Hi, Audrey. Tell us about yourself and your connection in Taiwan.

Hi. I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and also youth engagement. I was born in Taiwan in 1981. Nowadays, I’m in charge of the national action plan of the Taiwan open government effort, upon which of course we fought the pandemic off with narrow lockdowns and also fought the infodemic off with no take-downs.

We have this campaign called #TaiwanCanHelp, where we share this Tai model with our international friends.

I was just learning from you that #TaiwanCanHelp, I thought it was driven by the government and the President Tsai led that donation of masks to other countries. It turns out, you were saying, the citizens got involved, too?

That’s right. In social innovation, we say “It’s everyone’s business with everyone’s help.” Of course, President Tsai Ing-wen did donate a lot of mask, but so did more than 700,000 citizens, which dedicated more than seven million medical masks out of their rationing because we are still rationing out masks – every two weeks is 10, whether you are adult or a child nowadays.

If you have plenty of masks at home and you don’t collect your ration mask, you can actually dedicate it using a very easy-to-use app, the National Health Insurance app, to dedicate for international humanitarian aid.

You can check out the full list of citizens that participated in it in this website, taiwancanhelp.us, which is not from the government but rather from Aaron Nieh, and Adi, and other YouTubers.

I know Adi from Adi Speaks English. I didn’t know there’s so many facets to this. I love the community.

You were part of the Sunflower Movement. Can you share with the audience what was happening during that time and how you got involved?

Sure. It was a pretty large demonstration with half a million people on the street at one time and many more online. The trigger point was a trade deal with Beijing. It’s called the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement or CSSTA, which was being passed by the parliament without substantial deliberation.

Now, the people who occupy the parliament – many of them are young students – started their own deliberation. It’s a demonstration in a sense of demo, not in a sense of a protest or a riot. I was involved by providing essentially live streaming technical service to not only the people who occupied the parliament but also along with many other people in the community, all the different NGOs that help occupied the parliament.

There were more than 20 of them, each deliberating a different aspect of the CSSTA. There’s NGOs focusing on human rights, on labor rights, environmental issues. There’s even one focusing on our then new 4G infrastructure or whether we need to allow the PRC – that’s People’s Republic of China – regime components in our 4G network. Nowadays, everybody else is talking about this.

We were discussing that in 2014 and reached a rough consensus saying, “No to this PRC component,” and so it was a very happening time. The main lesson is that half-a-million people on the street can actually agree on something. The occupy was civic chain.

Wow. Was it the first demonstration you are part of?

No. Actually, I think not even two weeks before the Sunflower, there was another very large parade in a protest of then-new fourth nuclear plant. We were also there to provide broadband communication.

I remember it was raining very hard that day. Their turnout, like people who could actually walk to the end of the parade is arguably smaller than what the organizers imagined. Many people still care about this issue, so they watch live-streaming.

Now, in early 2014, live-streaming is very much a new phenomenon. People really want to feel that they were there. We also help setting up the live-streaming technologies for those demonstrators.

As a self-proclaimed anarchist, which…

Conservative anarchist.

Oh, conservative anarchist. The Internet definition [laughs] is to be free from governing body. I am curious, and I know a lot of people have been curious, why did you choose to become a government official?

Sure. A common survey, a lowercase minister, meaning that I mostly create common values out of different positions, but I never gave a single order as a minister. Neither did I take order from anyone.

By voluntary association, people learn to see that it’s not just about a top-down, lockdown, takedown, shutdown way of governance when it comes to the pandemic or the infodemic.

Maybe the Internet norms, which is a very Taoist norm, which is we call a rough consensus and running code, essentially, is a superior model to tackle this very complicated problems because otherwise people do not have a good first-hand experience on why to wear a mask, wash your hands, and things like that.

The only way to do that is not to impose very heavy fines, but rather to explain the science, and then come up with very cute dog memes that says, “Wear a mask to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands,” and so on.

Once that idea was spreading, spread to sufficient amount of people, you do not need a top-down order and people will wear a mask all the time to protect their own face from their own hands.

If your title wasn’t minister, what title would you give yourself that’s fitting?

No, I call myself a lowercase minister, so I’m fine with…If you go to digitalminister.tw, you go to my page. The lowercase means that I mostly just listen to people and give such advice, but I do not give people orders and I don’t take orders either. That was the point.

I noticed that somewhere, it says, “Without an office,” as well.

That’s right. I have, of course, this place where we’re recording this podcast in, but most of the time, if I’m not touring Taiwan, I’m in the Social Innovation Lab, which is in the heart of Taipei City. It’s a park. We tore down the walls, so anyone can walk in and enjoy any of those 17 sustainable development goals, related activities and events, and food, and things like that.

Next time, if you come to Taipei, do visit the Social Innovation Lab.

What happens in the Social Innovation Lab day to day?

We have international visitors.

[laughs]

This is the mayor of Prague City and Zdeněk Hřib. We also have a lot of communications with people around Taiwan. I tour around Taiwan during the Social Innovation tours, and I talk with the local people while connecting through two-way telepresence to the 12 different ministries, people in the Social Innovation Lab.

Just by going to the Social Innovation Lab, they can connect to all the different Social Innovation units around Taiwan and participate in a face-to-face-ish meeting with the local community and local people to make sure that there is sufficient bandwidth both ways to make an account of all the related policies and so on and so forth.

For example, co-ops social entrepreneurs, people who are in the local but have a good idea that’s worth spreading, this makes it possible for them to reach the central government very quickly and in a very uncompressed form.

Most of the people in the Social Innovation Lab are not from the government?

No, they’re not. They are, at any given time, maybe 30, 40 different teams working on any of the SDG goals or start-ups and things like that. It’s like a small incubator, but anyone can also run events there.

In a lot of the talks and tours you’ve given, you’ve talked about the importance of trust for building democracy. How do you help citizens trust our government?

I don’t. I help the government trust the citizens.

[laughs] I love that.

[laughs] The citizens are free to trust anyone, and we’re not interfering with that. When we talk about social innovation, the public service need to trust the citizens.

For example, when we were rationing out the masks – as I mentioned before, nowadays, it’s 10 per two weeks – we wanted a way for people to trust each other and for the government officials to trust that there is nobody stockpiling or holding the masks and so on.

It just so happens that there was a person named Howard Wu from Tainan City who invented this map which you can see the live availability of medical mask in each and every store. Colored green if there is still some in stock and colored red if it’s almost gone.

You don’t have to queue in vain. You can go straight to the pharmacy or convenience store that still have some masks. Imagine if it relied, as it did initially, in the beginning of February, on the citizens’ input on crowdsourcing, then the numbers may be accurate, it may be inaccurate. The trustworthiness will fluctuate, depending on the availability of volunteers.

I talked then to the head of Cabinet, to the premier, who talked to the National Health Insurance Agency. We dedicated, through open data, every 30 seconds, an update of the real-time availability of the pharmacies’ medical mask stock and published it as an open API to Howard Wu and many other civic technologists.

Because of that, when you’re queuing in line, you can check, in real time, the person queuing before you, how many masks did they actually buy. The pharmacists have a lot of trustworthiness, because they keep the system running, but so did anyone who procure some mask from the nearby pharmacy, because they are, in essence, part of the national auditing team.

It’s participatory accountability. This is what I mean by trusting the citizens with open data and API.

That’s such a great example of obviously using technology to solve COVID issues, but also government and citizens working together, in my opinion, to provide data, which is mask availability and distribution. That’s so important to both parties.

More about that, Taiwan did become famous for its COVID response in 2020. What do you think were the key components of Taiwan’s success?

I summarize it as three pillars, fast, fair, and fun.

I talked a little bit about rationing with the fairness part, but the fun part is also very important. We have a national spokesdog of the Central Epidemic Command Center. The name is Zongchai.

What? [laughs] I didn’t know that.

It’s a Shiba Inu, very cute. The Zongchai is, as you can see here, reminding you to buy some masks. “But why would you buy some mask? Well, a mask protects you against your own hands. Wash your hands frequently.”

This is a very good message, because it doesn’t appeal to altruistic intentions. This appeals only to rational self-interest, like, “Why wouldn’t you want to protect against your own hands?” This also makes this very easy to spread and really, because it’s very cute.

[laughs]

Also, social distancing, for example, “When you’re indoor, please keep three Shiba Inus away. When you’re outdoor, keep two Shiba Inus away.”

[laughs]

Again, you probably cannot unsee this [laughs] after you saw this. This, again, makes a great impression and it’s translated to many different languages. The fun part, which is what we call “humor over rumor,” is also very important.

Also, of course, and rightly so, attributed the main reason why Taiwan did so well is that we acted pretty much before anyone else. We acted last January, so that’s one year ago. On the 1st of January, we already started house inspections for flight passengers coming in from Wuhan.

That’s thanks to the whistleblower, Dr. Li Wenliang from Wuhan, whose social media post made rounds in Taiwan, in the Taiwanese-equivalent Reddit, in the PDT. Of course, Dr. Li’s message was silenced in Wuhan for a while, so he did save the Taiwanese, even maybe not a lot of Wuhan people.

Going back a little bit, you mentioned g0v in the Sunflower Movement. What is g0v, how was it first formed, and what has it become today?

G0v, broadly speaking, is a domain name, is a domain pack. It’s something that people registered – a lot of them were, and still are, my very good friends – around the end of 2012.

The domain name g0v.tw basically says that for any digital service that’s done by the government, which always ends in .gov.tw, the civil society can do better.

The social sector, with the slogan “Ask not why nobody is doing this. You are that nobody.” [laughs] Meaning that any time you see a government service, maybe about mask rationing availability display that’s not working very well, you’re invited to fork the government – pronunciation very important – fork the government and make an alternative, such as by changing join.gov.tw in your browser, change the o to a 0, you get into join.g0v.tw, who’s an alternate imagination of the government that is always open-source.

The government, once we see that, “Hey, the g0v really has a really good idea, like the mask availability map,” we would just merge it back in.

Forking the code until you merge it.

That’s exactly right.

Can you share some of your favorite projects, I know it might be hard, [laughs] from g0v community?

The inaugural project, which clkao and many friends of mine who participated, it’s called Government Budget Visualization. The project, very simply put, it supercharges citizens with the power of visualization so that government spending can be supervised.

You can zoom in on different perspectives of budget data, like historical trend, cross-department comparison, public opinion, and also component breakdown by taxation to category or by government spending, and so on.

The great thing is that…I mentioned join.gov.tw, right? This civic tech project from 2012 eventually became part of our government website. Now, this is a real government website and you can see the spending exactly the way the g0v people initially imagined it, but with the additional requirement effort that was more than 1,300 different projects. The public service actually responds to real public commentary.

What used to be like a public discussion board now is an institutionalized two-way communication with all the public service.

I personally love the data viz, too, of especially spending budget. For me, looking at different smart cities around the world, that’s definitely one of the most beneficial ways they’ve adopted technology.

Definitely, and when the citizen, the social sector creates those visualization…

It’s more powerful.

…it’s not just smart cities, it’s smart citizens.

Exactly. What’s vTaiwan, and why is that an impactful part of the democratic process in Taiwan?

VTaiwan is one of the projects that started in a g0v hackathon, proposed, I think it was late 2014, by Minister Jaclyn Tsai. At the time, the ministry without portfolio in charge of law and about adapting law to the cyberspace. Actually, we are in what used to be her office.

Wow.

Basically, what we did at the time in vTaiwan in 2014-15 is to co-create a online/offline consultation process that brings together the ministries, elected representatives, scholars, experts, and civil society organizations, citizens, and business leaders.

The process has tackled issues like the UberX issue, Airbnb, FinTech Sandbox, and things like that, making sure that people can surface the best ideas that take care of everyone’s feelings, which is a step that’s often forgotten in consultative processes.

To date, it has worked on more than 28, if I’m not mistaken, projects, and a vast majority of which has led to decisive government action.

The UberX or Airbnb, was that citizens opposing the entry of these businesses?

Yeah. The UberX case is very interesting because while on the surface, you’ll see a lot of very polarized debate on, for example, what really is sharing economy? One part says UberX was not offering carpooling, so it can’t be qualified as sharing. On the other hand, there’s people who’s…They’re time-sharing their spare time. [laughs] Those discussions tend to go nowhere.

At the time, UberX was introducing a new service of people who don’t have professional driver licenses who, nevertheless, try for-profit in their spare time. For some people, those spare time turns out to be 16 hours a day. It’s their spare time. That posts a problem to not just Taiwan but many other jurisdictions around the world.

Taiwan, unlike pretty much any other Asian jurisdiction, nowadays, Uber operates legally as a local fleet, the Q Taxi. There’s also LINE Taxi. There’s also, of course, other taxi fleets that use the Uber model of essentially app-based hailing, not hailing on the street.

It’s a very fair competition. They can’t undercut each other. There’s insurance and also, most importantly, the professional driver’s license requirement is kept. All the Uber drivers nowadays are professional drivers who can choose between the Q Taxi fleet and many other taxi fleets. It also improves their bargaining power and so on.

That consensus was gathered on the pol.is platform with the vTaiwan project around 2015.

Wow. I did notice that with the Ubers here. They all have the taxi profile.

They are taxis.

Yeah. We’ve already talked about a lot of examples, but how would you say we’re reinventing democracy in Taiwan?

This we is a lot of people. It’s certainly not just us, or the vTaiwan project, or the g0v community. The reinvention of democracy is hinged on this idea that democracy, itself, is a technology. Taiwan only had our first presidential election in 1996, which is already after the World Wide Web gets popular.

There’s many people who think about Internet and about democratic governance in the same generation with the same bunch of people. Unlike other more time-honored republics and democracies with hundreds of years of tradition, in Taiwan, we see democracy in the very beginning as something like semiconductor design.

You can change. You can adjust. You can try different layouts, much more than just uploading three bits every four year by every person — which is called voting, by the way. vTaiwan is also about a joint platform where you can start petitions, participatory budgeting, and sandboxes, Presidential Hackathon, many other things that improve the bandwidth of democracy.

I never thought about it that way because democracy is new to us. I want to know, because you know that typically, I live in Toronto, Canada. I have been a part of a civic hack community there, but I still live at Taiwan. [laughs] I just think Taiwan has been especially successful in creating impact and also involving the community.

Why do you think that is compared to maybe civic innovation in other countries?

It’s a new system. It’s easier to imagine new possibilities if it’s a system that has been around for hundreds of years. In Asia, it makes it harder to imagine new possibilities. That’s just the nature of things.

On the other hand, there are parts of the Taiwanese model of innovation that can be shared very easily. For example, the cute spokesdog, you can probably copy it overnight, the Central Epidemic Command Center with their daily 2:00 PM communication with this hotline, 1922, whereby anyone can call.

People did call to the call center. It was more than 95 percent pickup rate. They will answer any and all suggestions.

There was a young boy who called, I think, mid-April last year saying that, “You’re rationing mask, and all I get is pink medical masks. Other boy classmates of mine wear blue, and I have pink only. I don’t want to go to school, and/or I don’t want to wear a mask. Do something about it.”

The very next day, on the daily 2:00 PM press conference, all the medical officers wear pink. Minister Chen Shih-chung even said Pink Panther was his childhood hero. Suddenly, the boy became the most hip boy in the class for only he had the color that the heroes wear and also the hero of heroes wear.

That’s a great story of gender mainstreaming because it flipped the color around. A lot of brands just started calling themselves pink. That is responsive governance. Regardless of how long is your democratic institution’s tradition, you can take a page from this.

Yeah. Wow. One thing I want to ask you around the assumption of Taiwan’s success is a lot of people think it’s because of its smaller size. In some interviews, people have asked you about that as well. “Can what’s been done in Taiwan scale?” is the question people have asked. What do you think of size?

Taiwan only seems small because we have broadband as a human right. No matter where you are in Taiwan, you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second for just $15 per month for unlimited data connection both ways. Otherwise, it’s my fault personally.

This then guarantees that any point in Taiwan can access the digital service that I just illustrated. It also feels much more close because anyone can start a two-way video conferencing without worrying about their bandwidth cost and without worrying about whether they have a WiFi connection or not. That makes Taiwan seem small even though we’re actually 24 million people.

That’s true. It’s not that much smaller than the Canadian population. [laughs] A part of your definition of success is that everyone is digitally connected in Taiwan?

That’s right. Yes, broadband is a human right.

Thank you. I enjoy it very much. [laughs] How is doing this work personally important to you? Is there anything that surprised you about your job and where you are today?

Yeah, this is fun. I’m doing this work for fun. The most surprising thing is how innovative public service is. From the outside, before I worked with the government, I thought the most innovative people are maybe in the free software movement, in the open source communities, in the business sector and so on.

It turns out that the current public service are every bit as innovative as the other sectors. It was just that the public service regulations, and laws, and norms prevented them from voicing out their innovations.

A lot of my work is just to ask them to work out loud, to ask the colleagues that enter my office, as you saw on your way here with the Post-it notes and all that, to learn the importance of sharing their work publicly, not only with the citizens but also with other ministries, and other agencies, and other levels of government.

Surprisingly, if I said, “You have to do something,” then they’d do exactly as I said. Because I never gave orders, I’d say, “Just do whatever, but share the results.” I absorb the risks if things go wrong while people started proposing a lot of very innovative ideas, including the cute dog.

You took away this perception of risk for them to be free?

Yeah, because if it breaks, that’s all my fault.

[laughs] You were living abroad in the US until you started getting more involved with the Sunflower Movement. How has your relationship with Taiwan changed since you moved back?

Well, fact check…

Oh, sorry. [laughs]

I was under the US time zone, but I’m in Taiwan.

Oh, you were always in Taiwan.

That’s right. I was teleworking for a very long time with especially the West Coast, like with Apple. I’ve never been to Cupertino. I fly maybe to Palo Alto twice a year or something.

I’m most of the time in Taiwan, but I am actually working with the people in the US by waking up really early [laughs] and adjusting my sleeping patterns. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Maybe I have asked but differently then, just in general, how has your relationship with Taiwan changed?

With the COVID, I think a lot of people saw that Taiwan is a great place to not only enjoy a healthier life, that you can go to the Pride Parade. My friends are not surprised about the pride, but they are about the parade.

There’s a record number of almost 2,000 people now getting the Taiwan Gold Card, which you can check out at taiwangoldcard.com. You can bring your family, enjoy a health insurance, and stay without having to work or invest in a Taiwanese company. We just want talents here.

There’s a record number also of more than 250K people who lived abroad, now returning to Taiwan within the past year because of our COVID success. All this resulted in a different relationship.

Taiwan used to be a place that’s more focused on hardware, like the Taiwan Semiconductor, and less so on software and services. Now, it’s seen as a very large hub about not only AI but all sort of digital transformation and services and so on.

It truly a transcultural place, not just our 20 national languages but also a lot of people from all over the world now just working in their original work no matter where it is but choosing to live in Taiwan.

In the same vein of you mentioning the 250,000 people who lived abroad and have come back to Taiwan, I definitely see this fire in the Taiwanese people locally or abroad recently. What advice would you give them, for people who want to be more involved in Taiwan’s future?

First of all, if you don’t yet have a Gold Card, get a Gold Card. Check out taiwangoldcard.com, especially if you work in the arts or in the science and technology. The requirements is now so relaxed.

The science and technology regulation now say, “If you have the potential to contribute to science and technology, then you’re eligible,” which is pretty much everybody, right?

Potential, I love that.

Anyone who has the potential are eligible.

You just have to believe in yourself first.

Exactly. Apply for a Gold card if you don’t have one. Also, think about the community in Taiwan, not just traditional people living in Taiwan, which is a great community to tap into, but also the expats, the people in the Formosa and many other communities.

Starting this year, they’re residents, certificates their resident cards where we call the ARC, the Alien Residential Cards, are now renumbered to match their national ID number. The second letter is no longer letter. It’s a digit, like the Taiwanese national ID.

This is part of the campaign that I call Also Taiwanese. You don’t have to give up your original passport. You don’t have to give up your identity if you’re a citizen of another country, but you can, with Gold Card and many other measures, become gradually also Taiwanese.

Focusing on you a little bit because we talked a lot about your projects. You personally, you identify as what?

As non-binary, as whatever.

[laughs] You’re a transgender woman in Taiwan. Can you share your journey with us?

Sure. I went through two puberties, once when I was 12 or 13. I never developed quite so much as other adolescent boys. Later on, I would get my testosterone level tested.

Doctors said that I am like a 80-year-old man, which means that it’s between the natural levels of a adolescent boy and adolescent girl physically speaking, which makes it easier for me to go through the second puberty when I was 24, 25 years old taking hormonal replacement without having to take a lot of anti-testosterone, because my level is very low, to begin with.

I developed then for another couple of years the female puberty. In my mind, I don’t have this category like half the population is closer to me and half the population is farther away from me. I see my community as Homo sapiens, a large community.

I would say for Taiwan, even though it has become a beacon of LGBTQ rights, there’s still so much as a society for them to learn about the different groups.

Definitely.

How could Taiwan be more accepting or grow more aware of the different LGBTQ groups?

Last year was the first time that we had a transgender pride next to the LGBTQ pride in general. That helps the visibility. Also, the marriage equality law helps. We choose to legalize marriage equality by saying that it’s a marriage between two individuals but not between the two families.

This is after one constitutional court ruling and two referenda that jointly said that in Taiwan, although there is two different interpretations of marriage, one says it’s between families with the two individuals acting as representatives. One says that it’s between individuals and the families may or may not want to know. It’s two different by ceremony and by registration norms.

When legalizing marriage equality, we say we legalize the bylaws but not the in-laws.

When two same-sex couple wed, their families do not wed. This is a really good intergenerational solution.

Like all the best social innovations, it takes where it had tension and then, like the Eurasian Plate bumping into the Philippines Sea Plate or the other way around which cause earthquakes, it also caused the Jade Mountain — or Saviah, Yushan — to raise. It rises about two-and-a-half centimeters per year.

This higher vantage point like legalizing the marriage by marrying the bylaws but not the in-laws, it created a new vantage point. I like to call it the up-wing direction that makes the generations closer to each other by respecting their own positions and each other’s positions while creating new values. That will also help everybody to be more accepting toward everybody else.

That was a poetic description. I’ll leave you with, we just entered 2021, what are you most looking forward to either achieving or the impact that you could have this year?

Of course, I look forward to assist the vaccination. There’s some really good sign. Not only is the domestic vaccination research and development going quite well, but also the AstraZeneca procurement seems to be quite successful.

What’s more is that around the end of last year there’s record number of people who volunteered to vaccinate against the seasonal flu, which means that there’s a lot of people waiting very eagerly to get vaccinated. I’ll probably do whatever I can help to make sure that experience of getting vaccinated is smooth and also secure.

Thank you for this interview. It was really great.

Thank you. Great questions. Live long and prosper.

[laughs]