2020-05-30 Conversation with Birgitte Andersen

Hello. Can you hear me? Hey, greetings, very nice meeting you.

No, it’s just my end. As you requested, we will not put what you have said on the record. This is going to be a one-sided recording. I’m just going to record what I have said, but that is just fine.

That would be excellent. I have visited London quite a few times. I actually have two colleagues in the UK at the moment, one in Bristol and one in London. They will be able to follow-up on detailed discussions if needed be.

One of them is working with the Dark Matter Labs with Indy Johar and friends. That’s also a more design-oriented think tank, more around circular economy. They also do policy around smart citizens and things like that.

I am very happy to learn about the APPG. I have read some ideas from the public website, but it will be great to know where you are at and what your focus is at the moment.

That’s right. That’s my cultural translation service. [laughs]

The physical passport, yes.

OK. I will first share how I have engaged other think tanks as well as government think tank groups, as yours, which is broadly comparable. I’m on the International Advisory Board of the Governance Lab in NYU led by Beth Noveck.

We have done a “Crowd Law for Congress”, which is, I think, broadly overlapping with your citizen participation task force. It covers pretty much the same ground.

We also work with data collaboratives, which I think is very much the same as your data governance task force, when it comes to data democracy, for lack of a better term, or the making of data republic social sector, working with the private and public sectors on that.

I am also on the Digital Future Society, which is the Mobile World Barcelona Capital, the MWC think tank on future things. That’s the main platform that I engage through the Barcelona network, the European, and especially post-GDPR, how to reconcile our personal data protection norms with the European norms. So I am also part of Digital Future Society’s Board of Trustees.

I am also a board member of a not-for-profit startup called RadicalxChange with Vitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, and also Glen Weyl, an economist.

That’s also based in New York, but we actually primarily work with Canadian and also MPs in Berlin to further the ideas of participatory mechanism design. These are the areas that I am passionate about.

I mostly work with the government, not for the government. Although I am a government minister, I belong to no political party. I’m working with Taiwan, but not just for Taiwan. I’m happy to work with international counterparts.

The main is simply to, through open innovation, share our norms and our approaches to data governance and citizen participation, but also, make sure that we learn from other best practices.

Our, for example, e-petition platform came from Better Reykjavik. That’s from Iceland. Our participatory budget design came from Consul that was Madrid. Our crowd law participation platform came from Pol.is, which is from Seattle, and so on.

We work with all these international communities, and, basically, Taiwan is a Social Innovation Lab for those ideas. That’s where I’m coming from.

Sure. Taiwan’s ideas around data governance is on the data collaboratives, or nowadays, there’s even a board called Data Democracy, that basically have all the citizens as curators and producers of data that collectively do sense-making from air pollution to water pollution for all sort of things.

Using distributed ledger and similar technologies to make sure that people hold each other accountable, and for personally identifiable informations, they do not submit them to a surveillance state or a surveillance capitalist apparatus.

We’re taking, as with COVID-19, a very social sector-powered part. My subtopic, if you want to use a very simple word, would be about joint controllership of data, which this is the part in the GDPR that has the least academic understanding.

Joint controllership, especially from the social sector, would be my most interested subtopic.

It doesn’t matter. For me, AI stands for assistive intelligence, as I showed in the video. Assistive intelligence means that we use the kind of machine learning that automates away the chores, but do not give up our expectation on accountability as well as value alignment.

I think is exactly the same as your preliminary advices to your MPs. It doesn’t matter. I can code, but it is not likely that I will code AI or blockchain applications by myself, although I still code for many citizen participation platforms personally.

I work with Vitalik Buterin on translating those ideas into Ethereum governance. That is where my main community of data governance ideas, so that we can try out new idea, like quadratic funding and things like that on the blockchain – Ethereum, to be precise – first, for the on-chain governance.

Yeah, the focus would be on Ethereum, but of course, in Taiwan, there’s many other thriving communities, ranging from IOTA to other newer-generation. Hybrid ledger, also there’s a thriving community.

Of course, I can connect with those community, but I am not directly participating in those governance.

That’s right.

I see.

Yeah, I worked with the Siri team for six years. I know how it’s like. [laughs] Yeah.

Yeah, what’s the time commitment I’m looking at?

[laughs] OK. This is awesome. Yeah, the Digital Future Society usually meets once a year and usually around Mobile World Capital Barcelona. That’s their time commitment, one physical meeting per year, which is…

The Digital Future Society. Yeah, and I think later in the year, they’re going to have a summit as well, because Mobile World Barcelona got canceled because of the pandemic. Probably, they are trying to make up that.

In any case, I was in Barcelona nevertheless, even though the NWC was canceled. Because this is a smaller group, we did manage to have pretty good meetings. If I can time that to the visit to you, that’s just a single trip for me. It makes it easier.

We can also do remote. If it’s more than two physical visits a year, I probably cannot make it. I will have to do telepresence.

Dubai?

Yeah, I see that.

OK.

I see.

Yeah, they did a retronym. It wasn’t called a blockchain, but because everybody understood it as a blockchain, they changed retroactively for it to be a blockchain. The previous president did visit Taiwan, and we talked about that, too. Yeah.

Not at all. We didn’t do that. That’s because we’ve never entered the community spread. There’s only seven deaths in COVID in Taiwan, less than 500 cases, all the time.

We’ve never had a big problem of that, and so the app doesn’t really make a lot of value. We are developing the app to help people in the UK and so on, but we don’t need that app.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure. However, as I mentioned, even though we do help developing such apps from the social sector and from our research community, because in Taiwan, we have not used most of it, what we have done is instead hold a coronavirus hackathon, the Co-hack, with the American de facto embassy.

To highlight the winners that can provide values, that are conforming to the social norms, that doesn’t sacrifice the personally information and so on. There i5s five winners recently announced. I’m going to do a write-up for a few of them, anyway.

I’m happy to contribute those write-ups. All my blogs are in Creative Commons, anyway, so it could freely reused. I think these entries are some of the ideas that we can contribute and just a begenning of good connections to our development community.

Even though most of their ideas is probably only useful overseas, we’re still very much willing to support them and help the world.

Yeah, I think, certainly, an open, nonlinear, and circular recovery. The pandemic and the lockdowns is an opportunity for us to think in sustainable ways.

If we just make a linear recovery and go back to the bad old days of linear economic growth, GDP competition, and things like that, that will have basically rendered meaningless these amount of time where we experience that is possible to be friendly with the environment.

It is possible to manufacture in a purpose-led way, and it is possible to, instead of owning things, to basically share and rent things as a norm, all this, I think it’s an opportunity because of COVID that we’re now on the international solidarity that is even higher.

Much higher than the climate change, disinformation, or other previous international issues that we tackled. We should not squander this international solidarity and should figure out a way to do a circular and nonlinear recovery.

I think that is the most interesting thing, and it’s what the Taiwan recovery and revitalization plan is working on. We are actively working on it right now.

Yeah. Every early morning, almost now, I have video conferences with people from Canada, the US, or South America, in that time zone. Every evening, like now, I have conversation with people in UK, in Europe, and in Africa.

The hours in the middle is my usual working day. [laughs] A few days before the World Health Assembly, Taiwan hosted a milnilateral with 14 economies and countries, and with their health officials and so on, on a mini-pre-WHA meeting.

It’s very interesting, because now, with the US dropping support to their commitment to the WHO, it’s likely that people who are liberal democratic government officials can just focus on a minilateral based on open government principles, and to develop ideas and measures that do not encroach the constitutional freedom.

That is, I think, of quite appeal to many semi-democratic countries as well, because they’re at a fork in the road. If the totalitarian or authoritarian top-down approaches prove to be more effective, then that makes their top-down tendencies grow even more.

If we can show convincingly that empowering the social sector actually increase the public health and increase the mutual trust, then many of those semi-democratic countries will not see coronavirus as a necessity to drop democratic norms.

I think that is what I’m looking at, and we work with many other liberal democracy. Just a few hours ago, we had a talk with the ambassadors from the US, from France, from Australia, and also, our Digital Ambassador, Chairman Jan Hung-tze, on precisely this measure.

It’s a, what I think people’s mind is currently focused on. The French and Australians say that their contact tracing apps, they need to demonstrate that it’s privacy-preserving. It doesn’t concentrate the data, as the Singaporeans do, and so on.

They’re very happy that Taiwan is validating their basic normalcy and values. Also, the travel bubble, of course, is going to be based on that, because unless you can have accountable buy-in from the civil society from both countries to resume travel, it’s always a very risky business.

Yeah, certainly. Nobody is against sustainability. Nobody goes on a platform and podium and say, “I want the Earth to terminate in my generation.” I don’t think anyone would do that. [laughs] It’s not about…

Certainly. I think what the Taiwanese people is most wary of is, of course, over-concentrating power to any sector or any single player would end up feeling like going back to the martial law days.

Anyone who’s over 35 years old remember how martial law was like. Nobody want to go back there, because we’re an extremely young democracy. Our democracy literally grew with the World Wide Web and the Internet technologies.

We always see democracy as just another technology, a social technology that we can improve with day-to-day participation. With this much buy-in from the civil society to change democracy itself, where at the moment, the parliamentary debate is on changing our constitution.

Maybe four years from now, having a national referendum on important constitution changes and so on, this is a very robust civil society, and that is seeing democracy as something that people has control.

Of course, that will mean that the government officials is held both accountable to respond to such a call for democracy, but also need to be very inventive, innovative when new threats comes, because we cannot resort to top-down ways, either lockdowns or takedowns.

The main difference is that they also want to make citizens transparent to the state, but that’s not our platform. We are just making the state transparent to the citizens.

Even though technically we use many similar terminology, or even some of the same open source or open innovation ecosystems, I think the end result is quite opposite direction between the PRC and Taiwan.

Mobile World Congress Barcelona is usually around February to March, I think, in Barcelona.

No, my colleagues, there is two designers in my team. One is in Bristol, and one is in London.

Of course, yes.

Yeah, as long as we coordinate the time zones, order the same kind of food, and the same beer, it can feel almost like we’re in the same room.

That’s right.

There are physical meetings, like social ones, I can dispatch [laughs] one of my two colleagues in UK to attend. They can carry my avatar, I guess. I can just sit on their shoulders as an iPad or something like that. [laughs]

That’s right. I sent double robots to, for example, the Internet Governance Meeting, the IGF, in Geneva in the UN building, because the UN building doesn’t usually allow Taiwanese passport to enter.

I just sent a robot and spoke through the robot. That’s still on the record, so it’s good as I physically visited.

Yeah, this is actual video of my robot speaking at the IGF 2017 and what we have said. Many people also piggybacked on my robot also, as you can see. We’ve done this many, many times.

That’s fine. I’ll send you the transcript of the parts that I said.

OK, maybe we do that next time. I haven’t. [laughs] I only recorded one side, but that’s fine. I’ll send you my side. No, I don’t. I only…

OK, of course. I’ll send you both the recording, and later on, the transcript.

That’s right.

Sure, no problem. I see there is Pavilion 2.0 that’s being developed. I’m really happy to contribute. There’s a lot of previous talks, and I’m considering doing five-minute podcasts. Maybe we can just co-create on the topics.

I will just record myself asynchronously, given the time zone differences, but I’m happy to contribute content, of course.

All right, I think, yeah, I just wait for the Innovators’ Board, either the descriptions or the schedule. We’ll see how we can work together. We just, of course, you have your task forces and so on.

Given time zone differences, I will participate maybe only quite occasionally, but we will keep each other posted.

Yeah, I’ll send you the recording right now and transcript later.

OK, cheers. Bye.