 Hello, good time everyone. I'm Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister. I'm really happy to be here virtually to answer your questions from the Harvard Business School. First question. Could you talk to us about your early education, formative experiences, and personal journey that led you to your professional career? Gladly. My earliest memory was when I was four years old. It's very formative. I overheard the doctors telling my parents that this child, that's me, have maybe a 50% chance of surviving until the heart surgery. So for the first 12 years of my life before I got a heart surgery to correct the birth defect, my blood flow, oxygen flow, is much reduced. When I feel angry or I feel very happy, I would faint. And so I learned very early on as a survivor skill to be calm, to breathe deeply and intentionally, and also to be nonviolent. And what it also means is that it's instilled in me a norm of publish before I perish. Still to this day, before I go to sleep, I make sure that I publish into the commons. This video, of course, but also the interviews that I got from journalists. And lobbyists visits, even the internal cross-ministerial meetings that I chair. I make sure that I publish everything into the commons so that people who want to remix, to work based on whatever we have worked on, would not have to wait until my permission, because after I may not wake up the next day, and also not wait for 75 years or something for the copyright to expire. Now, this norm works also very well with the early internet norms. While I was recovering from the surgery in the early 90s, I encountered this nowadays we're called open access movement. The archive ARXIV community, the early through software communities, are all predicated upon the idea of open knowledge of people sharing with random strangers. And I remember reading those preprints, writing to the researchers, receiving an email and thought, well, I don't have to wait until I get a PhD or something, I can contribute to science. And also the textbooks that I was reading in high school seems woefully out of date, at least 10 years out of date. So I told my teachers I want to quit school and start my education on the web. And surprisingly, the head of my school said, okay, go for it. So when I was 15, and later on, I would found many internet startups. One of the first startup in foreign work on C2C auctions, something like eBay in the early internet. And I also participated in the standard making community, the IETF, which is based on the idea of rough consensus civic participation and running code. So this became my professional career. I got very interested into the phenomena of swift trust on the internet. Why do people trust random strangers over the internet, when it would easily take months of face to face interaction before the internet for people to do something together. But also swift distrust. Why would digital design that is antisocial render previous friends into enemies? Why would it lead to polarization and conspiracy theories? So that fascinates me. And in a sense, that was my research topic and my professional career for the past 16 years and counting. The burst of the current digital democracy movement seemed to have originated with the sunflower movement in 2014. How did that happen? Well, in March 18 that year, a bunch of students occupied Thomas Parliament building in Stadia, nonviolently for around three weeks. At a time, the MPs were refusing to deliberate substantially the cross-strait service and trade agreement with Beijing. And so the students were doing a demo, I guess. It's a demonstration in a sense of showing how half a million people in the street, many more online, can have a point-by-point conversation around the trade agreement with the help of around 20 NGOs. For example, in a corner around the occupied parliament, people were deliberating around whether to allow into our new 4G infrastructure, the so-called private sector from the Beijing regime. Now, of course, the entire world would have similar conversations around 5G a few years down the line. But at the same time, Taiwan was the only place that I know of that have this digitally facilitated conversation around this topic and many other topics. Now, I'm part of the GZeroV or GovZero team, which worked with the cable and radio and power providers to make sure that people who could not make it to the occupied parliament nevertheless participate substantially to the conversation. Not only we set up the live streaming about the occupied parliament, so that facts spread faster than rumors, we also work on tools that allow people to enter their company registration number or whatever business they're in and find out which part of the CSSTA affects them. In short, we were providing the fabric based by objective data that allowed listening and scale to happen. And after three weeks, the occupied was a success. The head of the parliament ratified the common values, the common demands of the occupiers. And at the end of that year, in the Mero election, all the Mero candidates that supported the sampler movement were elected, sometimes surprisingly even to themselves, and the people who did not support the civic movement simply did not get elected as mayors. And after the election, including myself, many civic tech people and facilitators were then recruited into the cabinet as reverse mentors, young people that nevertheless mentors the cabinet members into the listening experiences that we set up during the samplower to make sure that on emerging topics such as Uber, so-called sharing economy or gig economy, a similar digital democracy movement can be employed to make sure that the taxi drivers, Uber drivers, passengers of all sorts, and so on are having a real face-to-face as well as online conversation to settle the common norms around while ride-sharing at that time. And we would went on to go through the V-Taiwan projects and the hackathon to tackle around two dozen national-level laws and regulations and successfully passed them as bills or regulations. So that was my early experiment into e-rulemaking before getting, I guess, promoted from a reverse mentor to full-time minister in the same office in October 2016. What in your opinion led a one-time event, a very unique Occupy movement, to become a catalyst for a change in a way that the government deals with citizens? Well, I think nonviolence is the most important one. Because of its nonviolent nature, we showed that it is actually possible to de-escalate what would have been a large protest in many other jurisdictions around the world into something that is co-creating by showing that through the live-streaming nobody would like to incite a violence by showing that through real-time transcription and translations we can include voices that could not make easy use of websites. We made sure that the career public service see the sunflower model as a legitimate way of rulemaking. So, in a sense, by agreeing to become reverse mentors, we were saying that we're not working against the system, but neither are we working for the government. We're working with the government and want to invite the government to trust the citizens. And this is the most important thing, because once the career public service can see that citizens are trustworthy, that instead of just noise and protests, the citizens who care can often bring about very innovative solutions to the common issues. Then they would be okay to say, yeah, about this Uber thing, the Ministry of Transportation was having one idea, the Ministry of Labor were thinking very differently, the Ministry of Economy thinking also very differently, but that is fine. It is okay to move from the traditional consultation stage, which is only after the agenda is set to the pre-agenda setting stage, where the ministries were all having very different agenda, and we simply asked the citizens, okay, what do you feel about a private driver with no professional license driving to work, picking up strangers that they met through an app and charging them for it? How do you feel? So by moving from the interpretation or regulation-based consultation to the consultation about authentic experiences and feelings, we make sure that the public service sees this as something that is essentially risk-free. When people share their own feelings, you may feel happy and they may feel upset, and that is entirely fine. After a while, usually three weeks, we see very plainly that most people agree with most each other's feelings on most of the things, most of the time. It was just that on the more anti-social corners of social media, people were spending their attention on the most divisive part, the ideologies around particular things, but through the sunflower V-Taiwan-inspired facilitation, we simply create pro-social and safe spaces. You can think of it as a public square, or a ta-ho, or a park, or a campus in the digital realm, and then people tend to converge on good enough consensus instead of divisive ideologies. So for the career public service, this improves their legitimacy instead of taking away their legitimacy. How does a citizen interact with the different systems and processes that comprise digital democracy? Well, in Taiwan, there's a single website, join.gov.tw, that enjoys more than 30 million visits in the country of 23 million, that combines participatory budgeting, petitioning, regulatory pre-announcement, budget overview and accountability, auditing many other things. So for example, petition. As soon as a proposal collects more than 5,000 electronic signatures, we hold the meetings with the petitioner, and twice a month, the participation offices, the people in each and every ministry in charge of engaging the public, vote. And the top-voted issues are given to collaborative interagency meetings, and we actually travel to where the petitioners are, if it's a local issue, and start a multi-stakeholder consultation similar to the vetoing process that enables people to co-create, not just protest. For example, people under 18 were very active on the joint platform, one of the most popular petitions to ban plastic straws in our national identity drink takeout, bubble tea. We started by someone who just turned 17. And there's also a petition back in 2017 about the tax filing experience, which were, and I quote, exclusively hostile to the petitioner on Mac and Linux systems. So we co-created the tax filing experience in 2018. But because the participation offices are from all different ministries, so when we talk about the tax reform, for example, it could be the Coast Guard participation officer holding the breakout groups. But when we talk about the fishing and ocean policy, well, it could be the tax agency participation officer holding the facilitation. And the reason why is that although they are professionally trained public servants, they are on the citizen side. The Coast Guard perhaps also file tax themselves. The tax agency person also likes to fish and surf in their spare time. And so for the citizens that participate in the online face-to-face conversation, it's just like the participation office are one of them, right? They're one of the citizens. They could actually start a petition themselves and their pseudonym and enabled us to listen across silos and build to foster a co-creative culture. Of course, it doesn't need to be on the national platform. Join the GOV, the TWG0V has its own platform. Join the GOV, the TWG0V. So just change the O to a zero and you get into the shadow government where people look at the digital services by the government that ends in something GOV, TWG and make shadow forks of the official versions under open source and creative common licenses as something that GOV, TWG0V. So for example, the budget visualization was the inaugural GOV0 project. Because it's open source, we merged it in 2016 into the join platform and during the pandemic, not just the mask visualization platform, but also the contact tracing platform based on SMS in a privacy enhancing multi-party design were all contributed by people in the join the GOV, TWG0V platform that enabled Taiwan, a country of 23 million people to enjoy at the time of recording less than 1,000 casualties during the pandemic without a single day of lockdowns. So we relied on the social sector to contribute to the digital public infrastructures. How do you maintain a sense of empowerment? Well, I believe that instead of asking the citizen to trust the government, the government should trust the citizens and we show the trust by improving the bandwidth of democracy and reducing the latency of democracy. For example, back in 2020 when we were rationing out the masks, we make sure that we publish the real-time inventory of more than 6,000 pharmacies so that people queuing in line can see immediately whether this pharmacy is running out of masks and they should queue somewhere else. Now, if we publish only the statistics every quarter or even every week, then it is not enough bandwidth. Early, when we publish a power collection every 30 seconds, can people build hundreds of different tools like a distributed ledger that showed via chatbots, via maps, via voice assistants that helps people who were queuing in line to reduce their fear, uncertainty and doubt when it comes to availability of masks. But also, when bias is detected, the latency, the time between the detection and the fix is also paramount. If it takes a quarter to fix an issue, then people would not feel empowered when they point out the problems. Indeed, very early on when we rationed out the mask, we erroneously thought that the pharmacies aligned perfectly with population centers, so each person in Taiwan on average is of a very similar distance to a available mask and we thought it was good. But according to the civic technologists at an open street map community, that was not the case because not everyone owned a helicopter. So what's the same distance on the map is very different compared to the opportunity cost. If someone has to take a bus, for example, versus metro or driving, it all ends in very different accessibility. So by the time someone in the rural area reached the pharmacy, even though it's the same distance on the map, it already ran out of mask. So it's inequity. So after the open street map community's picture gets surfaced by a member of the parliament, N.P. N. Gao, to the minister, Chen Zhizhong of Helsinki, the minister simply said, well, legislator teaches. And that was not rectorical because N.P. Gao was VP of data analytics at Foxconn, so she knows something about data. And so she did provide very valuable suggestions. And just after 24 hours, we changed the way we distribute the mask to the pharmacies based on the actual opportunity cost. And we also introduced pre-registration and collection on 24-hour convenience stores, more than 12,000 of them. And so early through real-time open data, open API, can we turn those critiques into co-creators? And we make sure, no matter whether it's mask rationing or the SMS-based contact tracing, we do it in a way that's swift and safe. It's swift because it saves everyone's time, but it's safe and harmless because the pre-registration based on apps and website and so on does not substitute the queuing in pharmacy. So if you do not want to use a website, you can always walk to your local pharmacy or local convenience store as well. And the contact tracing are very successful based on SMS and QR code. If you do not like to use a phone, always you can ride your way or step your way into a venue. Again, it's all by harmless coexistence. How do you get powerful government leaders to pay attention and actually listen in a way that scales? Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, said a very inspiring statement in 2016 in her inauguration speech. She said, Before we think of democracy as a showdown between two opposing values, but now democracy must become a conversation between many diverse values. So by focusing on the common ground between the diverse positions and by focusing on the social innovations that can foster those common ground in a way that is good enough for everyone, that everyone can live with, this is very powerful. Instead of taking this side or that side, in a digital democracy, we can actually listen to all the different sides in a pro-social social media. So back to the Uber example in 2015, for example, instead of debating about abstract ideologies like is this sharing economy, is it gig economy, and so on, we simply focus on very specific examples. Someone who drives to work, will pick up strangers, they met over the phone charging in for it without driver license, that's professional, and so on. And so it turns out that everyone feels pretty much the same around these issues. So people care deeply about not undercutting existing taxi fare. People care about registration and also about insurance. People care about empowering local temples and churches so that the co-ops have the same access to the search pricing and app-based dispatch that Uber enjoys. And really, nobody is against that. Everyone can live with it. So listening in a way that scales is by empowering the career public service with the sort of tools that produces this common ground. And once the government leaders know that this is a reliable way to get to the common ground which we have proven with over 100 collaborative meetings across sectors, not a single one turned violent, not a single one turned into an ideological debate. And so because of this track record, it's now as easy as starting a survey, starting a poll or something, except this survey or poll is co-created by the people who are closest to the frontline, closest to pain. And this, of course, is the power of social sector that is an implicit outside game. So at the end of the day, the government leaders do not adhere to the norms that pretty much everyone, regardless of party, have already worked on. Well, then maybe they will lose the next mayoral election. And this is why all the foreign major parties in Taiwan have signed on the open parliament partnership agreement and they compete on being even more open, even more transparent, even more democratic. And nobody want to go back to the battle days of just a few people speaking to millions of people, but no way for millions of people to listen to one another. What would you recommend as guiding principles for applying the lessons you have learned to a larger and more complex society, even for global cooperation? Well, but we're already part of a global cooperation around digital public infrastructures. In addition of serving as a digital minister at TW, I also serve as a board member to seven social innovation organizations across the globe to work on democratization in various other jurisdictions. So it's a little bit like B-Water, where you don't have to call it the Taiwan model, you can call it the New Zealand model or the Estonian model or the Icelandic model. Indeed, the joint platform's e-petition was a direct adaptation of Bateria Kavík from Iceland and our participatory budgeting design is heavily inspired by Kansu and Desedim from Madrid and Barcelona. And we also learned the Polis system, which is the Uber resolution system, the process of social media from Seattle and so on. So it's already international. Now, we also include non-national jurisdictions, such as Ethereum. So I serve as a fellow board member with Vitalik Buterin in Radical Exchange and we apply the principles we have learned from the Ethereum jurisdiction to Taiwan as our presidential hackathon. For four years now, we applied quadratic voting, which is first prototyped in Ethereum into our national agenda setting around the sustainable development goals. So each year, more than 200 different civic tech teams propose their ideas about SDGs and each person with a Taiwanese SMS number receive 99 points and you can allocate them quadratically to your pet project, but you will soon find out that if you vote one vote that costs you one point, two votes, four points, three votes, nine points. So with 99 points, the most you can do is vote nine votes, which costs 81. And with 18 left, you will probably look at some other projects to find some synergies and then maybe you do a four, which is 16 points and then you have two left. So you're incentivized to look at at least four projects and you can also take some of the points back. Maybe you do a seven and seven and so on. And so after the voting, we discover that because the marginal return, the impact is the same as marginal cost of each vote. People tend to feel they have won regardless of the top 20 outcome of the quadratic voting because out of the five or seven projects they have voted or some made it to the top 20, even the ones that did not, what they know, which teams in the top 20, they want to contribute to because the synergies revealed by quadratic voting is public. And so because of this, people then focus on building the cross sectoral partnerships to realize the presidential hackathon team's goals and after a few months of prototyping locally, five teams receive this trophy from our president, Nguyen, who is the shape of the tire one with the micro projector underneath. If you turn it on, it projects the president giving you the trophy and promising whatever you did locally for the past three months and validated by quadratic voting will become public policy in the next fiscal year with all the personnel, budget, and also regulatory support required. And this is how we scale the local social innovations through a novel voting system from the Ethereum jurisdiction in a way that scales nationally. And in the past few years, we also have a international track. What advice would you give to students graduating from Harvard Business School on how they can make a difference in the world in the next 10 years? Well, be the difference you want to see in the world. And whenever you feel that there's a right side and there's a wrong side, try to think in non-binary. Try to take both, take all the sides. Indeed, in my life of work, if I see that a few sides are obviously correct and some other side is obviously wrong, I always think that it's my problem. I would spend time with the side that I couldn't argue for and spend time with them on a ethnographic not just hanging out with them until I can also see the world from their side and argue their case. And this is important because only then can we leave no one behind and say that the co-creation we just did is good enough for everyone. And if it's too polarized, if there's too much tension in my mind, I would simply sleep on it. I would read all the materials without passing judgment. And then I just go to sleep without setting alarm clock. And after eight hours or nine hours, if it's really complex, I almost always wake up with, well, a holistic view on things so that I can say, oh, this is actually a common ground between all those different sides. And so I would recommend people who want to be change agents, who want to make difference in the world, practice non-binary thinking and take all the sides and sleep on it until you make it. What should leaders do to ensure that new technologies are used for pro-social goals other than to exacerbate the inequality and lack of cohesion in society? Well, my recommendation is to trust your fellow citizens. Whatever product or service you're working on, instead of thinking your fellow citizens as consumers or as subjects and so on, make sure that they also participate in making the refinements but also surprising combinations, mods, modifications to your service and products. And this requires a change in thinking from delivering the perfect solution to just a good enough one. A good enough solution is required so that the communities can engage with you. If everything you do is perfect, well, there really is no room for the communities to enter. So publish early, release often, and make sure that whenever you see a innovation that builds upon yours, well, instead of saying it's not invented here, simply say, oh, we trust our fellow citizens. They have a better idea. So it's the social sector that sets the norm. It is the public sector that amplifies the norm and it's the private sector leaders that makes those norms stick by making sure that they can scale out, they can scale up, and they can scale deeply. Based on those privacy enhancing, democracy affirming technologies, we can then create a paradigm of plurality where each and every one of us is open to new designs and innovations from our descendants, from the next generations instead of aiming to maximize our control or maximize some individual liberty or maximize any arbitrary thing and foreclosing the possibilities of our next generations. So to conclude, I would read my job description which tells the difference between an IT maximalist thinking to a pluralist thinking based on digitalization, goes like this. When we see the Internet of Things, let's make it an Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here. Thank you for listening. Live long and prosper.