RFI: For foreign media, it seems very strange that a hacker have become a councilor in the government. How do you get from the civic tech to a seat of someone in the government, or an official in some ways?

Audrey: My English title is actually Digital Minister, so it's minister not councilor — just being pedantic here, sorry.

Audrey: In any case, I been doing kind of unofficially the digital minister's job, actually, over the past almost two years now. Among people in the administration they sometimes joke about this as an apprentice or understudy, now just getting the the official role, but it's kind of true. Because while we didn't have a digital minister, we did have Jaclyn Tsai as the cyberspace minister. And then before her also the ICT minister that was Simon Chang. And so in many ways their job description, while not exactly the same as mine, nevertheless paved a lot of the way in the job definition of what I'm doing. The two of them also opened up a lot of their work in a kind of crowdsourced way. I was one of the many in that crowd who contributed to their work, on open data and open governance in particular. So I've been practicing for almost two years now for this role.

RFI: As the Digital Minister, what are your goals, the main goals? What are your fighting for? Your main objectives?

Audrey: Well, I am not really fighting for anything. You know that I am a conservative anarchist, and the "conservative" part means that I want to conserve something. So it's exactly the other way around.

Audrey: I do want to conserve human values like inclusion, equality, and things like that, in the digital era.

Audrey: Being conservative also means that I don't want these to be inflicted upon us as a sudden change that caught people unaware or unnoticed. So mostly, it's just to ease the transition from the paper culture to a digital culture, and also to make sure that everything was communicated in a way that people can be included — that is what inclusion means: It means that people get to understand and to access and also participate, in the agenda that aregoing to shape everybody's life — which is the digital culture we're talking about.

RFI: What are the relationship between the democracy today and digital tools? Is there a specific relations between between democracy and space and these tools digital tools and new technology?

Audrey: Well I mean there's a book. You asked a a book-length question and I did contribute to a book that I just received as a draft. Actually it's for Habitat III, the U.N. habitat conference that's going to take place I think real soon now, like in a few weeks. So my contribution to that book is in the chapter about scalable listening through ICT-enabled scalable participation.

Audrey: Listening is something that we do, right? You're doing it right now. And I was doing just a couple seconds ago. I think information tools enables us to do this at scale, because without these kinds of tools, it doesn't scale scales to maybe 20 people.

Audrey: So it used to be that if you have more than 20 people, there's some hierarchy, there's some delegation, and it has to become representative, right? And so what we're doing essentially is to use "re-presentation" tools to remove the representation layers between the different scales, to have different kinds of people to participate — with audio, with visual, with streaming, textual and VR modes — and this multi-modal participation, I think is really the key, because everybody is has a particular mode of learning of thinking of listening.

Audrey: So when we say "listening", of course this is metaphoric, right? Some people read better. Some people imagine better, some people use tangible models better. Only with the right tools can we translate — automatically, sometimes — between those methods of cognition. With that, people can deliberate or think deeply or listen to each other much better than previous methods, which only favored people with certain cognitive abilities... people who could eventually become ministers.

Audrey: I mean, this is not optimal, but it was necessary. What we are doing now is to try to build a new substrate, on top of which there's no such necessity for people to rely on abstractions — symbols and so on — to serve as a representational layer that much. So I'm essentially working myself out of a job.

RFI: You can say that you're into making "going between the people and authority" more direct than the authority does now, so and the people can make a good dialogue?

Audrey: Yeah. There must, of course, still be a substrate like the basic infrastructure that sustains this kind of dialogue, just like this space, right? So there must be a place for infrastructures, somehow. But it was too vertically bound in the democracy, because it only provided the infrastructure of voting, accepting only maybe three bits every four years of signals. So I'm not really you know challenging voting per se, but challenging the bitrate of voting. I'm not saying that voting is bad. I think is so good, we should do it more, and do it in various different forms. I hope that answers your question.

RFI: Yeah it's a little bit complicated for foreigners who are in the system. Everything going on in Taiwan and going around the g0v and the relation between civic tech and governments. Can you explain in a few words what's your view for people, for French people, for foreigners in the western world? What is in your opinion going on right now? And this is related to my question before: Is there a big change right now using civic tech, open data, as related to democracy to the governments rather recent elections? Is there something like a new wind blowing on Taiwan on power, on the relation between people and democracy? How are you feeling about that?

Audrey: Sure. So my feeling is that it's not a drastic change. The Sunflower movement, we said it was a demo. A demonstration, not just in a protesting sense, but in a "demo" sense: we can talk about a trade service agreement using internet and computers as facilitation and assistive substrates, for people to engage in meaningful discussion that eventually became a set of consensus and then was then ratified or at least agreed upon by the head of parliament at that time. So it was a demonstration, that this kind of deliberation really works to some degree. And so I would say that's not so big a change, because of course after the Occupy, the MPs still go to work. It's not like that we moved away from the representative democracy altogether. But it is a demonstration: for one specific policy issue, it is possible to talk for all the aspects of it around outside outsiders many see us. It started with about 12 civil society organizations and ends up with more than 20 CSOs. Each CSO in the occupied area was debating around one part of the trade services agreement, and the larger constitutional issues around that. It was a scalable demonstration for sure.

Audrey: After that, we're trying to test all sort of policy issues and try to find out for which kind of policy issues is this technique applicable? For which kinds of issues is this may be too early in the game? Which kind of new technology we still need to develop? Because for issues like the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport, you would need a lot of new technology to help the CNDP to have a meaningful discussion, and it's the same in Taiwan too. We also have an airport, for the record.

Audrey: So for issues like that, I would say it's a slow but steady progress. But there is a willingness of people to pay attention to this progress. I would not say this is the only political trend in Taiwan. But it is something that is growing very steadily.

RFI: Can you tell us, for foreign media again and people will read our articles or radio, to do a review? Can you explain to us how you how did you become a hacker?

Audrey: Sure. Well, a hacker is someone who makes new tools in new situations, instead of relying on old tools for new situations which doesn't quite work that well. So I first encountered computers when I was 8 and I started programming on paper — that was very well documented — then I finally got a computer. Then I saw a video game, an educational video game that teaches fractions, and then I wanted to make something like that but not exactly like it. So when my parents said, OK, should we buy this game for education for my little brother? I was like, no it's not quite the way as I would like to code it. So I think that's that's when I started becoming a hacker. It's about seeing something that's pretty well made, but want to make it better. And then, to learn whatever it takes to make it better.