...dical participation can leapfrog public trust.
Public trust is fragile. Once it’s gone, it’s hard to win back. So the question is not only...
I’m very happy to welcome Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first Digital Minister from 2016 to 2024 and now Cyber Ambassador. Audrey is a globally recognized civic tech le...
Zarah Bruhn introduced us, thank you for that. Zarah leads SPRIND Society at Germany’s Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation. She’s building the Digital Demo...
This is so exciting. I’ve been looking forward to this moment for exactly three years. I looked it up. That was when I visited you in Taiwan.
A diplomatic breakthrough.
Exactly. And now we finally have a big announcement we’ll make at the end of this panel, because we’re creating things together now.
Yes, we are co-creating the Presidential Hackathon model here in Germany.
Exactly. And I had to learn what that is when I first went to Taiwan. I was commissioner for social innovation in the federal government during the last legisla...
So, I flew to Taiwan not knowing what to expect. Then I met Audrey, and afterward I basically wanted to move to Taiwan, learn from these models, and bring them...
Thank you. Streamlining bureaucracy was the original reason I was brought in as Taiwan’s first digital minister in 2016. And I am delighted to learn that “make...
We also learned from you that humor is essential when you try to disrupt the state. So maybe start there. How did you become Taiwan’s first digital minister? Th...
Certainly. In 2014, I kind of invited myself into government with half a million people on the street, in a demo called the Sunflower Movement.
In March 2014, people thought the trade deal with Beijing, which was being fast-tracked, really sucked. So, we occupied the parliament peacefully for three week...
We used technologies to listen to the half million people on the street, and many more online, about what they wanted instead. Every day we converged: we showed...
After three weeks, the speaker of the parliament basically said, “The crowdsourced version is better than the MPs’ version. Why not go with it?” I was then invi...
After two years working on participation, I was promoted as national tech support, the first digital minister. It was a government-efficiency role, the OG DOGE,...
Your story still feels like a miracle: occupying parliament, then winning people over, then becoming a minister because the work was so effective.
When you actually entered government, first the ministry and later your role, what did you find? And what did you change?
