Audrey Tang: How are you doing?

Gary Sheng: Good morning.

Audrey Tang: Can you hear me?

Gary Sheng: Yes. Good morning.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Gary Sheng: Thanks so much for your time and being awake, I guess.

Audrey Tang: [laughs] It’s 7:30 now. I should be awake anyway. Not very awake, but mildly.

Gary Sheng: Do you have a lot of international calls?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s right. Usually in the midnight though, but early in the morning is preferable to me. Don’t worry about it. We’ll have an even more earlier call once we…

Gary Sheng: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: …actually do the talk. Might as well get used to it.

Gary Sheng: That’s very true. I just want to say I am really inspired by what you have done in Taiwan. I don’t know how much you’ve gotten a chance to look at any of the documents that I sent you.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I did. It’s a very interesting idea.

Gary Sheng: I want to send out a couple more things your way after this as well. It’s totally controversial to say that democracy is in crisis in America. That has tremendous consequences for our ability in America to solve any problem.

Gary Sheng: Because of how interconnected our world is, it has great consequences to whether the free world and the rest of the world actually becomes more democratic or less. That said, the work that you have done highlights the power of individuals to overcome the tides of authoritarianism and make your own nation a lot more democratic and to bridge generational boundaries.

Gary Sheng: We can cut to the chase, but also, I want to leave time to ask you some questions. You can ask me as many as you want as well. I was just thinking about who should be in the Civics 2030 community. Not just a talk to the kids but whose intelligence and gifts should we harness as part of the collective intelligence of the community so that all of our collective action becomes more effective.

Gary Sheng: We just met, but I don’t think it’s crazy for me to guess that I want to be working with you and that you are a gift to democracy not just in Taiwan, but also for the rest of the world. I’ll pause there for a second in case you want to say something.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Of course, I’m happy to be involved, although you said involved with the community. As far as I understand, it’s more than 200 people, which is large community. The kids, I mean, the actual people who attend. What I have seen from your website is that the fellows have not yet drafted their personal plan, right?

Gary Sheng: Pledge, yes.

Audrey Tang: Right their pledge. We’re in the discover and inspire process. It’s not like they already have something concrete that I can personally look at, like the five plans and say, “Oh, I can help with the two but not the other three.”

Gary Sheng: Precisely. There’s a couple ways that you might be able to support, only if you’re willing. We’re working with a pretty great development team in Louisiana that is helping us build the Civics 2030 platform.

Gary Sheng: Basically, we’re calling it the Civics 2030 portal, where the community can vote on and put on important community decisions such as new membership and also comment on and submit and vote on project proposals. I’ll send you a doc that explains in detail.

Gary Sheng: Before the campaign launches on July 1st, there’s a big question of exactly how we design and develop this platform. You have so much experience with that. However you can weigh in, that would be incredible.

Audrey Tang: Like troll control and also more effective votes and things like that, I’m of course happy to help and join the coalition of the willing. Yeah, it’s fine.

Gary Sheng: Appreciate that. The campaign is launching with a founding community. There’s two groups of community members. There’s the builders. Essentially, all of them are Gen Z. Then there’s the supporter, which are basically everyone else. That includes people already that are excited to pledge, include mayors, senators, social entrepreneurs, technologists.

Gary Sheng: Just imagine if with every project that a young person designs, they have a whole village helping them just even come up with what they should even vaguely be designing and then working through the nitty-gritty of exactly what that design looks like.

Gary Sheng: Once they’ve gotten the grant, let’s say, and they started to execute on that project, whenever they hit the speed bumps, they have a whole community to help them problem solve.

Gary Sheng: I’m obsessed with the question of collective intelligence. Because America has a very individualistic and competitive culture, we have largely failed to harness collective intelligence for solving social problems. I just feel like you have seen so much and built so much.

Gary Sheng: Your wisdom wouldn’t just be beneficial for the tech platform, but also just I think you’ve seen a lot just about democracy in general and what might work to strengthen it and all that good stuff.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Gary Sheng: Do you mind if I ask a few questions?

Audrey Tang: No. I’m fine actually. I’m happy to. What you said agrees with my impression reading on the Civics 2030 website. It seems that you have a very clear plan of how to help the kids. The issue now mostly is just to make sure that they engage in this design process with plenty of support. I’m happy to offer support as I can.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, there’s no concrete one issue for me to offer support aside from the platform. I’d just be standing by and be one of your “resources.”

Gary Sheng: Maybe you can help me talk through this right now. Once we have a community that is way bigger than Dunbar’s number of like 200 people…We want to because we need thousands of young people and at least hundreds of supporters to support those young people.

Gary Sheng: It may not even start this way, but it’ll certainly cease being the organic everyone knows each other and will just come naturally reach out to each other. We’ll have a whole protocol for requesting help so you’re very explicit about what you need help with.

Gary Sheng: Then there’s going to be community managers that know all the resources that are in the community and the gifts and then being able to matchmake. I would say if that sounds good to you, then it may not be a lot of work sometimes just to be a supporter in the community.

Gary Sheng: You would only be pulled in in cases where we felt like you could provide a lot of value and the project called for it. Does that make sense?

Audrey Tang: Of course. That’s my expectation anyway. My areas of work is very well-known, and so I don’t think there will be mismatches in expectations.

Audrey Tang: The only requirement again is that whatever conversations that we’re having synchronously with a video call like now, we’ll make a transcript available so that even not the same person, but who is working on the same topic is very easy then to refer to whatever that we have exchanged so that I don’t have to, for example, talk about the same issue with five different projects.

Gary Sheng: Yeah, totally. Honestly, I take a lot of inspiration from how you operate like this, because it was very clear to me that you care a lot about transparency in governance and collective intelligence. It’s important that these knowledge artifacts are to be easily accessed with…

Audrey Tang: That’s right, so we start on the same page, like literally.

Gary Sheng: Exactly. In theory, this recording of all conversations and making the transcript available, makes sense to me. Have you been doing this all four years?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Actually, even before I’m Digital Minister. As soon as I’m Digital Minister, we made a protocol of it, and so it’s required. The only exception is with the fellow civil service, but otherwise journalists, lobbyists, no difference.

Gary Sheng: Very cool. How do you think that has affected…?

Audrey Tang: The quality? [laughs]

Gary Sheng: At the end of the day, we’re trying to make better governance. How is that tied to that?

Audrey Tang: There’s two advantages. The first one I already mentioned is that people understand the why of the policymaking, because the process, when it’s early in the drafting stage, or it’s just put at in the design and define stages, it’s already public.

Audrey Tang: Instead of waiting until announcement, which is already the what-stage where people have less room to be involved in, we can have a lot of people to look in at my day-to-day work and saying that, “Oh, you got this wrong,” or, “You have to kind of stop now or change your direction now,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: The input is much more helpful from the civil society. The signal is much more easy to generate, because you actually know what’s going on rather than speculating what’s going on. This is the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that the person talking to me, especially if they’re a lobbyist, tend to only make global goals, community interest, public benefit arguments. There’s no room for them to make a strictly private interest argument.

Audrey Tang: They know that these arguments will be inspected online, and they may face social sanction, actually, if they make arguments that are detrimental to the society, and they know it.

Audrey Tang: It makes it much more easy for lobbyists of different positions on the same issue to eventually asynchronously arrive to the same common values. People will be motivated then to only make public benefit arguments, so it also makes collaboration easier.

Gary Sheng: That’s amazing. Here’s a pointed question. What subset or what types of interaction between community members, specific to [inaudible 14:16] , should be recorded?

Audrey Tang: There’s two criteria. First, for example, if you start mentioning a story, a anecdote of your friend, who have not cleared this for publication, then on the transcript we’ll probably have to anonymize or even delete that section, because they have not cleared this for a public dissemination.

Audrey Tang: Anything that concerns the privacy, the trade secret, or whatever of a third party who is not party to this conversation, naturally should not recorded. Or even, if recorded, should be redacted before publishing. That is one criteria.

Audrey Tang: The other criteria is that if people are not making any knowledge artifacts together, like people are simply bonding. If we’re having lunch together, and we’re not actually talking about anything substantial or policy-wise, we’re just getting to know each other, and then it’s by definition our personal stories.

Audrey Tang: How much of it goes public should be only determined after the fact meaning that maybe we do a quick summary, a quick recap after lunch of the knowledge artifacts we eventually produced as a byproduct during lunch. We do another recording session after that, but we don’t record the lunch itself. That’s like purely social gatherings…

Gary Sheng: That makes so much sense.

Audrey Tang: …with no epistemological expectations. That’s the second why. One is about privacy, the other is about social content.

Gary Sheng: When you release a transcript, do you make it an option to comment on the transcript?

Audrey Tang: We release it as open data under the public domain Creative Commons Zero in a structured data format. Although it’s not on a forum, every single utterance has its own URL, and so it’s very easy to share individual speeches on social media or any conversation board or things like that.

Audrey Tang: Although it’s not integrated with a common sync mechanisms, mostly because not really wanting to get distracted all the time, but people are free to just quote each person or even each individual utterances, like this URL.

Audrey Tang: People do actually quote this, and just then start a discussion board with that as a social object. It’s not taken out of context, because if you click Show Context, you can see the conversation in which that this utterance happens.

Gary Sheng: Did you make this?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I maintain this website. This technology is called [non-English speech] , which is a African word. The English version is maintained by mySociety, which is a UK civic tech group.

Gary Sheng: US-based?

Audrey Tang: It’s called SayIt.

Gary Sheng: Saying?

Audrey Tang: SayIt, like just say it.

Gary Sheng: Say it. What is mySociety?

Audrey Tang: MySociety is one of the earlier civic technology groups, which I think works very well with your vision, which is about empowering people to be active citizens.

Audrey Tang: They have flagship products such as FixMyStreet which is literally requesting the public service to fix their street, TheyWorkForYou which is tracking MP’s work, WhatDoTheyKnow which is a very efficient tool to get freedom of information from the civil society to public service, and also many other tools.

Audrey Tang: SayIt is just one of the tools that is very good for keeping internal records and making them public without too much of a hassle. It’s open-source.

Audrey Tang: I’ll just download it and customize it, edit a bunch of features, maintain what we call docker, which is a microservice packaging, so that anyone with no operation training in computers can, nevertheless, easily just run that one single line of command and start running their own SayIt website.

Gary Sheng: You made it look really easy for the…

Audrey Tang: That’s for bootstrapping.

Gary Sheng: Wow. You made this bootstrap?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Gary Sheng: Have other countries used this?

Audrey Tang: As I said, SayIt started from mySociety, which is UK. It spread to a large number of users. If you google for SayIt, you can see that it’s being used in Africa, in many Parliament’s, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s actually a very integrated component in many existing civic hacking groups, where people really want to take a unfriendly format, for example, PDF files or things like that, that are published by their local city council or parliament. They write simple programs that publish them then as transcript that you can easily quote.

Audrey Tang: You talk about the commenting part. It’s very convenient and also pretty easily done to integrate SayIt with a hypothesis, which is another civic tech tool that is open-source. You can just take any SayIt web page, or indeed any web page, and then start adding a commenting board on it by overlaying the commenting interface on top of an existing page.

Audrey Tang: That’s something also very useful if you want to have a 200-people community talking about civic stuff via basically opening up conversation boards on top of existing public sector or civil sector works.

Gary Sheng: I know about hypothesis and SayIt. It’s funny because you’re probably so used to this civic technology. US is so behind. We have so little expectation of transparency. It’s shocking to me. I would actually love if you’d be willing to just share whatever resources you have or things I can read about. I just like to understand just the breadth of what is implemented and what…

Audrey Tang: Sure. Of course. Happy to help.

Gary Sheng: Your role was created by the cabinet to bridge the gap in older and younger generations. I feel like you’ve done all that. How do you know?

Audrey Tang: There’s a couple things. First of all, it’s not about generations per se. This is more about people’s different expectations of technology. There’s people who are very new to technology despite them being the older generation. They’re actually very young in terms of Internet age.

Audrey Tang: They have different expectations with a digital native, like all your Generation Z students who were literally born with this technology. They may consider any screen that doesn’t touch to scroll broken. [laughs] It’s very different than expectations.

Audrey Tang: My work is generally bringing tech to people, not asking people to conform to attack, and to translate across different modalities.

Audrey Tang: For example, people of the older generation often find it’s much easier if they can just go to a town hall, talk in a town hall, or use a pencil or stylus to easily express their your thoughts on a whiteboard or things like that. That’s the kind of expressions modalities that they prefer.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, many people from the Generation Z prefers to join conversations asynchronously whenever they want, online, in an interactive whiteboard, even with chat bots, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: The main question is, how can we design such a conversation platform so that we amplify the kind of face-to-face now that the older generations are used to, but make it appealing and even fun for a younger generation to join on the same topic and provide meaningful inputs? We can do this through augmented reality.

Audrey Tang: Actually, Pokémon Go is a great example. You have grandparents with their grandchildren using Pokémon Go to build social solidarity, learning about local history, and things like that. Anything that translates between different modalities of learning that builds a lifelong learning opportunity between different generations is a natural opportunity for this social interaction design to enter.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that I personally design things. It’s just that I’ve helped foster the culture in which within the civil service and also the civil society, anybody who come up with such a design easily gets recognition.

Audrey Tang: Maybe a trophy from the president, promising to implement whatever they have done in the next 12 months into a national policy and things like that, like meta-mechanisms to encourage such mechanisms.

Gary Sheng: If I’m hearing that you are changing the culture subsets, it’s more changing like helping people value the sort of making these participatory processes more accessible to the Gen Z types that [inaudible 25:07] interactions and then other people who are the more synchronous [inaudible 25:13] .

Audrey Tang: It’s transculturalism, which means the freedom to move across coaches and inspect your own upbringing with the lens of a different culture – asynchronous, synchronous, remote, face-to-face. These are all different kinds of cultural primitives, [laughs] the different cultural components.

Audrey Tang: Having existing mechanisms such as SayIt that bridges this very spontaneous, real-time conversations that we’re having now into a knowledge article that people can cite, annotate, and things like that is by itself a bridge across the synchronous and asynchronous cultures.

Gary Sheng: That’s awesome. Something that I’ve been thinking about but don’t have that many people that I personally know to talk to. I have some people that talk about how your job and how I feel like my job is as much to think of what technical as it is just as philosopher.

Gary Sheng: I don’t really have much more to say except that it’s extremely fun to think about these problems and how so much of why we don’t adopt I guess tech in America, because our mental models are from a different era. We don’t even consider this concept of transculturalism. It’s the first time that maybe I’ve heard of that word. It makes a lot of sense.

Gary Sheng: Actually, we have a system of incentives such that a lot of politicians have an incentive to make sites less accessible. I’m sure you know what Obamacare is. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Trump Administration has taken active steps to make the user experience of the Obamacare signup site less accessible and lower the signup rate.

Gary Sheng: What are your thoughts on why we have nothing like your role in our highest offices?

Audrey Tang: I happen to know such a role, the Chief Innovation Officer in New Jersey, Beth Noveck, a close collaborator and used to be deputy CIO of the Obama White House. She’s still running the GovLab, which is a close ally that tried to apply these philosophies to everyday rulemaking.

Audrey Tang: Recently, I visited the US Federal Congress to talk about very interesting toolkit, what we call Crowdlaw for Congress, that shows how the civic tech tools can double as GovTech tools. The GovTech tools can then help the MPs, the current Congress people, to use crowd intelligence tools for problem definition, identifying solutions, drafting, and evaluation oversight.

Audrey Tang: From my impression of the conversation with the chiefs of staff of the Congress people, many of them are aware of these tools. As you said, it’s more of the existing systems of incentives are headwinds when they’re trying to apply these tools because of the political climate, which is why I think it’s always easier.

Audrey Tang: For example, in New Jersey, compared to the whole of the US, it’s even easier to start with a city or a county. It’s even easier to start with a small community of 200 people and things like that. It’s like scaling deep before you can scale up. I think that’s the impression I get from the chiefs of staff.

Gary Sheng: Chief of staff of what?

Audrey Tang: Of the Congress people, of the Select Committee on Modernization of the Congress, who is actually solving, or trying to solve with some success, some of these issues, like partisan toxicity or things like that.

Gary Sheng: Can you send me the link of the person?

Audrey Tang: Of course. Essentially, a large list of people, but here is this entire names of people. I think it’s very interesting that it’s, by design, bipartisan and it’s from both parties. They have a set of recommendations to modernize the House, not the physical, the design of the House.

Audrey Tang: You can read about all their recommendations, and party members, and the chairs, and co-chairs in the website that I just pasted you.

Gary Sheng: Cool. This is cool because this is highlighting a blind spot for me about governmental reform ideas. I spend a lot of time thinking about electoral reform, which is also very important. If a slightly better elected official is elected into a broken system of governance, that only does so much.

Audrey Tang: They have a set of recommendations to make the Congress itself more modern. Each of these one are natural entry points for your young fellows to look into as well as to improvise on how they can contribute along these lines, not necessarily to the US Congress itself but to a kind of smaller representative councils.

Audrey Tang: These are general directions that the bipartisan committee identifies shortcomings of the existing representative system in the US Congress and the House. It’s even more inspiring in a sense than foreign examples because these are produced by the people who are work at day in and day out on these issues.

Gary Sheng: That’s amazing. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Gary Sheng: What is your relationship to the people supporting democracy in Hong Kong?

Audrey Tang: They visit actually quite often. Most notably right after they win the regional consular election because they finally now have time and some resource to try out these collective intelligence tools or [inaudible 32:54] within their purview. It’s pretty happy encounter with the people who emerge victorious after the election because they’ve suffered, and fought, struggled so much in the months leading to it.

Audrey Tang: It, in a sense, also shaped presidential election conversation of our past election because then all the presidential candidates here in Taiwan eventually supported Hong Kong in their endeavor. It’s really the first time that unites all the presidential candidates in Taiwan together. It’s become the defining keynote, the keynote literally for the presidential election.

Gary Sheng: Cool. Would you be willing to introduce me to one of them?

Audrey Tang: It’s all on SayIt. They’re all publicly available in terms of email addresses.

Audrey Tang: If you have a specific one that you would like me to introduce, or input, or things like that, then of course I’m happy to do. I’m just posting. Can read Mandarin?

Gary Sheng: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Not really. Google Translate works. Here is a recent conversation of the fresh either returning to Hong Kong or just won the local election people coming to me last December to talk about their playbook coming forward and so on. That may be a good background reading.

Gary Sheng: OK.

Audrey Tang: It’s Google Translate.

Gary Sheng: I think you know that we have a big convention in DC at Georgetown University where we’re launching this campaign. I want to make sure that the speakers are extremely symbolic of our belief in young people and in democracy. I think you can guess where I’m going with regards to Hong Kong.

Gary Sheng: If we can get a young either from Hong Kong and fly them out to talk about democracy, that would be so historic.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Some of them may be already visiting anyway, which makes it easier. International travel nowadays not very fashionable. [laughs] Of course, we can always do teleconferencing as well.

Gary Sheng: We’ll see where corona is in July, but do you have any recommendations for which of the young leaders that you think might be good to talk to?

Audrey Tang: I don’t have any specific recommendation because I don’t know the kind of tone you’re trying to set. I can just say I’ve been participating and helping out the Oslo Freedom Forum in Taiwan and also the…Actually there’s many human-right-related conferences that have Hong Kong people who input. There’s [inaudible 36:22] , the g0v Summit, who also has a Hong Kong track.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you can just look at existing material. These all have video recordings, even TED Talks. If you like any particular speaker that strikes you as working very well, then maybe that’s a better starting point than me just iterating the list of 20 or 30 people.

Gary Sheng: OK, that’s perfect. I’ll just look at the tone and energy of difference of the leaders and if it aligns well with what I’m trying to accomplish.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. That’s exactly right.

Gary Sheng: Cool. Thank you so much for your time.

Audrey Tang: No problem.

Gary Sheng: I’ll send you at least a couple documents for you to look over.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Gary Sheng: I’d love for your feedback on them.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Gary Sheng: You just have my mind racing about the whole idea of demonstrating democracy working on a smaller scale to a wider scale. Of course, that was already the orientation that we’re going towards, but just some of the technologies that you showed, and please send as many as you can think of.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Gary Sheng: The deep intention is to create a different type of leader that is not being trained right now. We’re [inaudible 37:55] Civic Superhero. That is [inaudible 37:56] aware of just how good it can get. You know?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Gary Sheng: They feel very motivated to spread just how good it feels to have a voice and to be part of a community that is getting better at solving problems by virtue of the people, but also, the technologies that are allowing the people to be the best that they can be. Right?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm. I really like this branding, Civic Superhero. Actually, I think only the City of Colorado Springs used it. It’s a very new brand. You literally own the hashtag because nobody else is using it, and it’s very evocative. I think it’s a good brand.

Gary Sheng: Thank you so much. We snagged the URLs because we look, there needs to be that sort of moral and also status-related kind of energy with citizenship, civic leadership, so someone committing lots of time, potentially their entire career to strengthening communities, and bridging divides, and solving problems. That deserves that sort of title.

Gary Sheng: I’ll send you a couple example of stickers that we…Let me…Give me one second. I want to show you right now.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Gary Sheng: Just imagine just seeing these sort of stickers fucking everywhere.

Audrey Tang: That’s nice.

Gary Sheng: You’re aware of, I’m sure, other civic superheroes as well. You have your own [inaudible 40:28] . It was cool. A couple weeks ago, we had a picture of the guy on the left, [inaudible 40:35] Conway, who was, he was the big star of the ‘60s in America. He was so cool.

Gary Sheng: Just imagine if there’s all these kids, actual teenagers, maybe even younger, but having t-shirts just proudly [inaudible 40:53] .

Gary Sheng: You are the pinnacle of a civic superhero to me. I’m excited. I’m just grateful that you spent time with me today. I’m excited that you’re [inaudible 41:09] to the kids and excited about all the ways that we can work together.

Audrey Tang: OK, of course. That’s pretty much it, and I look forward to the email exchanges. I’ll be online I think three weeks from now-ish and really happy to then meet with your students and see what their ideas and their questions are over the great beyond, that is the Internet, that connects us together.

Audrey Tang: That’s pretty much all I have. I’ll just make a transcript and for you to edit for 10 days before publishing.

Gary Sheng: All right, awesome. Thanks so much, Audrey.

Audrey Tang: OK. Cheers.

Gary Sheng: Take care. Bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.