How Taiwan is Using Technology to Foster Democracy (with Digital Minister Audrey Tang)

“Democracy is a technology. Like any […] technology, it gets better when more people strive to improve it,” says Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister. Minister Tang joins Azeem Azhar to discuss how the Taiwanese Government is using the Internet as a space for civic participation, dialogue, and consensus building.

They also discuss:

• How the open Internet helped Taiwan proactively tackle the Covid-19 outbreak at the beginning of the pandemic.


• Algorithmic co-governance, and how it can keep social media platforms in check.


• How the values of radical transparency and digital openness shape new forms of decision-making.

Further reading:

• “How Taiwan’s Unlikely Digital Minister Hacked the Pandemic” (Wired, 2020)


• “How Taiwan’s ‘Civic Hackers’ Helped Find A New Way to Run a Country” (The Guardian, 2020)


• “The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws” (Technology Review, 2018)

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