Open Source Beats Authoritarianism: Audrey Tang, Taiwan's first Digital Minister, on why strong public and civic digital infrastructures are key to advancing democracy

Audrey Tang has served as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister since 2016, by which time she already was known for revitalizing the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as for building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin.

In the public sector, she served on the Taiwan National Development Council’s open data committee and basic education curriculum committee and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. In the private sector, she worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.

In the social sector, she actively contributes to g0v (“gov zero”), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to “fork the government.”

rustydomino, 2 months ago

I’m am a big fan of Audrey Tang but there is a little bit of spin in the interview. For instance she says that there is no anti vax faction in the government. That is true. But it’s also true that there are plenty of antivaxxers in Taiwan. And it’s also true that the vaccine rollout was not great. That may be beyond her role as the CIO but she’s still a cabinet member. That said, Taiwan’s pandemic response was something I only wish we had in the US.

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