozen. All these policies are digital policies that we’re trying to debate on our vTaiwan process, on neutrality and things like that. Now all these demands may or may not be the new administration’s agenda, so we may or may not want to deliberate some of them. Like neutrality, it makes sense, also domestically, so we may still want to deliberate it, some of them were demands from the US that may not be demands any more ...

Darice Chang: Do you think the TPP will still go through or do you think it’s gone...?

Audrey Tang: It’s not really my job to predict this, we just react to the actual realities.

Darice Chang: Why did you think climate change was the most pertinent reason to invite president-elect Trump to come to Taiwan (as opposed to say, tech development or security with China)?

Audrey Tang: I think again I’m not the climate scientist and I just feel that in Taiwan the new administration really puts a lot of focus on the clean energy and on the new forms of energy that will not only be more efficient and eventually less expensive, but also much more sustainable. And sustainable development I think is something that international community very much want the US administration to still see as a priority, so that was my motivation.

Darice Chang: Do you type on Dvorak?

Audrey Tang: No, I use speech input most of the time, haha. I mean I type on QWERTY keyboard but nowadays it’s mostly speech input because recognition is good enough.

Darice Chang: What programs are you using for English and Chinese now?

Audrey Tang: It’s just whatever is built-in. So on this iPad it’s Siri recognition and my Android phone is you know Google speech recognition.

Darice Chang: What can we do about Taiwan’s critical cyber security weaknesses?

Audrey Tang: It is the part of the work of the cyber security office, Howard 簡, who is in charge of this, and this is a new unit after this administration set up specifically to deal with cyber security. Part of my role as digital minister in charge of open government is what I negotiated with the premier before I entered the office, is that anything I can see I can publish, of course after consulting the coders and after setting a time. But things like cyber security, they’re often confidential, often national security matters, right? So I set up this policy that I don’t even look at them, so no confidential or top secret information pass through my eyes, which is why also I can not give you an answer, because most of the cyber security really matters are classified, and I don’t even see classified information, but I do trust Howard 簡 and taking care of these matters.

Darice Chang: Was there a reason you decided on that policy like that you want to make everything transparent?

Audrey Tang: Because in our cloud system we’re building for all the Executive Yuan and all the administration, we have a flag in which we can just switch and make this discussion board public, right? So a lot of these are we want to feed into machine learning. We want to feed into the ways that analyze these materials and so on. So if you mix the secret information with unclassified information and then produce some aggregate results, then it is very questionable whether the aggregate result is classified or not. According to our current interpretation of the law, any system that contains input of classified information has by definition of output as classified information, which will jeopardize the whole effort, right? Which is why we only work with unclassified open data.

Darice Chang: Finally, someone has responded: "I love your dictionary apps. Can you make their databases available for Pleco? (Primary Chinese dictionary app for foreigners)"

Audrey Tang: It’s done already.

Darice Chang: So you can download it on the internet?

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly! If you just google Pleco, then you get this extensional pack. I think now they are building at it into Pleco as one of the plugins.

Darice Chang: And my final question just for myself, so I know that some Taiwanese youth are also transgendered and they have trouble coming up to their parents and I was wondering how personally came out to your parents and what advice you would have for youth to deal with parents?

Audrey Tang: I mean I was like non-binary when I was already 12, so it’s not much as coming out as saying that you know I don’t really want to be a confined into a specific gender role, so it’s with a very philosophical way in which that I came up with my parents and saying that was I just dropped out of school, I get to decide how do I look like everyday how I behave everyday, and there is a lot of experiments I was going to do, and so this is within a large framework of experimentation with not only gender but also identity of language that I speak, of the cultures that I choose to acculturate myself into and so on. I would say that if you framed it as a experimentation as a journey, as a journey to self discovery, then it is easier because the parents would want their children to experience as much as possible within a safe way, and then it also helps to prove there is a safe space, there is circle of friends were tolerant or okay, who sees this as normal. And once you have this group of friends then your parents maybe much more willing let you experiment. And this is true not only for the identity or for sexual orientation, this is true for anything. I think starting a startup, for example, is actually much more dramatic when I was 14 or 15 other than gender or other than any other experiments, because people know most of the startups fail. And for a teenager it could be very traumatic to fail once as startup, so it took a lot of convincing. But after my parents see that I have a group of friends who are also into startups who don’t see failure as something shameful, they feel more comfortable in letting me out — in all the sense of the word.

Darice Chang: So your parents were also quite conservative?

Audrey Tang: They were expecting me, you know, to go all the way to get a PhD or something like that. I mean the world has changed around 1996 because of World Wide Web, and because of the way that people can access to knowledge, so it is the material fact; after demonstrating the fact my parents they are very reasonable people.

Darice Chang: Awesome. Thank you so much!