This interview will be part of a preview of the Montreal Connect event, where you are going to participate. The goal is really to write an article about you, your mission as a minister, a bit to present who you are and what you do.

We’re going to talk a little bit about your talk. Not so much, because we don’t want to burn the subject beforehand, but we’re going to talk a little bit about that too. Maybe I can start the interview by asking you to just state your name and your exact title.

My name is Audrey Tang. I’m currently the Digital Minister of Taiwan in charge of Open Government, Social Innovation, and Youth Engagement.

Thank you very much. Maybe we can start with coming back in your background. What’s your background? I read the articles that you sent me with the links. Can you retell a little bit of your story and how you were involved with the Web and Internet?

My first foray into the Internet was back when I was 12 or so. At that time, the culture of bulletin board system or dial-up BBS is very prevalent everywhere, including in Taiwan, incurring a lot of telephone charge fees. I run quite a few BBS stations and participate in a few and things like that.

Then along comes the Internet, where nobody need to wait for the other person to hang up the phone to dial up to the BBS anymore. We all switched to the great Internet. There, I discovered the community. For example, archive where the academics publish their pre-prints for other people to review.

Around the time that I was 14 years old – that was 1995 – I started participating with nowadays we would call it the open access community. At that time, there’s no such name. After a year or so, I decided to tell my teachers and my principal that I want to drop out of the junior high school because the knowledge is being created on the World Wide Web and all my textbook are out of date.

Surprisingly, they all agreed with it and said, “Fine. We will cover for you.” That built me a lot of optimism in the innovation capacity in the bureaucracy. To me, the public servants are the most creative people. Because of that I started, co-founded quite a few of Web startups, notably Inforian, which got investment by Intel. That was all before year 2000.

After serial entrepreneurship, I finally started working on what we will nowaday call the community around open culture, including but not limited to open source, open government, open data, and so on.

There is a movement in Taiwan called the g0v movement that register the g0v.tw website address and systematically look at all the public service which all ends in gov.tw and fork it by changing exactly the same website with a O changing to a zero.

People, just by typing a single letter, gets into the single digit of zero and the shadow government that allows more forking, that is to say the more understanding of how to take existing public service but do it in a social innovation way through more perspective and a more engaging way.

To me, this has always been my native culture, the Internet governance culture based around rough consensus, on radical transparency, on stakeholder participation without any coercive power. The Internet doesn’t have a army or navy. The reason why all the different jurisdictions join the Internet is not because anyone coerce them to.

Rather it provides benefit for everyone. It’s like a common value despite the various different positions in a standard setting body or in various jurisdictions. That’s my mission, to bring what we have learned from the Internet culture into everyday culture and also into the politics, into the career public service.

How did you become exactly Minister of the Digital? How did it happen?

We literally occupied the parliament. We invited ourselves in. Back in 2014, the Sunflower Movement was a protest on the street about the sudden passing of the idea that the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement doesn’t need congressional approval or overview because…I don’t know.

People at the time, the ruling party, considered Beijing a domestic city of Taiwan. Maybe they call it West Taiwan or something like that. In any case, that means that unlike signing a treaty with, say, New Zealand, there is no similar due process going on for that.

People really wanted a due process and a real deliberation. They not only protested. I supported protest in live streaming. They actually broke into the parliament, taking the place where the MPs are on strike to actually do through citizen participation what they were elected to do, which is to deliberate substantially.

The occupy continued for around three weeks. There’s zero casualties, zero people missing around the parliamentary-occupied area. In fact, it becomes very peaceful, so that more than 20 NGOs, each talking about one aspect of the CSSTA, successfully take a set of 40 months at the end of the occupy.

Which are all agreed, in a binding way, by the head of the parliament. The occupy was not only a demonstration in the protest sense, but rather, a demonstration in the demo sense. Like, this is possible to get listening at scale with half a million people on the street and many more online.

After the occupy come the mayoral election, where all the mayor supporting the occupy get elected, sometimes surprisingly. All those who are opposing open government did not get elected. That’s when the cabinet hired the occupiers and the supporters – such as we, the civic tech people – as reverse mentors to the cabinet.

Can you tell me a little bit about the need in Taiwan for a digital minister? I would say that, maybe in Western countries, it’s like a department into a cultural ministry. Maybe it’s not like a ministry in itself.

What is the need to isolate this notion and make a ministry of it?

First of all, I’m a horizontal minister, meaning that my office is actually one delegate from each ministry. This is important, because digital transformation, as you correctly observed, is not a single vertical issue.

Any issue that we successfully deliberated using AI-powered listening-at-scale devices, such Polis for the UberX deliberation, easily concerns the Ministry of Transportation, Communication, Finance, Economy, and probably missing a few, Consumer Protection, and things like that.

Because of that, even if there is a minister in charge for, say, transportation, that value is actually different from the Minister of Economy’s value. There need to be a mechanism, just like in Internet governance, for the internal stakeholders within the bureaucracy to talk with the people outside of the bureaucracy.

Including Uber drivers, taxi drivers, Uber passengers, other passengers, everybody who feel they have a stake in it. This kind of mechanism-building is my work as a horizontal minister. In Taiwan, there are 32 vertical ministers, each in charge of one particular value.

Above, there is nine horizontal ministers, whose work is to coordinate those values so we can build a shared value out of initially different positions. In other countries without this horizontal minister, usually that is a cross-functional team within a cabinet office.

I think the UK GDS and Policy Lab started that way. Instead of being siloed within a single ministry, all the delegates from each ministry to me actually work not subservient to me. I don’t give them any order or commands.

They are still loyal to their original ministry’s values. It’s just they learn the art of working out loud, along with all the other ministerial delegates.

What’s your mission as a digital minister in correlation with social innovation?

I will first read my job description. Literally, my job description, which talks a little bit about this.

My job description reads, “When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it an Internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let’s make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever we hear the singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.”

Social innovation is not only tech for good, like innovation for social good. It’s also tech with people. It’s not just for people, it’s with people. Meaning that everybody who have a stake can actually appropriate the technology into appropriate technology that fits their local community’s purpose.

Through this idea of open innovation can we truly shape the very linear narrative of Internet of things, of machine learning, and things like that, which is very much centered around this techno-optimism culture, into the idea of Internet of beings.

Allowing people to connect with rivers more, with mountains more, and collaborative learning, where the machine learning only become our assistants and automate away the chores that people feel like a machine when they’re do it, but freeing people to do more creative tasks, instead of asking AI to take the place of judgment and creativity, which will be very disastrous for the social norm.

I think, for me, digital social innovation means a norm-first approach, where the society, through open experimentation, like sandboxes, Presidential Hackathon, and so on, show the various different configurations that the society have in demand of technologists.

Then the technologists can then, through market mechanisms, conform to the societal expectations. Finally, the law or regulation may change, but only after the regulators and lawmakers already have a taste of firsthand experience of how this kind of norm-first technology adoption works.

I think this is a much more inclusive vision toward the digital. It is smart citizens, not smart cities.

There’s a lot of talk in Canada and in Montreal about ethics. For example, digital but AI, or virtual reality. I was wondering if you have an ethical way or ethical rules to develop those type of technologies in Taiwan? Do you implement that in startups or encourage it in any way?

Yes, very much so. The idea of Sustainable Development Goals, or the SDG global goals, is instrumental, because these are literally a million voices collected by the UNDP in 2015 and agreed by everybody on the planet.

Which includes, actually, people who are experts of environment, of society, and of inclusive businesses as the 169 important targets to meet in the – now, what we call – Decade of Action, until 2030.

The important thing is that this normativity is not particular to one single culture or one single jurisdiction. This is something that is as universal as universal can be. The idea of digital, then, is the 17th goal.

I usually use a Venn diagram of the triple bottom line that is business, environment, and society but with the digital, the 17th goal, partnership for the goals, in the middle. Without digital, a contribution to the goals of making reliable data across sectors through distributed ledgers…

Without technologies to build effective partnership – for example, through open innovation – and also without technologies that enable people to fork – that is to say, to take those innovation toward different directions – all the digital black boxes create new ways for people to essentially give up some of their freedoms, as guaranteed by the law, in exchange for just a little bit of convenience.

If we allow that kind of surveillance statism, or surveillance capitalism, to thrive, then the civil society will actually shrink in its space. For us, the most important thing is that a minister’s word, or a CEO’s word, must never be of a higher power than a journalist or the civic tech person, or an investigative scientist.

That importance is seen by, for example, the Civicus Human Right Monitor that, in the entire Asia, Taiwan is the only place where we have completely open civic space, the right to assemble, to have freedom of speech, and things like that.

I think in physical space, we have long fighted for positive freedoms. In cyberspace, if we don’t get the defaults right, we will now actually have to look a lot about negative freedoms in the ASEA Berlin sense.

Like freedom from surveillance, freedom from censorship, freedom from control of links that denies people connectivity to certain other parts of the world, and things like that. I think this core promise of human right is the same, whether it’s cyberspace or the analog space.

In cyberspace, the norm of state surveillance and capitalism surveillance has now been seeping through the society. We need to emphasize even more the negative freedoms.

Maybe you can talk in these lines about the connection between digital and participatory democracy? I think that, in another interview, you mentioned four ways of digital being involved in participatory democracy. Maybe you can come back to that and explain it a little bit.

I think digital democracy is complementing, not replacing, regular town halls. This is very important, because in Taiwan, we have broadband as a human right. Even on the top of the…I am trying to use the indigenous word here, Saviah, which is the Jade Mountain.

This is actually one of the fastest place in Taiwan in terms of 4G. You still have to only spend €15 per month for unlimited connection. The reception is very good there, because fewer people share the spectrum.

Because of that, what we are saying is that, in the 98 percent Internet accessibility rate, it is part of the justification of including people’s digital participation, because we are not excluding anyone.

Even for the other two percent, which are almost always above 3,000 meters high now, we are now using a lot of helicopters and things like that to ensure that they, too, can have free access to reasonable bandwidth, at least 10 Megabits per second.

This idea of digital and complement and amplification allows us to bring the town halls in any vicinity – in rural places, indigenous places, and so on – and bring in all the municipal ministers, section chiefs, and so on to have connected rooms into policymaking.

A lot of problems in administration of silos is not because the people don’t want to listen to another. It’s just that there is no effective way to listen to a lot of people. You can very easily, if you are a minister in the government, talk to millions of people.

You just go to a public broadcast, and millions of people will listen to you. However, to listen to millions of people require that these people have the same broadband as human right as the minister. Also, it requires a culture of listening across different cultures, what we call transculturalism.

This is, I think, the core of liberal democracy, which is allow different perspectives to spring from the local perspective, each one adding to the democracy, without having to conform, like to physically travel to Taipei, to petition or talk only for 15 minutes, and so on.

Which will drastically reduce the effective participation of people in non-metropolitan areas. Regional revitalization, I think, is the response to not-inclusive representative democracy. Digital, to me, at least, at this current era, is really the only way to reduce the expense, so that we can have meaningful, multi-directional listening across different cultures regionally.

Is it linked to vTaiwan, and in what way?

Yes. vTaiwan is an early experiment, started late 2014, to work on policy issues, initially like the rights of teleworkers, or increasing the incentive of people who set up their companies in Cayman Island, and whether they would like to relocate back to Taiwan in their registration.

Later on, of course, we also deliberated UberX, Airbnb, and such. There is one similarity in these. It’s that it’s emerging. The government really knows nothing, or almost nothing, about what the real stakeholder think.

There is no union of teleworkers. There is no industrial association of startups who set up in Cayman Island. The traditional representative way of one person speaking on behalf of stakeholders simply breaks down, because the social norm is still being figured out in this emerging, be it platform economy, or self-driving vehicles, or whatever.

The norms is not done setting, and so traditional representation doesn’t work. vTaiwan, instead of representing anyone, simply re-presents their arguments. In an AI-assisted intelligence forum, people can resonate or not with each other’s statements, but there is no reply button.

There’s no room for trolls to grow. Any agenda that can convince across different groups, what we call inter-group consensus, we hold as ministers ourselves, as accountable to make a face-to-face consultation that is also live streamed, with real-time input from the citizens, to the agenda set by this crowdsourced agenda-setting, and talking about only those in consensus.

For example, for UberX, people talk about insurance, talk about the capability of each driver to switch between different co-ops and different vendors. They talked about the need to have surge pricing, like dynamic pricing of the market mechanism, and so on.

We hold ourselves accountable to talk only at these things, and not any other topics. In this idea, the stakeholders will very willingly appear, because they don’t have to defend their position. This is more like an issue mapping, so that we understand, in a wicked problem, what is the complete picture, and how we may actually deliver innovations that takes care of the shared value of everyone?

This room for collective feelings, reflections, is notably missing in the previous generations of our administration, but allowing this room of reflections between fact-finding and ideation, I think, is crucial to the success of vTaiwan and vTaiwan-inspired models.

Can you maybe present a bit the Social Innovation Lab? What is it, what you do in there?

The Social Innovation Lab, which is in the heart of Taipei City, is my office. We literally tore down the walls, so people can just talk in from the walls. We’re close enough to the Daan Central Park.

There’s only the Jian Guo Flower Market between the Central Park and the Social Innovation Lab. What this means is that, when we try out sandbox ideas – for example, self-driving tricycles that are cute and slow, and so they won’t run over anyone – we have a lot more inclusive participation.

Simply by people visiting the flower market, bringing some orchid flowers, and seeing those self-driving tricycles, and asking, “Minister, we don’t want to ride on these, but can we repurpose them, so that they become shopping carts that follows us around, so we can do hand-free shopping?”

This social norm building, literally with the market, because it’s the flower market, allows for a public demonstration, in the demo sense, of all the emerging technologies, while taking away the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that people would have if you tested in a remote lab.

The idea is that this lab is open space technology itself. Anyone who shows up are the right people to innovate, and anyone can book 40 minutes of my time at any hour in Wednesday. I will just talk with them, provided that, of course, they agree to have a radically transparent transcript.

What is the vision of the 5G in Taiwan? Will you implement it, and how will you use it?

We just finished the first round of spectrum bidding. In Taiwan, because we say in rural places, these are the places that actually need 5G most, if we want to have telediagnosis, if we want to have even surgeons, like da Vinci-wielding surgeons operating on moving ambulances.

There really is no other technology at the moment that can enable this kind of use case scenario. The more rural, the more indigenous the places are, I think the more need there is for this kind of low-latency supply.

That is also because, for example, buses currently being in the sandbox, and will soon roll out in the Xinyi Road in Taipei City – again, close to the Social Innovation Lab – where people after midnight in the metro stops can take a self-driving bus.

These things, while it makes sense to have the sandbox in a large city, actually, has its most application in the most rural places. No bus route can pay for itself, going to those places. Like drone delivery is important there, too, for medical supplies and things like that.

Because of that, we have worked, and already passed, the New Telecommunication Administration Act, which allows different 5G vendors to share the physical, the same base stations. Through the initial sub-6 GHC band, we will make sure that we have sufficient coverage in the low-resource places, before we develop millimeter waves.

We also have, of course, a lot of experimental bands on millimeter wave. For example, within the Taipei fashion music hall, so that people can just use VR and jam together. You can have various different musicians in physically different places to jam together through millimeter wave 5G technology.

That’s an obvious use. In Shaolin, we are also working with self-driving vehicles that are slightly faster than those shared buses, and see whether they can learn the different social norms. So that people can understand that, when those self-driving trucks happens on the road, what is to expect on these things?

These are where we’re trying out in the vertical testing for millimeter wave. I think sub-6 will be first, in terms of broadband as a human right.

Thank you. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the theme of your talk at Montreal Connect, without saying what you’re going to say? Maybe talk about just the general idea of your lecture.

My usual way of delivering a talk is crowdsourced. At the very beginning, I show a QR code. Everybody can scan the QR code, and they can ask me questions, which will immediately be projected on the screen.

The idea is that people can like each other’s question. Because, again, there is no reply button, there is no room for troll to grow. Nobody will like the troll’s comment. I don’t even see the trolling comments. I only see the highly voted comments, which flow to the top.

By focusing on one top-voted comment after another, I hope to demonstrate this idea of crowd law, or a crowdsourced rule-making. Although this is technically not, I am not speaking anything like signing a bilateral MOU with the Canadian government or anything like that, this is actually how we did conversations, for example, with the AIT, the de facto US embassy.

The diplomatic agenda of this year around making Taiwan more unique in the world, around economic cooperation, security cooperation, people-to-people ties, are all crowdsourced through the Polis platform, with participation from both American, Taiwanese, and anyone on Earth who cares about Taiwan-US relationship to collectively set the top 10 agenda on each of those four topics.

We actually get the ambassadors, the ministers, and so on to sit down and talk on those four different subject areas, and only on those 10 rough consensus topic that everybody can agree on, without over-focusing on the trolling or the divisive ones.

I want to show maybe a little bit of demo of how that feels like in a real interaction with a town hall with a minister. As of what I will substantially talk about, that entirely depends on what people ask. There really is no room for spoilers, because I cannot anticipate what people would ask.

That’s great. [laughs] That’s perfect for me. It makes my job easier. I would say what opportunity is there between sharing ideas about digital between Canada and Taiwan?

Actually Canada is our very important ally when deploying the Polis system. When we were talking about this bilingual participation from US and Taiwan people, it’s actually two different writing languages.

We looked around, and we discovered that the Canadian government – I think the National Energy Board, what used to be called the National Energy Board – actually contributed this idea of bilingual interface of interaction.

In federal level, everything has to be bilingual in Canada, too. It’s English/French. We worked, actually, quite a bit with the Canadian people, not only on specific technologies, such as making sure of bilingualism in all our civic technology tools but also, on comparing similar stories.

For example, our transitional justice apology to the indigenous people, the mining relationship, and the nuclear waste issue that were placed in the Dawu people without their confirmation or assent.

This is both transitional justice in terms of apologies, but also transitional justice in terms of making the indigenous First Nations relationship more like diplomacy and less like government. In this, actually, Canada leads us by four years. [laughs]

There is a lot to learn from the Canadian people on how to get transitional justice right when it comes to the First Nations. Also, it makes sense to share our more worked examples. For example, using ledger technology to make rivers and mountains come alive, like literally, Internet of beings.

Share a common ledger between the indigenous people and the administration, so that they can together re-present the actually health of, again, the Saviah, which is Holy Spirit Mountain, in the Bunun people.

That they can participate in a natural personhood way in important policymaking, which we call the civil IoT framework.

I think this is something that we have shared with the Canadian people. The people who are in charge of First Nation relationships, I think, very interested, because this is not only about bringing Internet to indigenous people, but rather them using this to amplify their culture and do-develop.

For example, the Blueseeds, which is a little bit like Aveda, is through the natural grasses that’s grown in the Eastern Taiwan’s indigenous nations. It use their indigenous symbol. It employs only the indigenous people.

It’s their traditional plant, and also, the important thing is that it’s using their indigenous ways to grow these without any chemicals and things like that. This became actually very popular among Taiwanese. It become a way for us to learn from the indigenous culture.

When Blueseeds opened a branch in Vancouver, I found that the people who are interested is not only people who are for social enterprise or social entrepreneurship, but actually people who see this as a model to replicate, or at least adapt to, to improve the relationship of the cultural agenda-setting power of First Nations.

I have one last question, if I may, which is what would be the next big project for you to implement as the Minister of Digital in Taiwan? Do you have anything set in plan?

Sorry, would you repeat the question? The sound didn’t quite work.

Do you have any big project coming up that you want to try to implement as a Minister of Digital? Do you have something else in the next few months that you’d like to start?

Yes. First, there’s the annual President Hackathon, of course. The Presidential Hackathon for this year, the focus is just on all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. We will make sure that anyone who feels strongly about any of the 17 goals can not only make a wish, which will account for 10 percent of the score.

Also, through a new voting mechanism called quadratic voting, express their true social preferences of the prioritization of the implementations of those sustainable targets, which will account for 30 percent of the score in the top 20.

We, for this time, invite everybody around the world to work with Taiwan teams. There’s no separation from domestic people, only on the domestic track, or anything like that. We truly welcome everybody to join us to deliver social innovations that can actually get binding power from our president.

When she gives a trophy to five winning teams every year, she actually promise to implement anything they have prototyped in the three months into national policy within the next 12 months. This is how we get the top five years from the past two years.

We deliver 10 out of the 10 of those promises to the social innovators. We welcome global participation. The international track, which is more of a side event last year, won by Honduras and Malaysia, this year, we will expand more and include everybody, not just people from the ASEA Pacific region.

That’s the big thing for me. Also, the legislators have indicated that they really want to institutionalize whatever we’ve been doing as a horizontal minister in the past three and a half years. A new dedicated unit – it may be called a Digital Development Council, or Digital Ministry, maybe – will be formulated by the parliamentarians and by the president’s team.

I’m happy to help her drafting that.

Well, thank you very much, Audrey, for this interview. We’re finished. [laughs]

All right.

Thank you, and see you at Montreal Connect, hopefully.

Virtually. [laughs]

We’ll make something work. Have a good local time.

Thank you very much. You, too.

Cheers. Bye.

Bye.