Talk with Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang: Social Innovation and the Renovation of Democracy

Description

Abstract:
Open, collective, experimental and sustainable. Taiwan’s first Digital Minister Audrey Tang’s talk will show what happens when people who grew up on the internet get their hands on the building blocks of government. As a self-described “conservative anarchist” and a so-called “white-hat hacker,” Audrey Tang will show how she works with her team to channel greater combinations of intelligence into policy-making decisions and public services delivery. She will also discuss “tech for good” and how Taiwan is “SDG indexing everything.” For more information, please view two recent articles on Apolitical (links below) which help elucidate Audrey and her philosophy.

"Reprogramming power: Audrey Tang is bringing hacker culture to the state"

"Meet the network tearing down walls between departments in Taiwan"

Biography:
AUDREY TANG is known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. In the public sector, Audrey serves on Taiwan National Development Council’s open data committee and K-12 curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project.
Audrey joined the cabinet as Digital Minister on October 1st, 2016. In the private sector, Audrey works as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design. In the third sector, Audrey actively contributes to Taiwan’s g0v (“gov-zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government”.