Audrey Tang: Let’s get started.

Jenny Wang: First of all, Minister Tang, thank you so much. I know it’s 10:30 at night, Friday night there, right?

Audrey Tang: Surprisingly, I’m in Detroit. [laughs]

Jenny Wang: You are? [laughs]

Sevim Abaza: Wow.

Audrey Tang: I just woke up, actually.

Sevim Abaza: Good to know.

Jenny Wang: What are you doing in Detroit?

Audrey Tang: There’s a annual meeting of the Taiwanese Women’s Association. I’m giving a keynote tomorrow.

Sevim Abaza: That’s awesome.

Jenny Wang: That’s amazing. Which organizations? These are all women’s empowerment associations that are all Taiwanese?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s all Taiwanese. They’re called NATWA. I think they’re North American Taiwanese Women’s Association. They’re indeed the primary Taiwanese American working women empowerment, and they’ve been around for, I don’t know, three decades or something.

Jenny Wang: Great. Cool. Was that today or it’s this weekend?

Audrey Tang: It’s going to be tomorrow.

Jenny Wang: I see. Basically, we just wanted to hop on a call to talk a bit more about your recent exciting endeavors. Obviously, you’ve been doing really amazing things, empowering Taiwanese citizens, but also connecting Taiwanese civil society to the global goals.

Jenny Wang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Literally. [laughs]

Jenny Wang: Based on learning and reading more about what you do, we feel like you’d be a really excellent fit to our Oslo Freedom Forums. As you know, Oslo Freedom Forum, we went to Taiwan for the first time last year in November 2018. It was very exciting. It was a great learning experience.

Jenny Wang: We really hope to continue connecting with Taiwan’s civil society but also empowering and amplifying balanced voices, local youth, and things like that. For this year, 2019, we are going back, but the date is still TBD. We’re trying to find a venue and everything, but we’re working on outreach right now.

Jenny Wang: Given your involvement, do you have any organizations or individuals that you think would be interested in connecting with us for anything?

Audrey Tang: Date wise, is this still going to be around the end of year? I remember you were like November last year, right?

Sevim Abaza: Yes, November, but I actually did not attend. Jenny and I have been going back and forth with different venues. This is my first time doing an event in Taipei. Last year the forum was a little bit stuffy, is what we were told. It was a bit formal. It didn’t allow for networking connectivity. It didn’t allow us to bring society together. It didn’t allow us to have balance of different political views.

Sevim Abaza: This year, it’s important for us to unite everybody around the common good. The idea was to find a venue that supports that process.

Sevim Abaza: Since we are branching away from just the hotel culture, we have had a little bit of trouble. We’re thinking, it looks like it’s going to be between September and November. We were hoping to actually do something closer to October, say, a little bit away from the election time. I know it’s all crunched, coming in for January.

Audrey Tang: You’re breaking away from the hotel culture. Did I hear that right?

Sevim Abaza: Mm hmm.

Audrey Tang: There was a OTF Summit, the Open Tech Fund Summit that was also in Taipei, and they chose a pretty good hotel. I was there. Do you mean that you’re deliberately choosing a venue that’s not a hotel?

Sevim Abaza: Yeah, I’m looking for something that allows for more engagement with those on stage and those offstage. Sometimes there’s a formality with hotels. Again, I’m not familiar with all the hotels in the city. If there is something that you feel as a venue was really functional, allowed for better engagement, and I would say more egalitarian.

Sevim Abaza: I want it to be more accessible, especially for youth. I don’t want it to just be high society. I want it to be all society. Sometimes the hotel is a barrier to entry.

Audrey Tang: Does it have to be Taipei City, or are you open to considering other cities?

Sevim Abaza: I think Jenny and I were discussing this. We’re open to other cities. The problem is, whatever city we’re in, we want to make sure that we’re engaging the audience. We don’t want to go so far away, where maybe media is not interested in being a part of it, or youth is not interested in being a part of it. It has to be strategic, unfortunately, so that we can really bring groups in a united way.

Audrey Tang: I see. How many people do you expect will attend this year around?

Sevim Abaza: Jenny, how many did we have last year? Around 400, was it?

Jenny Wang: Yeah. I feel like last year was around 300. This year, of course, we’re going to try to shoot a little bit higher, but also keep it realistic, like 400 or 500 this year maybe?

Audrey Tang: 400 or 500 in Taipei City and also which is not a hotel already narrows it down to a handful of choices.

Audrey Tang: To be egalitarian as a focus... Well, my office, which is the Taiwan Social Innovation Lab, may actually fit such a description.

Audrey Tang: We do have to negotiate with Minister of Culture, which runs the C LAB, or the Contemporary Culture Lab. I think by the time that you were around last year, the C LAB was not even generally open, so this is a relatively new venue.

Audrey Tang: That’s where they have, for example, one of the larger g0v hackathons this May, that is just next month. They have very similar requirements, like everything is on the ground floor, or at most, the second floor. Things are more spontaneous. It feels that there is no hierarchies and so on, so it is a possibility.

Audrey Tang: I cannot guarantee you the C LAB’s availability, especially it’s now becoming a very popular place, hosting for example the Night of Ideas from France, and so on, there’s many international activities being held around there. I’ll give you the link to the venue for your consideration. I do feel the same way, that hotel, sometimes vertical restricts conversations.

Sevim Abaza: No, I agree. Thank for the suggestion. We’ll definitely look into it. Let’s see if we get lucky, and they have some availability for us.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Sevim Abaza: As far as, coming back to the city, I think it’s also important to feature not only the tech community, but also women. It’s very important that we balance our stage and balance our perspective. For us, having someone like you participate on our stage as far as a speaker, or otherwise, we would be honored. I wonder what your interest in that would be.

Audrey Tang: My office is literally inside the C LAB, so regardless, I’ll be there.

Audrey Tang: I’m, of course, very willing to attend. It’s difficult to pre-agree without like a week range of dates. I’ll just signal that I’ve very interested. I think the major travel I have is around the end of October, the week of 20th, from 20th to the end of October, I’ll be in Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, which is far from Taipei.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, I think I’ll be in Taipei. The sooner you let me know which week you intend, the better that I can guarantee my participation. I’m highly motivated and willing to attend, even if I’m abroad. I’m happy to attend through avatars, robots, holograms, and all that.

Sevim Abaza: That’s incredible. May I ask what you’re doing in Ethiopia, and it’s OK if it’s personal.

Audrey Tang: Sure. No, I don’t have anything personal in Ethiopia. It’s the Social Enterprise World Forum or the SEWF. This time there’s two SEWF co-branded ones. One is Taiwan, the Asia Pacific Social Enterprise Summit, where we give the partnership award for like the STG, the Biosphere Inclusive Business Social Progress Partnership.

Audrey Tang: We co brand with SEWF, so they help bring in people to Taiwan. Around the end of the year, we help bring in people to Ethiopia, which is their annual summit.

Sevim Abaza: Incredible. I didn’t even hear about it, so now I have to look this up. This is wonderful.

Audrey Tang: It’s called Social Enterprise World Forum. Coincidentally, I think their main theme in Ethiopia is also around women entrepreneurship and empowerment.

Sevim Abaza: We have to look out for that one, I guess, guys.

Jenny Wang: [laughs]

Sevim Abaza: Sorry, go ahead, Jenny.

Jenny Wang: Sorry. Also, Minister Tang, we were also thinking about going to Taiwan at some point this summer for a planning trip, and also to meet with civil society, NGOs, etc. I saw online that you’ll be at the Techsauce Global Summit in June. Do you plan to be in Taipei or in Taiwan over the summer, and what dates would work best if we were to go visit you?

Audrey Tang: There is a lot of traveling from now to May. There is only a brief weekend, which is May 11th that I’m in Kaohsiung for the Asia Pacific Social Enterprise Summit, but otherwise there’s lots of travels. I think the travel stops June 3rd. Starting from the weekend of June 3rd, let’s make it June 5th just to be sure, then I’m available for meetings in Taipei.

Jenny Wang: Good. We’re thinking of going sometime either June or July, and it’d be really great to meet you. We recently, also, connected with 楊黃美幸.

Audrey Tang: Yes, our ambassador at large.

Jenny Wang: She was very delightful, and we really look forward to seeing her there as well. I think it’s really exciting that HRF and Oslo Freedom Forum is starting to really work with the community and engaging. I think this is a exciting trajectory. We’re excited that you’re on board and definitely interested.

Audrey Tang: As for the organizations, are you looking for people who help setting an agenda, people who are delivering talks? What kind of partnership are you looking for at this stage?

Jenny Wang: So far, we connected with the foundation for women’s development. Let’s see, Foundation for Women’s Rights Promotion and Development.

Audrey Tang: 婦權會?

Jenny Wang: Yes. Let’s see, last year, Taiwan’s Foundation for Democracy was there as well. We had the Marriage Equality Coalition. This is just the beginning, we’re scraping the surface right now. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Just to make sure, are you connected with the FWRPD, the Foundation of Women’s Rights Promotion Developments, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, and also the Marriage Equality Platform?

Jenny Wang: Yes, so far.

Audrey Tang: These are very good starting points. The FWRPD was also our main partnership in the social enterprise work forum efforts. They’re very well connected with the Ministry of Health and Welfare. Similarly, the TfD with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. You’re in really good hands.

Sevim Abaza: With us, we already have an amazing community of activists and speakers. When we think about how we build those partnerships, it’s how to also further our activists work globally. When we’re talking partnerships, it’s people on the ground who are interested defending against tyranny, those who are interested in building a community after we leave.

Sevim Abaza: It’s not just that we come in, we do an event, and we go. We want to set a mark, or at least set a process, or begin a connection. Hopefully that will allow for problem solving, for strategizing, for thinking out of the box on how to solve some of these problems that we bring to the surface. I think from a partnership perspective, it’s not only just attendees or otherwise. We also have this expo space.

Sevim Abaza: It’s called the Interactive Expo, we’re interested in the technology scene to maybe show how we can merge technology and human rights, and how we could use technology to solve a lot of our human rights issues. Those kind of partners are very incredible creative dissidents, and creative activists are always partners that we look for and also can feature in our expo space.

Sevim Abaza: It’s really holistic, and we’re thinking with Prachi, as well, who’s on this call, we’re thinking of different ways we can build more of a grassroots initiative around it. We’re not just a conference. We want to be a little bit more than a conference.

Audrey Tang: My suggestion would be to look into, there’s a working platform across all the NGOs around the two covenants. That’s the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and of course, on Economic, Social, and Cultural rights. Every time around they write shadow reports. They organize all the human rights activists in Taiwan. I think there’s a similar one for the CEDAW too.

Audrey Tang: That’s the main topical coalition of all the related human rights workers to systemically look at how Taiwan can both help internationally as well as requires help internationally. If you look for the shadow report co-authors, you’ll probably find the right people to network with and connect you.

Audrey Tang: Every time they publish a shadow report, there’s a credit list of all the civil society organizations that contributes to the shadow reports. I think these are the ones that are your natural allies.

Sevim Abaza: That’s great. Thank you so much. Prachi, do you have any thoughts? Did we lose Prachi?

Jenny Wang: I think we may have...

Audrey Tang: Hey, greetings.

Prachi Vidwans: Thoughts? I think this has been really interesting. I feel like basically our goals have been already laid out by Sevim, but I also didn’t go to Taiwan last year, so I’m really excited to come and learn more about the dynamics on the ground and the groups that are working together and what connections already exist between organizations, both in Taiwan and in the region in general.

Prachi Vidwans: Another element, too, is that our goal with all of our conferences is to create this global community of pro-democracy activists, people from all over the world who are fighting similar battles. It can be tough for us to balance bringing in the international perspective and also addressing local issues. Our global conferences are in Mexico. We’ve done one in Johannesburg.

Prachi Vidwans: Mexico has a lot of serious political issues that are going on, so does South Africa, though it’s less violent. Both of these, we consider them democracies. Taiwan is a democracy, but it’s confronting authoritarianism in a very direct way that these other locations don’t.

Audrey Tang: Literally in the front line.

Prachi Vidwans: Exactly. I’m trying to understand how we can address this topic in Taiwan without creating problems for the people that are joining our network, but there is so much more relevance to authoritarianism in Taiwan than there is in like South Africa. I don’t really have a specific question about that, but I’m looking forward to learning more about out when our planning trip ends.

Prachi Vidwans: If you have insight on how we can talk about China, and the spread of Chinese authoritarianism in Taiwan, in a way that’s safe for the people in the room, I’d love to hear about that.

Audrey Tang: If you mean safe from the police in Taiwan, I assure the police in Taiwan will be on your side. [laughs] There really is that Taiwan has absolute speech freedom. I think the only thing that you can’t really hold a public forum about is advocating conquering of Taiwan by force. That one is still not allowed. Otherwise, everything else is just fine.

Audrey Tang: Again, even people who are talking about PRC in a pro-PRC way, enjoy lots of freedom around speech and assembly. Really, there will be no trouble for your extended networks, no matter which position that they hold.

Audrey Tang: For people that are visiting come from Hong Kong or Macau, and so on, generally, they’re welcome as well.

Audrey Tang: If people come from PRC, they may need applications well in advance. If you have visa issues for people from regimes that previously had a much more close relationship with the PRC — we need to be very precise here — then they may need visa help. Our office is also very happy to provide this help.

Prachi Vidwans: That’s amazing. Something we’ve discussed is how to figure out how to balance our marketing and our presence in the press.

Audrey Tang: Last time around, you already sent a pretty good signal by being pretty much non partisan in your assembly and working with one of the opposition party lawmakers, Jason Hsu, right? I think that sends a pretty good signal that you’re not here to advocate for any particular parties.

Audrey Tang: If we continue this non partisan or cross partisan connection and signal, I think you’re pretty safe. Myself, I’m independent, I’m non partisan as well.

Sevim Abaza: Something interesting that was mentioned to me from one of our colleagues was that there’s a lot of misinformation in some media circles. Is this something that you have witnessed? Do you have any opinion on that? Should we comment on that?

Audrey Tang: There’s a recent study and publication from someone called Puma. He said that’s his nickname, and he’s working with the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, the TAHR, which I’m sure that you have already connected with, but they are one of the main association behind the shadow reports, and so on.

Audrey Tang: If you look for the report on misinformation and information manipulation, these are the keywords that you need to search for. There’s plenty of discussions right now about systemic campaigns to sow discord, as well as to specifically target elections. These are not new. We’ve been witnessing it in the past few elections.

Audrey Tang: The way that the people who want to influence elections is very interesting, because we have one of the most developed sunshine laws when it comes to campaign donations. This year, we will publish all the individual donation records under structured data, so that it’s readable, analyzable, and so on. It’s a model for the rest of the world.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, then people use a lot of other ways, like placing a lot of targeted advertisement or misinformation campaigns, and so on, through paid advertisement on social and traditional media. That’s a new development, partly connected to why because of our campaign donation laws are so transparent, people consider other ways, especially if they’re foreign capital.

Audrey Tang: We’re now working with the Parliament. They’re now deliberating a honest advertisement amendment to the election laws to make sure that the campaign donations and political advertisement are held on the same standard of disclosure as well as limiting them only to domestic people, and so on.

Audrey Tang: These are pretty new developments, and I’m happy to share more if you’re interested about that on your planning trip.

Prachi Vidwans: I think we’re definitely interested. [laughs]

Sevim Abaza: Definitely. Anything else from the rest of us? I don’t want to take up more of Minister Tang’s time.

Audrey Tang: No, that’s just fine.

Prachi Vidwans: I’d love to learn a little bit about what you’re working on right now, and what initiatives you’re working on.

Audrey Tang: I’m working on quite a few things. Right now, I’m working on the Presidential Hackathon, which is an interesting way for the civil society to set an agenda for the public service by essentially making what we call trilingual teams of civil society domain experts, data science and IT experts, as well as public servants or regulatory experts, and forming those trilingual teams.

Audrey Tang: There are hundreds of proposals last year, and we’re on the second year, actually. There’s already more than 100 proposals too. Every year, we choose. This year through popular voting, using quadratic voting, as well as a panel of experts using range voting, to make sure that we select at the end five winning teams.

Audrey Tang: They get no monetary prize, but they get a presidential promise and a presidential office demo day to make their ideas public service by the next budget year. We delivered all five of five last year, and there are quite a few related to your work. For example, one of them is to provide human aide to people who cannot afford to own a car.

Audrey Tang: They re-planned their help centers, and so on, around public transportation, walking distances, and piggybacking on existing services offered by other CSOs to make sure that people get a fair legal counsel, even when they cannot afford it, and things like that. It is a very interesting way to do government innovation.

Audrey Tang: This time around, we’re also working with the open contracting partnership, internationally, so that people who can also apply for international engagement could look at our procurement data, for example, to make sure that we’re even more accountable than we already are.

Audrey Tang: Here are the related links if you’re interested in recommending other teams to participate, and have a change to demo to our president. I think the international track is still open for participation for another month or so. That’s the thing that we’re working on right now.

Prachi Vidwans: Very cool.

Jenny Wang: I’m definitely going to look through this.

Sevim Abaza: I was reading your article about how tech is vital for the future of democracy. I was wondering what kind of results you’d seen from your efforts as minister in that space.

Audrey Tang: Very positive.

Sevim Abaza: Great.

Audrey Tang: We’re hosting a conversation right now about the future of Taiwan/US relationship. It’s one of the cases where we really use what we call AI-moderated conversations...

Sevim Abaza: Oh, cool!

Audrey Tang: Here is the link: https://talkto.ait.org.tw/. If you open that link, and scroll to the bottom, you can already see the hundreds of people who participates interest to sign in. You can also vote anonymously each other’s opinions, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Very interestingly, it highlights not only the divisive issues, but also the majority opinions. Because there is no reply button, there is no way for ad hominem attacks, trolls, or whatever. Tt’s a very civil way to talk about common agenda. This is actually one of the most polarizing issue in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Because we have worked with many polarizing issues, we worked with like this technology in Taiwan has been worked with mainstream media. The continuation of death penalty following a random killing. It has been used for associating Singaporean style caning to drunk driving. Uber, also. Basically, all the divisive issues you can think of, we’ve deployed this technology to really good result.

Audrey Tang: That’s make people aware that actually they agree with most of their neighbors on most of their issues, most of the time. For the conversation not to get derailed by divisive issues. I think this is one of the cases really working. We’re also working with the e petition participatory budgetary regulatory announcement, and so on, in conjunction with this technology.

Prachi Vidwans: I can see this being really useful, too. Say this is a very polarizing topic, but these majority groups are kind of close to one another, like...

Audrey Tang: That’s right. If you want to experiment with this, it’s free, as in free software. You can set up a copy of the software, or if you just want to try around, here is the link for you to try around: https://polis.pdis.nat.gov.tw/.

Audrey Tang: You can start a new conversation anytime.

Sevim Abaza: In a way, because you don’t have these, I guess, trolls, there’s no way to sew divisiveness in the conversation.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. The insight here is just to take away the reply button. Once you take away the reply button, everybody becomes civil.

Sevim Abaza: That’s kind of an interesting phenomenon.

Prachi Vidwans: Fascinating. I think most people say, well, not most people, but there’s a discussion whether anonymity brings that out in you. Maybe it’s just the ability to argue that brings this on.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. It’s just like email. Anyone can anonymously send anyone anything. If they send it to millions of people at once, they risk being flagged as spam and go to people’s junk mail folder. Still, it’s no censorship. It’s just you can’t you always waste other people’s time anymore by default.

Jenny Wang: That was really interesting.

Sevim Abaza: I can play with these links all day.

Sevim Abaza: I’m just thinking, "What can we do with this? There’s so much to ask. There’s so much to do." Jenny, anything else from you?

Jenny Wang: Let’s see. No. I think this conversation was really great and super informative. I’m pretty excited that now we have this dialogue going. It’s great. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Is it OK if I just publish this unedited to YouTube after our talk? I don’t think we have mentioned anything confidential. If you object, we can publish a transcript instead.

Audrey Tang: I can make a transcript. We can co-edit for 10 days, and we publish through text instead of through video.

Sevim Abaza: I think so.

Audrey Tang: Let’s do that.

Sevim Abaza: Yeah.

Prachi Vidwans: Great.

Sevim Abaza: [laughs] Very cool.

Jenny Wang: Very cool.

Audrey Tang: Anything else?

Audrey Tang: We’re good then.

Sevim Abaza: I have a lot of ideas. I feel very excited about the potential and what we can do. I hope the place is available. We’ll reach out to them. We hope to get you a date as soon as possible. We want to get it by May, to have a date, so we can send out to all. We’re looking forward to it and look forward to seeing you this summer, hopefully.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, see you in June or July.

Sevim Abaza: Or July. All right. Take care.

Prachi Vidwans: Great.

Audrey Tang: Take care.

Jenny Wang: Bye.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.

Jenny Wang: Thank you very much.

Prachi Vidwans: Bye.

Audrey Tang: Bye.

Sevim Abaza: Bye.

Jenny Wang: Bye.