Audrey Tang Discusses Taiwan’s Digital Politics

An Interview on Participatory Politics, Social Technology, and Digital Democracy after the Sunflower Movement

On 11 July 2019, I had the pleasure of interviewing Taiwan’s ‘cyber-minister’ Audrey Tang, who joined the Taiwanese government as a minister without portfolio in 2016, where she has since been in charge of cyber developments and of bridging Taiwan’s generational gap. The interview is part of my research on digital politics in Taiwan after the Sunflower Movement, which has been kindly funded through the Taiwan Fellowship.

In keeping with the ideals of open data, the interview was first published under a creative commons license on 14 July 2019 on the government’s speech and interview website. The following transcript is a reproduction of that interview. It has been co-edited by the participants for language consistency and continuity.

 

Florian Schneider: Well, thanks, Audrey, for making time. Before we start with the interview, I just wanted to make sure: did Zach explain to you what my research is about and who I am?

 

Audrey Tang: Yes, and I have read the brief.

 

Florian Schneider: Excellent.

 

Audrey Tang: It’s an excellent sketch, an excellent brief. I’m also very appreciative that you have this on-the-record/off-the-record choice. Because this is my office hour, we’re always on the record.

 

Florian Schneider: Actually, I like that, and I think we’re going to get a chance to talk about open government and transparency in a moment.

 

Audrey Tang: That’s actually part of the Sunflower movement.

 

Florian Schneider: We’re already right on-topic.

 

Audrey Tang: It’s directly carried over.

 

Florian Schneider: Very nice. Basically, the topic for me — for people who are not familiar with the brief but are reading this interview now — is to figure out what the legacies of the Sunflower movement might be in Taiwanese politics, particularly in the realm of digital politics.

You’re the perfect person to talk to about that. You’re the cyber minister, and you were involved at that time as well.

Now, of course, we don’t want to rehash all the different things you did at the time, but maybe you can just give me and the people who are reading this a brief impression of what your role was in 2014 and what followed afterwards, how you got involved in the government. What happened in 2014 and afterwards?

 

Audrey Tang: I’m just one small petal in the Sunflower movement. I was there at the night before they broke in, providing connectivity to, for example, Indie DaaDee, who was covering the live-stream of the protest on the street.

I helped put together the HSPDA, because there was no 4G at the time, a connection for that live stream to happen. Broadly speaking, the g0v movement was the banner under which the civic tech people provided communications support to the protesters. Incidentally, it just happens that when they broke into the parliament, another team from g0v was there.

Because I went home and handed off to Venev and Bropheus, and they capture the entire process of breaking in. That proved to be very valuable, because it was posted to YouTube, which was just opening live-stream service at the time, people can see with their own eyes that it was nonviolent.

When the mainstream media, on the next day, tried to portray this as mobsters, violent gangs, things like that, we do have first-time coverage and experience of showing that it’s actually not the case. Nobody really expected the break-in to happen.

Then after they set up the live-streaming from within the Legislative Yuan, we also very quickly found that they don’t have sufficient bandwidth from within the legislation. We really need to get sufficient bandwidth into the occupied Parliament.

I personally brought Ethernet cables. There’s many people from the open-source movement logistics team, the so-called CPR — Cable, Power, and Radio team — under the banner of g0v to support the people who are occupying the parliament to make sure that everything that happens inside is live-streamed.

After setting up the live-streaming, we quickly found that nobody had the time to view the live-stream. We also used Hackpad to organize court reporters, stenographers, typists, to type down everything that really happened in the Occupied Parliament.

Because people on the street really needed a real-time view, so we also set up projectors on the street to display first-hand both the typed stenographic report as well as the live-stream from Occupy the Parliament.

People can see through the walls, so to speak, by just walking through the side of the occupied street. You can very easily see how the Occupy is happening and thereby making truths spread faster than disinformation.

Because there’s around twenty different NGOs supporting the Occupy’s agenda, each of them had booths to deliberate one particular aspect of the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement (CSSTA). Our service at the time ensured that live-streaming and stenographic support extend to the site of the parliament, where all the different NGOs delivered on all the different aspects, as well as providing factual data.

For example, there was a civic tech project that just allows you to type in the company ID or the trade that you’re doing and shows exactly how you will be affected by CSSTA in a very neutral and factual manner.

Those were the support that we’d extend, regardless, actually, of the NGO or factions or even a counter-protest protests, the so-called White Justice. We also supported them with live coverage, with instructions on setting up live-streams, as well as making sure that there was a fair coverage for all the different sides.

The g0v movement was classified as the three neutrals in the Occupy. There were pro bono lawyers who provide legal support; there were pro bono doctors and nurses providing healthcare support. Then the g0v communication team providing the right to communication, whether you’re in an enclosed area in the parliament, or whether you’re part of the street.

 

Florian Schneider: Since we’re on the topic of g0v, can you tell me a little bit more about that initiative, the network?

 

Audrey Tang: Usually, we say gov-zero, but it’s spelled g0v, however g-zero-v is very hard to pronounce.

g0v is a movement, just like the open source movement. It is not actually bound in Taiwan, because it’s a simple idea.

It’s that all the government websites and services around the world is something.gov.something. For example, in Taiwan, all the government websites, something.gov.tw. The civic hackers back in late 2012 registered a domain name, g0v.tw.

Therefore, all the government services that people don’t like, they don’t have to protest in the street. They can just deliver an alternative by having the same website, but changing the O to a 0. Just by changing one letter in the URL, you get into the shadow government.

Of course, you see g0v.it, or Canada, or whatever. It’s a simple idea. It’s not patented or anything. It’s just a domain hack, if you will. Initially, g0v back in late 2012 focused on information transparency and accessibility.

The inaugural project was a visualization of the national budget, enabling people to have a real-time conversation around individual budget items and in a way that is very quickly turning each item in a 500-page PDF file into a social object around which people can have a real-time conversation.

I wasn’t part of g0v back then. I joined in early 2013, doing pretty much the same thing, but on dictionaries of Taiwanese Mandarin, Taiwanese Hoklo, Taiwanese Hakka. There’s indigenous languages, English, French, and Deutsche, and built this multilingual dictionary experience that we call MoeDict, or Ministry of Education Dictionary.

Again, it’s a domain hack at the beginning, because the domain name edu.tw applies to educational institutions. Initially, the project’s called 3du, again, just changing the E to a 3. Then it’s more known as MoeDict. That’s a project I personally founded.

Basically, a lot of ideas in g0v, because they are always open source, they are always demoed in a bimonthly hackathon, which has been going on for many years now, almost seven years now. Each hackathon usually demonstrates some working prototype.

Sometimes, the people who initiate this idea no longer have time to carry it over. Some other social entrepreneurs or other innovations and so on just look at this idea and then carry it over in the next hackathon and so on.

It’s a way to basically get the spirit of a hands-on experience, which is what makers and free software enthusiasts is always about, and infuse it into the civil society, so that people who complain can just look at the slogan, “Ask not why nobody is doing this; you are that nobody.” [laughs]

Making sure that this hands-on experience is combined with civic media, who often points out problems but without obvious solutions. This alliance is very important. Also, it let individually-siloed social activists, organizations in the social sector get access to open-source spirits and Creative Commons.

So that even though they may not agree on each other’s ideologies, they can nevertheless share tools and things like that. For us, the free software people, of course, it teaches us about not just sharing in the commons for our practitioners in information technology, but also to care more about sustainability, about the environment, about social justice.

All the three groups have something to teach each about it. That has been always the core spirit of g0v, is just to be maximally inclusive.

 

Florian Schneider: You’ve also mentioned earlier that g0v’s involvement during the Sunflower movement was to be neutral, to open up and report and help people understand. I know that after the movement, first, you helped the then-KMT government with its vTaiwan platform. You were involved as a consultant, I believe, right?

 

Audrey Tang: Yeah, as a project adviser. At that time, the person in charge of that is Jaclyn Tsai, minister without portfolio. She is not exactly KMT.

 

Florian Schneider: That’s true. She’s your predecessor, in a way, right?

 

Audrey Tang: That’s right, I was her understudy. I think that’s very peculiar about the Taiwanese cabinet, is that we are two times removed from party politics. The draft bills that we prepare are operated in a non-partisan environment, and there are more independent cabinet members than members of any party in the cabinet.

The people’s election is for the President, the President appoints a Premier, and the Premier then appoints the cabinet. Basically, that makes the cabinet members, especially in the administration itself, the nine so-called “horizontal ministers” — also known as minister without portfolio — are remarkably free of party politics, because we don’t even have to answer parliamentary inquiries.

We go to the legislation as assistance to the Premiere, as moral support, but we don’t have to answer questions.

 

Florian Schneider: I can see the advantage of that, for both Jaclyn and yourself, would you say there’s also disadvantages of being that removed, or especially not having the portfolio, not having resources or power like another minister who is in charge of an entire ministry? Would you say that affects you?

 

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say so, because my office is literally one person from each ministry. Technically, I can have 32 colleagues in my immediate staff. At the time, it’s 22, which means some ministry didn’t send people over, like the Ministry of Defense and the Council for PRC Affairs. Maybe they are still getting used to radical transparency…

In any case, most ministries facing the people are actually very eager. We do have a lot of people queued up to join my office. For example, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there’s easily a dozen people wanting to join.

We decided early on that each ministry can only send one person, because the idea here is about creating new values and innovations that reconciles seemingly opposite values across ministries. If a ministry sends a lot of people, then it tends to be lopsided.

Because of this, I actually do have access to plenty of staff, because each delegate brings with them the resource that the ministry has to offer. I don’t think I’m constrained by people. We actually have, I don’t know, 20-something interns every year as well.

Because everybody can work under my working conditions, which is location independence, we also get to have interns all over the world. Indeed, I have also joined the international NPOs [Non-Profit Organisations]. That is actually an innovation that was just recently interpreted last October by our Examination Yuan.

That even as a public servant and minister, I can also join international NPOs as a director of the board, as long as it’s not run by foreign government, because then that creates loyalty problem. Then it lets me, for example, just by the virtue of being a director of the board for the RadicalxChange Foundation, which includes Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum, Danielle Allen, Glen Weyl, and friends, it immediately gave us access to the blockchain community, to the distributed ledger community. They are very eager to help us prototype new governance mechanisms before we translate that into government policy.

 

Florian Schneider: Just to get back to issues of bringing together these many different ideologies and different positions in society, you’ve made it clear on numerous occasions that you’re basically willing to bring everyone on board and make people talk to each other.

 

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

 

Florian Schneider: Is there a line you would draw, where you say, “Here’s a position, here’s a value set. I cannot deal with that. We’re not including it. It’s toxic. It’s hatred.” Something where you draw the line, where you say, “This is not a legitimate part of the conversation”?

 

Audrey Tang: Sure. The core spirit of nonviolent communication is that we don’t accept behaviors that would preclude, exclude, or foreclose other people from participating. Trolling is not welcome. If you, for example, in one of our platforms, write 500 words, 400 of which is trolling, but 100 words is actually genuine contribution, that sometimes happens.

Early on in the vTaiwan project, what we have decided to do is just to moderate away those 400 words and keeping those 100 words. They are version-controlled. It’s like Wikipedia. You can still see all the trolls, if you have too much time.

By default, it doesn’t consume people’s time. Then we just make the constructive part, or the part that share their authentic experiences, part of the conversation. In many of our platforms, there’s no reply button.

Without a reply button, it is actually very difficult for trolls to have control. You can just upvote or downvote other people’s opinion and so on. In that, we learn a lot from international friends, like the Better Reykjavik from Iceland has a very similar design.

For each e-petition project, you can have pro and contra opinions, but you cannot reply to each other. You can only upvote and downvote.

 

Florian Schneider: I’ll actually come back to exactly this in a moment, because I want to talk with you later on about design and design choices.

 

Audrey Tang: Yeah, mechanism design.

 

Florian Schneider: Right. But before we do that, I remember a quote from you which was about transparency. You call your position “radical transparency.”

 

Audrey Tang: Yes, that means transparency at the root.

 

Florian Schneider: At the root, right? You’ve also made it clear that — this is the quote — “Transparency is good, to some degree,” which is also why this interview, we’re going to each go over it and make sure that it represents what we wanted to say, if I understand correctly.

 

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Sometimes, there’s typos, there’s in-jokes, or there are contextual information, like you or I will say we want the readers to read before making sense of your sentence. All this, it beats live-streaming.

Live streaming, there is a lot of extra non-verbal information that may be good for authenticity but, actually, makes it very easy for people to just take a small segments of five seconds and then amplify that.

 

Florian Schneider: De-contextualize it.

 

Audrey Tang: Exactly, or just re-framing. With a full transcript that we have both gone over, it’s always contextualizing and very difficult to take it out of context.

 

Florian Schneider: Just to play devil’s advocate, if you are then editing information like this, where is the line between complete transparency and censorship? Where would you say one moves into the other?

 

Audrey Tang: What we have done is a protocol, a radical transparency protocol, at visit.pdis.tw that especially highlights the cause of redacting. Usually, it’s about confidentiality. If you mentioned a case of someone who’s not on this table and mentioned their private matters.

That’s something that we usually have to just edit away, because that person has not given consent of being revealed in this way. That’s, I think, the number one reason why we do redact things.

All this conversation is usually at the drafting stage. None of our conversation will immediately become policy. The Freedom of Information Act in Taiwan and elsewhere usually says that these are not to be made public, unless for a clear public benefit. My working condition is that everything that I chair is of public benefit to know.

This flip of the default is what I mean by radical transparency, but we do take a lot of care to not compromise other, unrelated people’s privacy and confidentiality.

 

Florian Schneider: Most of what you’ve already described, plus just your position in its own right, I would think, is a legacy already of the Sunflower movement.

 

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely.

 

Florian Schneider: Are there other practices, mindsets, habits, institutions that you would point at and say, “Look, these are things that have come out of the 2014 events”?

 

Audrey Tang: “Sunflower technology,” right?

(laughter)

I think the insistence of making a maximally inclusive space, I think that is very important. In Occupy, elsewhere as well as in Taiwan, the decision-making is always about having an open-space technology point of view, like whomever showing up is the right people.

People who show up should be given the autonomy of expressing their opinions, arrive at a collective decision, and so on. All this is very different from a traditional representative politics, where people of an association, a trade, or whatever are assumed to be homogeneous. They just send one representative to speak on behalf of their interest.

Occupy is all about everybody who show up, just speak for themselves. We make sure that, using information technology, we re-present their positions, rather than we as communicators represent their positions.

This shift from representativeness to re-presentation of people’s genuine, authentic opinion, I think that is very important, and that directly led to the e-participation process, including petition and participatory budgeting.

That, I think, would be a legacy of the Sunflower movement, because immediately after the Occupy, there was a national forum. That’s one of the consensus points of the Sunflower Occupy. On that forum, a lot of Occupiers and Occupy sympathizers just outlined the need of a, for example, a regulatory pre-announcement conversation space that is public.

That is very important, because previously, at the time of the Occupy, all the regulations — which is not law — they were only pre-announced for 7 days or 14 days. There’s no way for public debate. You would just call the ministry by phone.

It really doesn’t work, because it only allows one round of clarification, and there’s no accountability at all. The ministry at hand doesn’t have to respond to people’s comments, because those are private. Each person who calls them didn’t know that there’s 50 people already making the same point already.

It also creates unnecessary burden on public service. Around 2016 — just about the time that I joined — Secretary-General Chen Mei-ling worked with all the different ministries to make sure that all the pre-announcement of regulations is 60 days.

Then after I joined, I made sure that the 60th conversation always takes place on a public commentary board. That means that people who already see an idea that they agree on, just upvote it. You don’t have to write the same thing twice.

Also, there’s no exception. It creates a new norm that new regulations are subject to public debate, instead of people discovering it after the fact. It did, of course, create social controversies, but I think the controversies are created before the regulation takes effect, and thereby still has room to resolve.

We do see agencies and ministries just delaying the regulation for a while after they receive things from different angle. They make some changes, and they do another announcement of the same regulation.

These are norms that where, previously, it just wasn’t there back in 2014. Sunflower started exactly because the administration at the time considered the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement a regulation-level policy, instead of a law-level policy, so that they can just pass it without substantial deliberation.

Now, this new norm would have prevented the Sunflower from happening in the first place, because at least they have to have 60 days of public commentary and debate.

 

Florian Schneider: I have the impression that the subsequent KMT administration learned some of these lessons from the Sunflower movement and just… you already have the vTaiwan initiative.

 

Audrey Tang: I think the reverse mentorship was their response. All the member of the cabinet is supposed to recruit one of the Occupiers to work alongside them to learn this art of public engagement.

 

Florian Schneider: Similarly, then, the DPP, also integrated many of these ideas, as you just described, directly into its governance and government processes.

 

Audrey Tang: Many of these are actually campaign promises of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen.

 

Florian Schneider: What would you say are the lessons that social movements and social activists have learned? So far, we’ve talked about the government side, about administration. What has changed — has anything changed — on the side of organizing activists against power, for example, or to promote particular kinds of issues?

 

Audrey Tang: I have a colleague, En-en Hsu, who used network theory and quantitative analysis to basically establish the co-occurence of NGOs across the years. One interesting connection that I may make is just to introduce you to her work.

She was actually one of the main facilitators in the occupied parliament. I was on the periphery, making sure the communication works. She was actually there and making sure that the people who occupied the parliament can get into a rough consensus in a facilitated way.

I think she will be very interesting for you to interview or at least get access to her master thesis, which is about quantifying the answer to your question.

In very broad brushes, I would say that, because the NPOs in Taiwan always had more access to legitimacy than the administration, and it’s an historical fact…

The social sector began growing around the time of the lifting of the martial law, which is in the ’80s, but the presidential election is late ’90s. It gave them a decade or so of head start to accumulate legitimacy.

Then it creates a generational gap, because while the most respected charities, like Tzu Chi and so on, they have very devout followers, and indeed, have a lot of financial sustainability. However, their engagement with young people was pretty lacking in 2014.

That applies to pretty much all the NGOs who co-orchestrated the occupy. It’s that their main supporters are 40 years old or older. The young people, who are 20-years-old, do not, at that time, consider it hip to talk about human right, to talk about LGBT politic, to talk about constitutional reform, to talk about any of these things that those NGOs care about.

The Sunflower made public discourse cool again. It became mainstream for the young people who are around 20-years-old to just participate in public discourse. Then the NGOs shifted their strategy to allow more meaningful participation by the young people, as well as changing their discourse as to attracts more young people.

Indeed, the young people have led their own social movement, because the next major movement after the Sunflower is the senior high-schoolers who campaigned against the changing of the curriculum. That movement is almost all led by people who are under 18 years old.

A lot more focus is placed on people who are around 15 to 17. That’s never happened before. It’s very exciting for the NGOs to have fresh minds joining their movement. Even in our e-petition platform, we tend to see that the two most active segments, like one-quarter of population’s on our e-petition platform.

The most active people are around 15-years-old and 65-years-old. The 65 years old are retired. They were in the social sector. They have time to care about public benefit and their descendants, of course. They were the key generation when the martial law lifted. They are the backbone of the social sector organizations.

The people who are 15-year-old, it is the first time that, even in their civics class, they just practice direct democracy. They don’t have voting rights yet, you see (laughs). They practice direct democracy by, for example, petitioning for a gradual banning of plastic straws.

That really had a lot of movement. They don’t even have to go to the street on Fridays. They can just communicate through the e-petition platform. Indeed, starting this July, we are implementing the idea proposed, indeed, by a 15-year-old.

I think this is a really good boon to our democracy, both in the government side, and especially from the social sector side.

 

Florian Schneider: What you described so far are mostly progressive movements, activists, and so on. What do you make of, shall we call them, reactionary (laughs) social movements, like the kind of people who are anti-LGBT, or I don’t know where we place the pro-nuclear power lobby, for example, which are in opposition to the Tsai government, the Tsai administration.

Do you think they are also using similar habits and techniques?

 

Audrey Tang: Of course, of course. The pro-nuclear folks is also very much young people-driven. Even during the Sunflower, there was the so-called “white justice.” The white justice, again, is led by young people, even younger than Occupiers, actually.

I think it’s just people learning the toolsets of a new engagement strategy of inclusive participation, rather than one-way preaching. It’s spread to all the different parts in Taiwan. I think it’s generally a good thing, because if they don’t make their ideas public, there’s no way to have a public debate.

I think that’s also why I fully support the change recently to go to a more Swiss model of referendum by not tying the referendum to elections. In election, you tend to have binary mindset for people. For a referendum, you really want people of all the different sides to have a real deliberation.

Just by tying the referendum day to election day, it ensure that whatever deliberation you do is facing a headwind of polarity and binary thinking. I think, just by getting them into alternate years, we have the referendums having more than one year of more rational, or at least deliberative, conversation.

That, again, I think it’s directly prompted by the techniques that we have seen on the movement that you just mentioned.

 

Florian Schneider: You mentioned polarization and binary thinking. Taiwanese politics has traditionally been fairly binary and polarized.

 

Audrey Tang: Polarizing.

 

Florian Schneider: Green and blue and all that. Independence, non-independence — all these big issues. Would you say that in the last 5 years or 10 years or so, that you’ve seen an increase of polarization, or do you think that there’s more deference?

 

Audrey Tang: Well, part of the legacy of Sunflower is that a lot of techniques did get transferred to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. The Umbrella, while not entirely leaderless, was actually the first time that Hong Kong shifted to a semi-leaderless movement.

This is very important in Hong Kong in that they just practiced and perfected this leaderlessness. That informed, of course, the 2019 extradition protests, which is entirely leaderless and coordinated on the Internet.

I wouldn’t say it’s purely a Sunflower influence, even though there are Hong Kong newspapers that says I orchestrated the entire Hong Kong protest. I must say it’s utterly false.

(laughter)

We do make all our toolkits and our thinking publicly available online, so of course, there were surely cross-pollinations of techniques.

What this year’s protests created is a, to reuse the word, unified front, against the so-called “one country, two systems.” Hong Kong people made it very clear that one country, two systems is just collapsing into “one country, one system,” and they are resisting that.

By now, all the KMT presidential candidates, as well as DPP, as well as Mayor Ko, as well as previous Premier Simon Chang, all the presidential hopefuls are now strongly against one country, two systems. The old binary is no longer there. Everybody is against “one country, two systems.”

 

Florian Schneider: Are you worried about maybe other areas where there might be bubbles of polarization that could be exploited or manipulated through the way that social media works, through power laws, or through people who intentionally influence public debate. Is there such a vulnerability?

 

Audrey Tang: I think mostly it’s about 65-year-olds and 15-year-olds. Those two age groups are both very active on social media, have a lot of time, care about public matters. The more intergenerational solidarity we can build, the less risk of polarization.

The more we see, for example, 15-year-olds refusing to talk to their grandparents because of their different stands on LGBT issues or whatever, the more chance for polarization. That’s what we are working on very intentionally.

For example, this place, the Startup Hub, used to be called Youth Entrepreneurship Hub. That is an age-discriminative word. We just took it away. The best startups are the ones that starts by a young generation, an old generation, and the stakeholders group. These are the right formulation of startups.

As you can see in that event just across the aisle, we see leadership from the elder generation, but we also see a very young MP joining the conversation. That symbolizes our conscious attempt at making sure that inter-generational solidarity is a norm instead of an exception.

 

Florian Schneider: Do you see areas where the technology you’re trying to deploy precisely for that might ironically get in the way because of digital divides, of different levels of skill and education.

My question is, are there people who are switched off from these processes because of their backgrounds, or because of the lack of time that they might have, and other issues? How do you do something about that?

 

Audrey Tang: We always bring tech to where people are. We don’t ask people to come to tech. If you have an e-petition about Hengchun’s medicare, we just travel everybody to Hengchun to have a town hall deliberation. The same for fishing rights in harbors for amateur fishers. Again, we just go to an actual harbor to have a conversation.

Even for marine national parks like the Pescadores, the South Penghu Marine National Park, we actually travel to the Pescadores, to Penghu, to have that conversation.

Usually, I tour around Taiwan and I explicitly say that the farther you are from a high-speed railway station, the more likely I will visit you. I bring 360 live-streams, Zoom and other technologies, to that particular county, and then have a talk with the local elders in closed meetings if it’s indigenous, and then co-ops, social entrepreneurs and so on.

When I talk with them, I’m backed by video conferencing from Taipei, Taoyuan, Taichung, Kaohsiung, Taitung, and Hualien. It makes sure that a local social issue is broadcasted to all the municipalities that join this network, as well as if there are horizontal synergies, it’s resolved on the spot, as well as all the central government ministries, they send delegates here.

They can no longer pretend that, “Oh, I’m not blocking this new idea. I have to talk with the minister of health and welfare.” MOHW is sitting right next to them, so they really have to resolve this on the spot.

The radical transparency ensures an accountability scheme that everything everybody says is kept for ever until it’s resolved. In this process, we make sure that people who have a local issue, they don’t have to connect to the Internet. They don’t have to go to Taipei.

Even though we have broadband as a human right, they don’t have to exercise their broadband connection. They can just be there and I’ll go to them, and then we have a regional regulation co-creation conversation. Then everything is followed up.

This is a really good use of broadband as a human right, because no matter where I am in Taiwan, I’m guaranteed to have 10 megabits or more connection to the backbone of the conference.

 

Florian Schneider: In that context, as you’re traveling around, you’re seeing a lot of local places and local folk. What do you make of local populist movement? I’m thinking of Han Kuo-yu, of course, but there’s other areas where populists have been able to rile up often older folks, it seems.

How do you interpret these processes, and what do you feel you can do to contribute to a conversation that brings them onboard into dialog?

 

Audrey Tang: I’m all for populism if it’s not tribalism. There are populisms that speak to all people, and there are populisms that exclude certain people from the population. The latter is very dangerous, and I don’t have to elaborate at all.

(laughter)

The first, appealing to the masses, appealing to people’s voice and making sure that people can feel that they have a meaningful participation in policy making, that’s what we’re working toward. You can, in a sense, say that the Sunflower Movement is a prototype in a populist re-framing of the conversation around the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement, which is very technical.

The Occupy is all about everyone joining and getting informed and getting influenced into the ultimate rough consensus of the Occupy. In that sense, I’m all for populism if it doesn’t exclude anyone.

What we have done so far is just by traveling across Taiwan and letting people meet, sometimes virtually, to make people think that the central government is not there to issue top-down orders, which are often out of context and out of touch.

Rather the policy making, including the budgeting and the policy, is made by what we call regional revitalization plan, which always starts in the precinct level or county level, and unites the scenario workshops in a deliberative way — again, the Sunflower legacy — across all the different sectors.

Once they have a common vision of the local people’s needs, then the National Council just talks to all the different ministries. Up to 10 percent of all the relevant projects of budget is now being distributed in such a participatory way.

It’s one step further than Porto Alegre, which pioneered participatory budgeting using a fixed percentage of the discretionary budget. This time, it’s not just about budget, but about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), about investment, about adjusting of regulations, about sandboxes, about all these things, but it’s always in response to a local need.

This kind of local-driven policy making is our answer to populism. The people are great, but we want your innovation to be seen widely by everybody and include all the people who normally don’t have voting rights into this conversation, such as new immigrants and others, like younger people.

 

Florian Schneider: I can see certain components of what’s classically populist actually working really well for bottom-up democratic movements. It is populist, particularly this egalitarian idea, like ideas of being skeptical of power and of authority.

There’s also, you already mentioned, exclusionary, tribal sentiments that might work against that. I can see another tension, which is, for lack of a better word, anti-intellectualism — sort of a sense that the world is too complex, I’m not going to understand it, and I don’t trust people who have knowledge since I don’t have it. It’s very easy to get into a bubble on that side as well.

How do you reach groups that feel this way about ideas?

 

Audrey Tang: I think we need to distinguish anti-elitism, which is what you refer to, to anti-central planning, anti-authoritarianism, essentially. They often have very similar rhetoric, so it’s not always easy to tell them apart.

As a conservative anarchist, I am…

 

Florian Schneider: What does that mean? What’s a conservative anarchist?

 

Audrey Tang: (laughs) To be a conservative is to respect the traditions — whether they are indigenous traditions, whether they are Hakka or Hoklo, or whether they’re old or new immigrant traditions — it’s very important when developing policies to not sacrifice the respect for those traditions in the service of mere efficiency or for some other value. That’s what conservative means.

Anarchism means that I don’t give or take orders, and given a choice, I always prefer norms over laws. Norm making preferably is social innovation, meaning everybody can participate to everybody’s benefit, rather than more classical civic participation, which usually means the government sets the agenda but people have consultative power.

I prefer to have the social sector and the private sector set the agenda, and the government to respond to that agenda. Anarchist in this sense means relinquishing the agenda setting power, and for the people to hold the agenda setting power.

These two combined basically says that in many other policy areas where it requires technical knowledge and things like that, it is the duty of the people who hold this knowledge to translate them into a way that is very easily acceptable for the masses.

If the masses don’t like this kind of explanation, they can always just — based on their open government data, based on the open government policies, open budget, and so on — create their own counter narratives, by their own counter expertise, essentially doing citizen science and collecting their own data — air pollution or water pollution — create their own norms in counter of the regulations.

My mandate is just convincing the establishment to give room to such social innovations and give them, for example, a year to break the regulation and prove that the civic side is better. Then we just absorb them into the national regulation. That’s the sandbox project and many other projects as well.

All my work is focused towards making sure that establishment is in the service of the people. The anti-authoritarianism is actually a boon to this project. Then the anti-elitism wouldn’t have room to grow, because essentially, there would be no elites, but just stakeholders of different positions and knowledge.

 

Florian Schneider: Is being part of a society of stakeholders for a citizen not also a whole lot more work? Do you see fatigue in people who cannot handle the information overload or opt out, simply because they feel “it’s too much for me, it’s overwhelming”?

 

Audrey Tang: I think the key is to make sure the actionable intervention takes less than one minute. That’s our main design criteria. Whether to upload or download a Polis statement, whether to sign an e-petition, whether to view informative infographics that counter, say, popular disinformation — it’s all less than 60 seconds.

More than that, of course there’s fatigue, but usually, people do have one-minute of kindness, no matter what you want them to participate in. Just lowering the threshold, making it very actionable is very important. The second thing is to make it connected.

For example, of course, you know the ice bucket challenge. Even though it takes less than one minute to splash cold water on your body, it’s meaningless if it’s not social. It doesn’t make any sense if it’s not social. (laughs) It’s also very important to have memes that people can just remix among themselves.

A good example is the slogan #TaiwanCanHelp. It can be remixed any which way, and indeed, a lot of social sector people just remixed this for their purpose. Again, this kind of memetic engineering, it’s very important.

Third, I think it needs to be open, meaning extensible. We usually relinquish the copyright. Like this transcript, it’s going to be in the public domain. Anyone can extend and use it to draw a comic, to make manga, and to do video, whatever, without even asking our permission.

This kind of permission-less innovation is ultimately the key. Because being actionable, connected, only ensures that it takes people’s attention for a news cycle, like a day or two. But if it’s extensible, then people feel that it’s there a while, and then people can expand it in a way that’s truly empowering.

 

Florian Schneider: Since we’re on the topic of design choices, what would you say is your design philosophy for social software, for digital politics?

 

Audrey Tang: My design ideas for social interaction design or SxD is heavily informed by my work with the Silicon Valley companies, for example Socialtext, who just adopted all the trending Wikis, micro-blogging, collaborative spreadsheet, you name it, into Fortune 500 and largest NGOs.

The design philosophy we adopted in Socialtext is called “in the flow of work”. That symbolizes two important things. First, we don’t design to replace an existing habit or existing workflow. We design so that people can feel that they’re just doing their normal work, while making sure that their contribution is more visible, their idea is more amplified. They don’t have to do extra work as public service.

For example, the public commentary and up-voting in Join.gov.tw means that they can dedicate their time, not on answering 40 identical statements. It saves them time. In the flow of work means reduce the chores in the work. That’s the first thing.

The second thing in the flow of work means that it also makes sure that the risk is absorbed by the mechanism. As public service, most of the time, if things go wrong, the ministry can always blame public service for not implementing this correctly.

If we figure out a good mechanism and have people’s innovation described as mechanism, then nobody is to blame when things go wrong, because when things go wrong, it’s public. Everybody learns from it. We write the postmortem, and because it’s mechanism, nobody is at fault. We just change the mechanism a little bit, so it reduces people’s risk.

The third thing — that is not just “in the flow of work” — is “working out loud”. Radical transparency means credit goes where credit’s due. Whenever I tour around Taiwan and the people from Taipei Social Innovation Lab, the central government public servants, figure out a way to deliver a social innovation in a legal way… for example, remote e-service of psychiatric help, for example, e-consultation, or allowing social sector organizations to found and own controlling stock of for-profit companies, there are many cases… all the credit goes to the original public servant who proposed that, because their name is on the transcript.

Working out loud assigns credit where credit is due, instead of having the minister soak up all the credit. By simplifying their work, reducing the chores, by absorbing the risk by mechanism design, and by giving credit where credit is due, that’s the three design criteria for public service intervention.

You cannot really trade one for the other two. You can’t sacrifice one for the other two. All of them must be pareto improvements, meaning that you can increase a little bit on one of the three without sacrificing the other two, and then people get more accepting and they defend it as the norm, instead of something that you impose on them.

 

Florian Schneider: Is there a tension between that vision, particularly one that’s open access, free software, and so on, and the market dynamics that you’re also utilizing to make that vision happen? Traditionally, there’s different streams of anarchism, off course. I’m thinking of Noam Chomsky, or I don’t know if you know if David Graeber from the London School of Economics.

 

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

 

Florian Schneider: The kind of anarchists who are both skeptical of the state and its power, but they’re also skeptical of capitalism and the market, and yet your approach actually brings in market activism at the same time. How do you make that work?

 

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that capital and market is the same thing. They are very different things. Market just means that you can do relations building on transactions with people who you didn’t already know. It’s a very wide definition. Capital means some things that you can strictly accumulate.

Of course, it’s been extended in every which way. You see relation capital, but that’s not capitalism. Nobody is a “relational capitalist.” It doesn’t really make sense. (laughs) It is a perversion of today where we talk about for-profit entities like companies as if they are people, like we are incentivizing companies, or we’re encouraging companies, which are all verbs related to people.

On the other hand, some people say “human resource,” which is treating actual people as materials. Of course, I’m against that confusion of categories, but I’m all for markets. I think markets are the best thing. You can easily see Creative Commons and open-source and free software as a market-building mechanism by making that people who design anything, they can share the maintenance cost with other people who require the same materials or same innovations.

It is market design. It’s just not for profit. It’s with profit. It’s not optimizing for capital gain. It’s optimizing for reduction of maintenance cost. All these different schools of thought must make use of markets. That is how we become open.

We tend to assign equal, if not more, importance of social benefit, of environmental benefit into the market design so that it’s not just about short-term GDP.

If you think about capitalism but in a seven-generation view, like if you want to build the most capital gain but seven generations down the line, like the Native Americans do, then you actually tend to think like people who are working on social justice or the environment.

It’s not the market is a problem. It’s the tendency to just view the return from the next quarter. The shortsightedness, that’s the problem.

If you extend the timeline long enough and design the market so that the social environment and the economic part agree on such a long-term view essentially for the benefit of people who have not been born yet, then we tend to agree on the common values instead of having this pseudo-opposition between the different views.

 

Florian Schneider: Another question about design. We have all these large platforms that are not open platforms like the ones that you’re working on: all the social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, which make certain design choices, but these design choices are not democratically arrived at. They have certain consequences.

How do you feel about the way that interactions on Facebook work and shape politics in Taiwan or how interactions within LINE communities work and shape politics in Taiwan? How can we — I wouldn’t say oppose — but at least counteract some of the negative outcomes of design choices that are not in service of your values or ideas?

 

Audrey Tang: All my computers and browsers have the Facebook Feed Eradiactor. I don’t even participate in this AI-generated dopamine addiction cycle…

 

Florian Schneider: (laughs)

 

Audrey Tang: It’s just like liquor. A little bit may improve your thought process, but once it becomes addictive, then it’s purely negative externality.

In that sense, Facebook is a lot like a liquor company. What I mean is that we should hold the same view as we have on liquor and other addiction manufacturers. In small doses, they have a public utility. A large dose means that people generally find that their lives become worse.

First, I think there’s the importance of digital literacy to teach our children that there are alternatives, you can either just install Facebook Feed Eradicator, or you can go on PTT, which is open source and maintained by the academic community and the National Taiwan University, that doesn’t even have a profit motive, and so will never really make the same decisions as a purely for-profit company.

We, of course, also have plans, working with LINE, for example, to basically align their corporate social responsibility and their sustainability strategy with mitigating the negative part of their platform.

For example, on disinformation, they voluntarily sign on a norm that Google and Facebook also sign on, that basically, they would start to work by featuring clarifications more prominently, and have a single affordance for people to forward anything that they see that’s information operation into the fact checkers community, and so on.

All this is not by law. All this is just by convincing them and putting them into contact with civil society that would just steer them toward a co-governance mechanism that is patently not run by the government.

In Taiwan, we always preferred this kind of norm-shaping way to make them more socially responsible. Then other governments or other jurisdictions will see how they have changed their ways, driven by a democratic social sector, and then learn from this conversation.

I think this is very important. Finally, I would also say it’s always our hope of promoting social entrepreneurship, as well as a registry of companies that declare their social purpose on their founding charters, as well as publishing benefit reports, like B corps usually do.

It’s not just companies, but also co-ops, foundations, and associations. We have a single registry at SI — that’s social innovation — si.taiwan.gov.tw that lets people see the 400 or so of social innovative organizations.

You can very easily actually sort them by the topic that they’re working on, by the locality they’re working on, by the social or environmental issues that they are addressing. We let people view, very easily, their benefit reports.

The idea is that we build this ecosystem where, if you include these socially purpose-driven or impact-driven organizations in your supply chain, and you buy five million NT dollars a year, I personally go out and give you award.

We highlight the unlikely partnerships between the companies, the associations, and charities. All this is basically a way to prototype a new relationship across the different sectors, so that the social sector can drive the sustainability strategy of the cooperative, for-profit sector, so everybody becomes more aware of the with-profit, not for-profitness, of their operation.

I think if Facebook eventually gets convinced and become a social enterprise, that would be great.

 

Florian Schneider: And if not?

 

Audrey Tang: At this time, we appreciate their willingness to work with, for example, community colleges — which is a prominent social sector innovation in Taiwan — to distribute media literacy, critical creative thinking, and indeed, to teach people who are long out of the university to reevaluate their relationship with the social media and so on.

We will continue to push them this way until they become a socially purpose-driven company.

 

Florian Schneider: In an environment that is governed by essentially still market dynamics, like you propose, can small, local social enterprises, can they win out against the big conglomerates that are so powerful in the market, especially when it comes to issues like providing convenience, which everyone craves, and once you have the convenience, it’s very difficult to get back out?

 

Audrey Tang: No, I’m very confident, actually. The local ride-sharing service, Gogoro’s Go Share, is a really good example. It’s driven by the need for a better electricity, renewable energy, carbon reduction, and so on.

The innovation that it deliver in the form of an electric vehicle that is shared in Taoyuan City now, I think, is very compelling for people to reduce the overall amount of motorcycles on the road, as well as reducing carbon emission and all that.

We’re actually exporting this, this model. Even for, like, the Taiwan Taxi, who has been diversifying their payment systems, their routing system, and things like that, they are domestic, but they are heavily influenced by the actual drivers.

Their developer groups include all the taxi drivers in Taiwan Taxi that have an IT background. They are like the front line that co-design the experience. Now, the experience is actually better than Uber. I have all the confidence in the innovation in Taiwan’s private and social sectors to out-compete the multinationals.

It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum thing, though. The multinationals can also join social initiatives — as Facebook and LINE did — for the Digital Accountability Plan.

 

Florian Schneider: I know we’re out of time.

 

Audrey Tang: It’s fine.

 

Florian Schneider: One last question, if I may.

 

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

 

Florian Schneider: Just to round it off, I’m wondering, with the elections on the horizon next year, what would you say are some of the biggest challenges for you in facilitating digital politics and creating a participatory environment for democracy in Taiwan?

 

Audrey Tang: I think the elections — I’m very hopeful, because none of the presidential candidates, as I said, is against open government. Everybody has to now say that they want to do more open government. That you can see in the DPP primary and now in the KMT primary.

Nobody runs counter to transparency and participation, which is what I care about. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that the closer the election day is, of course, the more information operation there will be.

Again, just by having people generally aware that there are info ops going on, and also, for the first time, requiring the sponsored advertisements, in form of precision targeting or whatever, to be held to the same standard to political campaign donations — which is, I think, the world’s most open — in Taiwan. You can actually download CSV records of individual donation reports for a campaign. There really is nothing to hide from the people.

 

Florian Schneider: Since this year, it’s new, right?

 

Audrey Tang: This year, it’s new, yeah. Folks from the g0v-cy project campaigned for it for years. Finally, it’s passed.

Right now, you can just go to the Control Yuan building, and they will just give you a CD-ROM of that structured data.

It used to be watermarked A4 printouts, and a g0v project had to ask people to do a kind of Captcha, to re-digitize it. The bad old days are gone, it’s now radically open. In the previous election, because that’s the first time this new radical openness is applied, what we have found is that people then prefer to buy precision-targeting advertisement on social media and traditional media.

That part doesn’t need to be disclosed in the same way as campaign financing. We’re now saying that the new norm is that all the advertisers and all the people who receive advertisement need to fully disclose it to the same degree as the political campaign donation.

If you are not in a jurisdiction with voting rights, if you are not a citizen, basically, you cannot donate to campaign donation, anyway. So you shouldn’t be able to do precision targeting if you are a foreigner. That requires the platforms to review how the precision targeting is written, who are the ultimate people paying for it.

It’s like anti-money laundering. Each part needs to review where their payment came from. If ultimately the payment came from a non-citizen source, then it’s subject to a very large fine. Basically, what we’re trying to do is making sure the media environment during elections is held to the same account of transparency as campaign donations.

 

Florian Schneider: We’ve reached the end of my questions, unless there’s something else you feel I haven’t touched upon, and you really want to get off your chest?

 

Audrey Tang: Right. Taiwan is doing a national action plan on open government, the Taiwan Open Government National Action Plan. The process will start right after the presidential election. For the rest of this year, what we’re doing is consultations for people who have participated in the Open Government Partnership (OGP) before.

That includes domestic stakeholders, and also international ones. If you are an international NAP-participated stakeholder community, and you want the Open Government Partnership process to change for the better… Many people told us they want it to be longer, like three to four years, to match the term of the president, so that each presidency can be held to account and encourage more people to include them into the campaign promise.

The entire accountability mechanism, precisely because we’re not an OGP member country, we can pilot a new NAP process for OGP members. If anyone reading this is interested, just write me an email.

 

Florian Schneider: All right, sounds fantastic. Thank you so much for making time. Let’s conclude here.

 

(title image provided under creative commons license CC BY-SA 2.0)