One thing that Nigel Jacob, at Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, always talks about is “being greedy with blame and being generous with grace, with credit.” It sounds like that’s very much what you’re describing. If anything goes wrong, you just raise your hand and say…

That seems to be an incontrovertible set of goals.

The three pillars that you mentioned are interesting: reduce risk, save time, and build trust.

It’s interesting that the plan is so aligned with the agenda that you’ve been building. I’m curious what you think caused such a groundswell political change in that direction?

You had mentioned that you were doing some transformation within the government over the past month. There was a congressional hearing. Is that right?

Thank you for taking the time to talk. It’s a nice moment to catch up. I invited some friends. Jayne Engle is here. You and Jayne have crossed paths, Audrey, at the Civic Experimentation Workshop that we hosted in Toronto with Indy Johar and Dark Matter Labs.

Thank you. Bye.

Great.

With regard to the recording, let’s collaborate on transcription, or share the recording, or…

Audrey, this has been a pleasure, and I’m excited to keep following your work, and I hope to stay in touch in the future.

That’s fantastic. Thank you.

Only if a government is necessary does the government then become a function of that public, but what’s really happening is this public format. I just find that compelling, and it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing in this approach. It’s like government’s there, but it’s really the process ...

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to constitute a public. This is on my desk right now, but John Dewey’s “The public and It’s Problems” is from almost 100 years ago, but he’s talking about when people have a shared problem or a mutual goal, they come ...

That’s fantastic. Thank you. This is hugely inspiring. Also, for my own work, it’s just a terrific body of work that you’re building, and it’s really just a fascinating relationship between these different sort of groups and ways of thinking.

I lived there for like six months.

That’s fantastic. Do you have any concluding thoughts or things I missed that have been on your mind, maybe even on a more personal level?

I think that’s brilliant, and it actually comes into all sorts of different domains, right? Like you could apply that same principle to any number of governance, or regulatory, or even…

Audrey, you broke up. I missed your response to that question.

Sorry, Audrey?

Let’s say I’m here in Boston, or I’m the mayor of Amsterdam, or I’m the prime minister of France. How do you see this landing in other places?

Yeah, and it’s politically different. I’m curious how you see, given any kind of help of the kind that you’re already seeing with some of the digital things, or some of the responses, or whatever might emerge in the future.

Right. I’m curious how you see that landing in other places, because Taiwan is obviously, in very logistical sense, Taiwan is really exceptional, right? Because you have essentially like a city state, a very small population, and one that’s…

I’m curious. First off, what did you learn from SARS and now you’re taking into the COVID situation? Also, knowing that you were able to learn from that, what are you taking forward into the next, into the future, from COVID? What are the provisions you’re packing from this moment?

That was actually one of my questions, was that it seems like a big sort of asset that Taiwan has had was the recent learning from SARS, and the fact that you went through this and you developed some knowledge from that.

Which is of course an important and interesting thing, when you’re creating rapid response to a public health crisis.

I think that’s brilliant. It sounds like you also had that happening with scientific experts in the hackathon, and when people were giving ideas, and there were experts saying, “OK, this is workable. This is not. This conflicts with certain policies…”

Digital infrastructure, yeah. That’s fantastic. There seems to be this really interesting back and forth relationship between programs that are created by government, and things that are coming up and then sort of how they flip and flop and grow as they…

Wow.

Did that happen?

I’m curious, are the situations where you’ve made a fast response and with good intention, but found that it was the wrong one? How do you manage that communication, where you say, “OK, we tried this. It didn’t work, and that’s part of figuring out the right solution”? Can you ...

I think that’s really fascinating. It’s something, that nimbleness, that capacity for responding quickly, and for that response to be taken seriously.

Exactly.

I think something about that kind of deep model where you have education and digital competence built-in from day one, I guess, from a young age, that cultivates a condition where you can respond quickly to a situation like coronavirus, because you have that framework of legitimacy.

Something you’ve brought up a couple of times is legitimacy. I think that’s at the center of all this, because not only does your approach have tremendous legitimacy clearly in the public sector, it also has tremendous legitimacy in the broader social structure of Taiwan.

You send a drone, kind of.

Can you talk a little bit about that, as a part of your work?

I’m perhaps asking this from the perspective of someone living in the United States, because here, that assumption doesn’t quite hold in many cases, and so I’m curious. Maybe this is embedded in your fast, fair, and fun principles which it sounds like are gearing toward bridging that tech literacy ...

On an international level, this becomes as rich as it can be because Japan has a phenomenal team working on this, and Korea does, too.

I think there’s a question of technological literacy on both levels. Part of what you’re describing in the domestic response has been hinging on technical literacy. That’s everything from pharmacies even having data, to citizens holding government accountable using these platforms, or even just engaging with information and reading graphs.

Awesome.

I’m curious, has that been a two-way exchange of information? What are you learning from other places?

I find that interesting, actually, that now that Taiwan is very plugged into a global knowledge base around this, and that you get this real-time flow of information in a way that hasn’t been as relevant before.

I’m curious. Obviously, this, the coronavirus, has given you a very specific set of very clear challenges that your office is very well-suited. The structure and the accountability networks that you have and the digital capacities you have, perhaps, are very well-structured to deal with this particular crisis. I’m curious ...

What you’re talking about, you said support but not control. There is something really interesting. There’s a nuance. Of course, you’re not controlling, but you also have the credibility with the pharmacies that when you turn around and say, “Look, we need you to open the data,” it’s not that ...

[laughs]

Cool. If you could just start out by introducing me to your office, the digital office, and in ordinary circumstances what your agenda is or what the mission of the office is.

I have a handful of questions for you. Just to make sure, do you have half an hour or an hour? What’s the time frame?

It’s a great group. I’m excited to include some of the work that you’ve been doing, that you published on the blogs, but also flesh that out with our conversation here. Thank you.

That’s what we’re doing with this special issue. We have people talking about food systems. We have people talking about bottom-up community response. We have people talking about local government, surveillance technology, everything.

Also, some of those things that are potentially worrisome and that are changing and the ways that we don’t have government systems in place, governance systems in place, to be thinking about some of the kinds of digital technology, medical technology, or even political responses that are being pursued.