Of course.

It’s fine. Please give your email to ST and we’ll work out the privacy-preserving part of our transcript to be published.

Glad to help.

That’s awesome. In that case, our Ministry of Science and Technology would be the ministry to talk to. There’s contact numbers and all that on the website.

I presume that, since you’ve worked with Twitter and Facebook, they’ll be willing to attest to these people’s mission?

I understand.

That’s one possible step.

I understand the situation. On average, in normal times, it’s 30 days is the usual processing time for a Taiwan Gold Card, but I can’t promise that it could be fast tracked.

When you say a lot of people, how many are you talking about in the team?

Check out TaiwanGoldCard.com, which is not a government website. It’s done by the people who have get Gold Card themselves. There’s a active community here, and they can probably help you of getting the right messages across, because they can share how exactly they got a Gold Card.

Sure. We need to see these are actually the people that work on the project and things like that.

It’s not like you have to earn a high percentage in salary or anything like that. Long as you have the potential to contribute, then you are eligible. You can get a Gold Card from overseas. Once you have that ID, it’s as good as a residential certificate. Then you ...

They wouldn’t?

You’re saying there’s a list of people, because we don’t have a refugee act here. You would be going nowhere without a local sponsor for their visa. While, of course, we have, for example, the Gold Card, but it takes time.

Of course.

I see, so you came here for a visit?

You were based in…

I saw it on Twitter.

OK.

How do you spell your project?

Sure.

Of course.

Thank you.

Sure. Of course.

Essentially, at its most drastic form, may just render democracy just like a ritual, which you ostensibly go to vote but all the candidates you vote, all the policies you vote just look the same. That of course, is not a thriving democracy, and will, in fact, make democracy look ...

Sure. The idea of democracy is based on the idea that a plurality of perspectives, the plurality of voices together, when trusting each other, makes that the polity knows about itself more and know about the world more as a epistemic alliance. Without gender equality, this is basically just privileging ...

That of course, is not yet applied to the domestic people, especially that in our ID card. There’s still a very clear delineation between the two genders and nothing about non-binary. Next year we’ll roll out a new format of the ID card that did away with the gender field ...

When you’re arriving to Taiwan, you’re probably filed either through a QR code or through paper. There’s quarantine cards. You would notice that the gender field there is already men, women, and others. We do have some beginning of the non-binary ideas within our quarantine forms.

It not only furthered, for example, the marriage equality, which is the most visible out of this, but also make sure that when you’re going to do the pride, it’s not just about gays and lesbians anymore, but also about transgenders, non-binaries, and many other people who want to look ...

Previously, of course, people would think people working on labor rights, working on indigenous rights, working on animal rights, working on LGBTQ rights, and some are different kinds of people. After the Sunflower Movement, they very much supported each other in the intersectional means.

One of the thing that’s a legacy of the Sunflower Movement is that none of the 20 or so NGOs are considered fringe anymore because they all united together to complement each other during the CSSTA discussion.

The idea is that it’s not just a demonstration as a protest, but rather a demonstration as a demo. It shows how half a million people on the street and many more online can collaboratively look at more than 20 aspects of this CSSTA, and arrive to a rough consensus ...

Certainly. At a time the Sunflower Movement was about the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreements or CSSTA, being passed through in the legislature without substantial deliberation. People thought, “OK. MPs were on strike. Let’s occupy the MPs’ office and work their work for them,” I guess.

I can interpret it myself. [laughs]

Yeah. Why not?

I don’t know.

Yeah. I’ve met her maybe a couple of times. My first memory of her was around the time of the Sunflower Revolution, in which she very successfully put a stop to escalating violence on the street. I think she’s a great facilitator and a great speaker at the time as ...

Cool. I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement.

All right. Do I look at you or the camera?

Thank you for your time.

All right. Thank you.

That’s right. It’s just so much. [laughs]

That’s another angle, but I think it’s easier if you focus because from what I can glance from your website, you have a lot of technologies. [laughs] It sometimes gets dizzy just looking at the breadth of technology.

If you can narrow down your value proposition to either the explainability angle, which I like, or to the faster knowledge transfer interactive knowledge bank, or workplace, or workbench metaphor.

That’s right. Last year, one of the top five teams used smart meters and did Taiwan energy company, the Tai Power, that use AI to find out whether it’s the fridge, or whether it’s the air conditioner that’s consuming a lot of power at peak hours. A lot of those ...

That’s right. That’s one of the inaugural Presidential Hackathon cases.

…and see what cross sectoral teams that maybe you’ll be interested…

Around end of this month or early March, we will start the call for solutions for the Presidential Hackathon. It may make sense for you to take a look at the previous Presidential Hackathon…