Interview with Audrey Tang, Taiwanese Digital Minister and Tech Innovator
Audrey Tang is a pioneer in the digital world. From a young age she was passionate about technology, dropping out of high school to pursue a career in software and working in Silicon Valley. She built up experience, eventually working for Apple, and in 2016 was named to the Taiwanese cabinet as the Digital Minister, the youngest minister without portfolio ever and the first transgender person in the top executive cabinet. Audrey Tang’s resume also includes numerous software programs, involving the PERL language among others. For more information about Ms. Tang, visit her wikipedia page or this Vice article.
Rana Myneni: Why did you choose to take such an unconventional start to your professional career, dropping out of high school and working in startups instead?
Audrey Tang: I encountered this website called Archive.org and that’s ARXIV, and it’s a preprint website, meaning that people post their journal papers to the peer review. Before it gets published, they post it to their Internet for people to discuss. Because I was doing a science fair project when I was 14, working on artificial intelligence and natural language processing, I had to consult a lot of those preprint papers. Now, I remember distinctly telling my principal at the time that instead of going through the university, college, post-doc, and so on, I actually wrote emails to the leading researchers of that field asking them questions, asking for clarifications and so on, and they all replied very kindly. Now they didn’t know that I was 14 years old, they didn’t know that my English was not that good at all. It took me ages to compose that email and so on to them and just a fellow researcher. Because of this, a landscape opened before me instead of going through the high institutional process to take 10 years or more to get into their lab. I feel that I am in their lab already and we’re actually doing productive work together. I remember my principal hearing that story and thought about it for a minute and said, “OK, from tomorrow on you don’t have to go to school anymore, and I’ll cover for you.” This is actually very happy story that instilled in me a certain optimism to the flexibility of bureaucracy.
RM: You started an IT company and you were a digital advisor to Apple, and you are currently the Digital Minister of Taiwan. What importance do you give digital innovation in our society, and how do you translate that to your ministry?
AT: The point is not to focus on technology. If we’re talking in technologist terms like Internet of Things, or machine learning, virtual reality, or whatever, these are instruments where people project their own fears, uncertainty, and doubt in psychological projections on these tools. I call myself a poetician because I don’t give or take orders. What I do is I write poetry. That’s my main work. The first one as digital minister is when the HR here asked me for a job description. Taiwan didn’t have a digital minister before. They asked for a job description to put somewhere on the website to explain what the post is really about. That’s the first time that I sat down and started seriously thinking how to not talk about technology in technologist terms. I’ll read you my job description. The job description 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. Whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember that plurality is here." It’s poetic in a sense that it brings people’s false projections about technology into something that’s obviously shared no matter which technological cap you’re on.
RM: Could you talk a little about the responsibilities of your digital ministry?
AT: My office’s role – I’m officially the Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation, Open Government, and Youth Engagement – is to make sure that the best ideas, the brightest ideas, are amplified throughout our network of many social innovation units around Taiwan so that, for example, when people in Taiwan think, “Oh, it may be a good idea to visualize the pharmacies’ mask distribution,” we make sure that all the pharmacies in Taiwan publish their stock level of a medical mask every 30 seconds at a time. Now, it’s every three minutes because nobody queues to buy mask anymore. In any case, this real-time participatory ledger enabled everybody to take part in the governance. Instead of trusting the government to make good use of public resources, the government instead trusts the civil society, trusts the entire society to make good use of the shared common data so that they can form the data coalition, data collaboratives, that make the analysis, that make the best decisions and share those decisions, and also take care of people with blindness who cannot view a map into voice assistance, into chat bots, and things like that. The main idea is that we should support but not control anything that is a data collaborative by the civil society. We run annual Presidential Hackathon, where the top five social innovation teams get a trophy from our President, Tsai Ing-wen, now in her second term in a couple weeks. The trophy is a micro projector. If you turn on, it projects the image of a president handing you the trophy, promising whatever you did in the past three months will become national policy in the next 12 months. We do shorter hackathons as well, like the cohack.tw, which is specifically around coronavirus mitigation and transitioning to a post-coronavirus world. Again, we use technology such as Polis, that clusters people’s shared reflections and opinion so we can listen at scale without being swamped by people who AstroTurf or by trolls or things like that. It’s basically a troll-proof way to get people’s rough consensus on any divisive or potentially divisive issues. That’s another thing that we do. We also respond to the e-petitions. Whenever, wherever people – that includes residents of foreign nationality and people under 18 years old – think of a great idea and mobilize 5,000 people to support them, such as banning plastic straws in the take-out of the national identity drink, the bubble tea. We make sure that we have a ministerial point-by-point response and a face-to-face collaborative meeting that take care of all the stakeholders, including the makers of such one-use utensils to make sure that everybody can transition into circular design and so on. I haven’t mentioned the reverse mentors yet, but that is the basic idea of this portfolio.
RM: You are a leader in the open-source software world. How does open-source software encourage progress more effectively than commercial software?
AT: Open source is a national priority. We directly fund, for example, the Taiwan Open Source Software Collaborative thing, twoss.io which mostly showcases two existing ecosystem, why it’s a good idea to have open source contributors, what kind of open source solutions have worked. Whereas before, only proprietary software has occupied those positions, and how those shiny new technologies, because of accountability requirements, watching governments and so on, almost have to be open source. That concept has to be explained over and again to existing players, and so on. It is mostly an industry awareness project. You can find the relevant details at twoss.io. The other thing that we focus on is in education. We make sure that in the basic education -- that’s to say K to 12 -- when the students are exposed to digital technologies for the first time, they own it in a kind of personal computing kind of way. That means that the schools are highly encouraged to use open source solutions. If the students, after graduation, choose to use proprietary software, that’s their choice, but we’re not going to create vendor lock-in as part of basic education. That covers with the broadband as human right and the national computation platform making. It’s very easy for the students to experiment on GPU and related technologies. It means that we think it will be a democratizing force, instead of leaving parts of the population behind. That’s the basic education. The new curriculum, embedding these values will be rolling out next August. It’s called the 108 curriculum.You can find all those details, including how we’re moving from a skill set-based education to a character-based education. Because these are being ultimately the way, but these are core to cure humanity. If we focus on sustainability and things like that, are all part of the new curriculum. You can find that in the K to 12 new curriculum website, at, I think it’s NAER, the website. That’s open source, also plays a large part. Finally, and more personally, interested in getting the procurement process to be open by default. It is not just open source, but actually the publication of the procurement data, and making sure that the open API, which is a Linux Foundation standard, is embedded to the same degree as the accessibility standards. So that, for example, now when their government procures a website, it needs to be available, not just to sighted people, but also for people with blindness. Then we say, in the same vein, machines are kind of blind people, too. If you don’t make it accessible to machines through APIs and make it human only, then the vendor could be disqualified for being unprofessional, or for charging extra to do an API. Basically, API-first procurement through government digital service guidelines. That’s something I think, longer term, will have an equally if not more impact than open source procurement. If you buy open source, but then it depends on a huge proprietary database, that open source is not very useful. On the other hand, if you build a large proprietary interface, but then mandate that it has to talk through open APIs, then it makes it very easy for MSMEs, for medium and small businesses, to build around the public API, even though the core may be proprietary. That’s the overview.
RM: One project that you’re involved in is g0v. What impact has it had on the Taiwanese government?
AT: Gov zero is just an idea. It’s just a domain hack. There is no membership per se. People in Italy, if they want to start doing something like that in Italy, they don’t have to ask anybody in Taiwan. They just started doing it. I would describe it as more of a meme than anything. It’s just a mind virus that does. You can find people working with the same gov zero ethos in the US, in both coasts, in Canada, in Italy as I described, in France, and so on. The branding itself is public domain, so anyone can call themself gov zero, as long as they are doing something that is in the open, and that concerns public benefit. Gov zero is just a model that promotes people initiating innovations that are alternatives to public service, that can then be adopted by the governments that service, to become a collaborative governance system. We actually don’t write code, unless there’s an absolute need to do so. In the beginning, the g0v movement mostly run on Hackpad, which is a system that’s already written by a startup. Hackpad gets acquired by Dropbox. Because of open source, then we switched mostly to a team called HackMD. HackMD, MD for markdown, is now a preferred form of collaboration over a Hackpad. We work with both teams, to ensure a good transition from g0v.hackpad to g0v.hackmd. This is just one of the many examples. It used to be that people in g0v was very interested in liquid feedback, the liquid feedback, which is a very early prototype of the thing that you are doing now, and then we discovered Loomio, which works somewhat better. For a while, people used Loomio quite a bit, and then we discovered pol.is, and so a lot of people start now working on pol.is instead of Loomio. Of course, all those tools have their places depending on the size and the use of the teams, so we’re not wed to any specific technology. We have good relationships with Enspiral, or with mySociety, or with The Governance Lab or the usual suspects, Omidyar, now Luminate, that works with these technologies.
RM: One method you use as a minister is taking full responsibility for the actions of employees under you. How does this further digital innovation?
AT: We want to make sure that whenever there is a multi-stakeholder situation, each relevant ministry can respond swiftly without fear because they know that there are existing ways to reduce risk for everybody involved. They can respond without any feeling of uncertainty because they understand even if they say honestly that we don’t have an idea of what to do of those emerging technology, they know that the civil society is willing to co-create. Finally, there’s no doubt as of whether trusting people this much is a good idea because it’s institutionalized as a national level principle. [Our goal is also to] improve the image of career public service because it used to be career public servants are anonymous. Their ministries get the credit, and they take the blame usually, and it’s not only a Taiwan problem. Participation offices as well as any public servant that take place into this direction conversation with people, people see that it’s really the public service serve the public. Not just the minister. This really improves the trust between the career public servant, the civil service, and the civil society. However, as for politicians, I think it enabled a more accurate view instead of a caricature on politicians. It enabled a more evidence based view. Whether it’s a positive or a negative feeling or effect, that’s up for every citizen to decide. We’re not painting a positive rosy picture.
RM: You are followed across the world. How are you promoting environmental and responsible innovation?
AT: We asked smaller companies to voluntarily disclose [sustainable practices]. They’re not under any legal obligation. They’re not publicly traded anyway, but if they do do so, then we prefer them in our public contracting. Also, if they’re in the supply chain of larger companies that do have to disclose such social or environmental procurements, and they reach maybe NT$3 million, I think this year, I personally go out and give an award. They’re also listed on the free online catalogue, and so on. We’ll help them to promote, to match make them with CSR partnerships, and also encourage the social environmental buying through the Buying Power awards. That’s all in the MSME, the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency. They too are converted to the SDGs. They actually are wearing this T shirt all the time. We make it completely opt in. We are not giving tax incentives, otherwise there will be a revolt. We’re not giving tax incentives. We’re only doing match making, cross promotion, and recognition. When the President gives an award, it’s not a monetary prize. It’s basically trying to foster a new norm, but there’s no penalty comparatively to people who are not opting in yet.
RM: Your ministry and Taiwan in general are big players in the Artificial Intelligence world. Where do you see AI in the future?
AT: I think there’s two things. First is that the idea of digital twin previously require a very costly infrastructure to set up, will probably become pervasive with 5G technology. So that, first of all, we don’t have to look at two-dimensional representations of one another now. We will probably just scan ourselves into extended and augmented reality so that we can feel that we’re in the same room with a much lower latency, a much higher fidelity. That essentially brings the online social norms directly overlapping it with the offline social norms. It is essential that this kind of digital twin of not only our public infrastructures, our cities, and so on, but also ourselves – our online persona and so on – all this need to be accurately build in a way that respects the human dignity and the societal norms that makes people comfortable of sharing with their friends. Instead of just being in a matrix, literally, like in that movie. That is the main thing I think we need to work on with this post-5G era. That’s the first thing about pervasive, immersive computing and ambient computing. That’s one. The second thing I would like to highlight is the data collaboratives. The data collaboratives, we already see, because of the pandemic’s requirements. In Taiwan, we built them, of course, with the controllership firmly in the social sector. We also see in other places that, because of pandemic, they’re justifying much more state surveillance, state control, and so on. In other places, it’s in the private sector, with very fragmented governance relationship.I think this governance, as outlined by I think that there’s a book called “Surveillance Capitalism” on that need to be more widely read and understood. In the next 10 years, we will probably see all those three different models of data governance be amplified even more by the pervasive AIoT technology that I just alluded to. These governance models will probably go back and re-inform the ideas of constitutional democracy to redefine what democracy really is. When people already accept the data governance by algorithm or by data, then it essentially weakens the legal protection and access to justice to only the people who understand open source code, actually. We become like lawyers in this new era. If we don’t democratize the competence of the civic right education that people receive when they’re just primary schoolers, if we don’t do that for algorithmic governance, then even the best-designed liberal democracies risk becoming authoritarian or even totalitarian in the next 10 years.
RM: Your ideas on revamping the educational system, specifically customizing education for each kid, is revolutionary. What steps are you currently taking to implement your ideas?
AT: In Taiwan, we deliberately say digital competence not literacy because we want children to be producers, not just consumers of media. In the same vein, we call what the Western World call software engineers. In Taiwan, it’s called program designers. We deliberately choose the word design because this is far more gender neutral than the term engineer. Because of that, as soon as we do that, and it’s many years ago, there’s actually more women in programming than men in Taiwan because designers, mostly women. Of course, we have the reverse problem, we have to incentivize the boys. In any case, such deliberate choosing of language, of protocol, of the social norms is essential in encouraging more people to just go to the places where their curiosity lead them and their sense of fun lead them rather than being labeled as someone who break out of the stereotype.