Audrey Tang

Then we talked, and to my surprise, I learned that a majority of them were Occupy supporters. They are also very much pining for a way to listen at scale. Like, they would wish that the signal-to-noise ratio is higher when doing public hearings.

They also really want to communicate directly to the people, instead of through caricatures, through various different channels. We brainstormed together, using a few initial cases, such as the equity-based crowdfunding telework and the closely-held companies law with special voting stocks and so on.

These were the first three cases that we worked on to find a way to not talk only to a representative, but to work with the people, so they can represent themselves. That was the vTaiwan project.

I think that’s the cultural change, like people would expect that public service is not something hidden behind professional politicians. They expect that, through a digital deliberation platform, they can systemically provide accountability.

It’s mutual as well. The public sector can ask the social sector to work on things that the social sector considers important, but it’s inappropriate for the public sector to work on these things. For example, fact-checking.

That’s a very good example, because the public sector is one of the parties that’s reported by journalists. If we say that we’re fact-checkers, that will actually throw all the journalism standards. We’re just saying, “No, we provide timely responses to journalistic inquiries, but it’s people in the social sector that are fact-checkers. That’s what I mean by the social sector leading the innovation.

I’ll use an example, because I didn’t talk about the parliament in all our interviews. I feel that there is something missing there. I remember a time when we – I think it was also during late February-ish – when there’s a mask map from a team called Geobingan, G-E-O-B-I-N-G-A-N.

They are the first mask availability map that shows not only each individual pharmacies, but also the trend. You can zoom out and see whether the north side have more supply left than the south side of Taiwan.

You can zoom in to learn about discrepancies within the county that…For example, in the city center of Pingtung, there is more supplies than the more rural parts of Pingtung.

Even though the pharmacies look like they’re evenly distributed, it’s actually if you are an elderly person and rely on public transportation or bicycle, it will actually cost much more time for you in the more rural parts, even though the distance looks the same, because of lack of public transportation and so on.

There’s a legislator, MP Ann Kao, is a new legislator of the Taiwan People’s Party who served as VP of Data Analytics at Foxconn, so she knows something about data science. She cited numbers and projected the Geobingan map in her interpellation to Minister Chen Shih-chung.

Saying that there’s uneven distribution due to supply and demand differences. Minister Chen at the time was at the height of his popularity. He did not jump to defend any of our existing systems.

He simply said 「委員，也許你可以教教我們」, which is in English, “Legislator, teach us.” [laughs] Then promised to immediately revise the system.

The day afterward, Ms. Kao posted on her Facebook – and I quote – “In the wake of yesterday’s questioning is two days improvement,” because we did change the distribution algorithm as per the Geobingan’s insight.

I think this is a good illustration of the opposition party doing a constructive criticism. The revision is only possible, because all the different sites share the same objective facts. It is not like she criticized in the abstract fashion, but rather she pointed to data.

It looks fine in this city or county, but if you zoom in, you find discrepancy and things like that. I think Minister Chen’s response is something, I think it really is a Taiwan model, and that many administrations can learn from.

Which is essentially like the Mandarin I use is, 你行你來. I don’t know how to translate that to English.

That’s right, “Welcome aboard.” I think some people translate it about, “You can, you up.” [laughs] That’s probably not the right translation. [laughs]

OK. By amplifying all the constructive criticisms, it turns out that people are not polarized at all when we share the same objective fact. A lot of the political divisiveness is because people who hold very similar, even the same, values simply were living in different realities.

This OpenAPI participatory accountability is just to make sure that people live in the same reality and can confirm with their own eyes, just like how we, in the voting ballot counting process, hold up each vote for each YouTuber to film the ballot.

It is a way for people to trust whichever YouTuber that was in that particular counting station to reflect correctly on this shared fact. I think that what’s necessary for any liberal democratic or social democratic countries to regain public trust.

That’s right.

That’s exactly right, yes.

We have an entire hour to ourselves.

Functional? Yes.

That’s right. We’ll be sending you a transcript for co-editing. We can embargo the publication of the transcript after you publish. That’s fine.

My office, the Public Digital Innovation Space, is not a ministry. I’m one of the horizontal ministers, at which there’s eight at this moment called 政務委員 or ministers without portfolio, whereas there’s 32 ministries with their own ministers that are vertical.

We in the cabinet – all of us are on the ground floor – work on cross-ministerial issues, that is to say things that are not very clearly cut when it comes to the responsibility and their roles. When there’s emerging digital technologies that threaten to disrupt people’s lives, or whenever there is something like e-sports that none of the ministries have a natural obligation to work on, these become my work.

My three main mandate is open government, meaning that when we don’t know what’s going on, we ask the people what to do, and social innovation, like when people have a better idea, they tell us what to do.

Also use engagement, like when the younger people determine there is a better way forward for the society, we, the older generation, make sure that we realize whatever their ambitions and directions are, like through reverse mentorship. These are my main duties and obligations.

As for achievements, I entered the cabinet upon three conditions. First one is radical transparency. Everything that I chair, including this very interview, is published to the public under the Creative Commons Zero Public Domain License so that everybody can learn from it.

The second is voluntary association. My office is one secondment from each ministry that voluntarily participates. For example, the Foreign Service is Joel, before Joel, Aurora, and so on a rotating basis in the sense that each ministry can send at most one secondment. All innovations are actually done by the very innovative career public service people. That’s the second thing.

The third thing, in addition to radical transparency and voluntary association, is called location independence. Wherever I’m working, I’m working. This is more like our recording studio now. I’m not here most of the time.

I’m mostly in the Social Innovation Lab in the Ren’ai road used to be the Air Force headquarters, or I tour around Taiwan to bring, through telepresence, the 12 ministries related to social innovation to everywhere that’s not as connected to the Taipei City to make sure that we empower the people closest to the pain, so to speak.

My main achievement is, I would say, that these three working conditions, far from being experimental, are now ratified as national-level regulations. For the open government, we have the participation officer network in each ministries, and some municipal government, too.

There are people just like parliamentary officers talking to MPs and media officer talking to the journalists. We have participation officer that talk to hashtags. [laughs] Whenever there’s a trending hashtag, we ensure that we engage the hashtag instead of specific spokesperson, because there’s often no spokesperson for hashtags.

We engage those hashtags with funny memes, humor over rumor, and things like that to ensure that these people, instead of just traveling on outrage, can turn their outrage into co-creative energy. When people complain that nobody knows where to find mask, the mask availability map is created as a social innovation partnership.

When people complain the tax filing system is bad, the people who complain gets invited to do the tax filing experience together, and so on and so forth. That becomes a radical thing. Social innovation also gets ratified as an annual project, co-sponsored by the American Institute in Taiwan for the presidential hackathon.

That’s run by the President’s Office, making sure that every year, we choose five winning teams. We just chose one actually yesterday, the day before, Saturday. We made sure that these five winning teams receive a trophy from the president, which is a micro projector that, when turned on, projects the president handing you a trophy. It’s a self-describing trophy.

Whatever they did in the past three months then will become national agenda for the next 12 months. Executive power as a social innovation hackathon prize. That’s that. For the youth engagement, we also regularize reverse mentorship so that each of the 12 ministers now have one or two social innovators under 35 serving as their reverse mentors.

For example, the Ministry of Labor’s Reverse Mentor, Huang Wei-Xiang, brought the roller skaters champions to the National Day Parade alongside the athletes, and making sure that in the new K-12 education curriculum that technical skills is not chosen as a second choice to academic skills.

Rather, people will have role models that work with them to improve their K-12 community, the school building, and so on. They have a role model that’s not athletic, that’s not academic, but technical to look up to. That’s a pretty good idea that’s realized by our reverse mentor, Huang Wei-Xiang, who’s not even 30 years old when he entered the reverse mentorship cabinet.

My main achievement is just that it works pretty well without me. I could be touring the world giving speech in Berlin or whatever, in Addis Ababa, and the system still functions very well.

The mask availability map that I just alluded to is entirely a social innovation. We certainly did not until 吳展瑋 in Tainan to come up with a mask availability map that would be a procurement.

Instead he just got it on himself, amplified it through the media, and demanded actually that the public sector provide him with a public API, which we did, but also empowers many other map maker such as 江明宗 .

As the Center of our Disease Control, the 疾管家 bot that together serves more than, I think, 10 million people on the first week making sure that people remain calm and collected during the COVID.

These things are pretty much autonomous now. [laughs] I’m helping the President, the Premier, and the team to make sure that in the next coming session that we will propose a digital ministry, council, agency or museum. We haven’t yet…

Maybe not museum, [laughs] but anyway, a dedicated agency that’s on par with any other ministry or council. That is to say, in addition to the horizontal digital minister role, we will also be able to call digital ministry, council or museum that accompanies the role…

In addition to, yes.

My favorite is museum.