Creative Bureaucracy Festival Award 2026: Audrey Tang on Trust and Democracy

Creative Bureaucracy Festival Award recipient Audrey Tang explains how broad listening, radical transparency and protected spaces for experimentation can rebuild trust in government.

How can governments regain public trust in an age of political polarisation, technological disruption and growing scepticism towards democratic institutions?

For Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Cyber Ambassador and former Digital Minister, the answer begins with a simple principle: trust people.

During the presentation of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival Award 2026, Tang reflected on her journey from civic hacker to government minister and the lessons Taiwan offers for democratic renewal. She described how digital tools can help governments listen at scale, transform public ideas into policy and give public servants the freedom to experiment.

Rather than building smarter cities, Tang argues, governments should empower smarter citizens. That requires moving away from one-way communication and towards what she calls broad listening: creating spaces in which people can identify common ground, contribute their knowledge and become active participants in government.

Her experience also demonstrates that innovation requires protection. Public servants need room to test ideas without risking their careers when an experiment fails. When those ideas succeed, however, governments must be prepared to recognise them, scale them and turn them into public infrastructure.

Tang’s message extends beyond government. In an era of AI, deepfakes and extractive digital platforms, she calls for citizens to help write the rules governing new technologies. The goal should be neither blind acceleration nor permanent obstruction, but a shared capacity to steer technological development towards the public good.

The award was handed over by Creative Bureaucracy Festival Co-Founder Sebastian Turner following an on-stage conversation moderated by Festival President and Co-Founder Charles Landry.

Read the edited transcript of Audrey Tang’s award conversation below

Award Conversation

Audrey Tang, Charles Landry, Sebastian Turner
Presented on 10 June 2026

Charles Landry: I’m going to invite someone who many of you know: Audrey Tang. Please come up here.

Audrey Tang: So happy to be back in Berlin. I was here last November for the Freedom Forum.

Charles Landry: Can I ask you a few questions before I might want to give you something? Or not me, my friend over there will give it to you.

My first question is: you moved from being a civic hacker, and you actually became a minister. What did that journey teach you about how government needs to change? What did you learn from moving from civic hacker to minister?

Audrey Tang: Okay, great question.

I entered parliament not by being invited in. As many of you know, we occupied the parliament peacefully for three weeks back in 2014. I was there with an Ethernet cable that was 350 metres long, and we livestreamed the entire occupation.

The first lesson I learned was that many bureaucrats were in favour of the occupation because they were the most innovative people, and they were really tired of the deadlock.

That year, in 2014, the Ma administration and our president were enjoying an approval rating of 9 per cent. In a country of 24 million people, that means that anything the president says, 20 million people are against him. That is not a good environment for the bureaucracy to get any work done.

So we tried something very different as civic hackers. We did not protest. We demonstrated. We showed a demo.

Instead of half a million people on the streets just shouting at each other, we brought them to tables of ten, with many more online, and with only one ground rule: you could talk about the trade deal that triggered the occupation, but you had to convince the nine other people at the same table in order for your idea to bubble up.

Very interestingly, this way of broad listening, not broadcasting, but rather listening with the people, produced some of the most coherent policy bundles after three weeks.

The head of parliament, Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, simply said: “Oh, the crowdsourced version is better, so let’s just go with it.”

What surprised me was that the career public service really tapped into us and recruited us as reverse mentors.

I was 33 at the time. They instituted this idea that people under 35 would each advise at least one minister, usually someone above 35. I served for two years as a reverse mentor until I was 35 and therefore too old. So they promoted me to a full minister.

Charles Landry: That is a very clever answer. You’re far too clever.

I’ve got another question. You really transformed government from doing something to people to doing something with people. How did that work? What were the obstacles?

Audrey Tang: When I came in, I said there were really only three conditions for me to serve as Taiwan’s national tech support. This was back in 2016.

The first was voluntary cooperation. I would not give commands to any public servant, nor would I take commands. I would just tell people: “This is how the people think.”

The second was geo-flexibility. My team could work from anywhere in the world because many of them came from outside Taiwan, and cyberspace knows no boundaries.

Finally, radical transparency. I documented and published into the public domain every visit from every journalist and every lobbyist.

When lobbyists know that future generations are watching, they always argue from the perspective of the public good and sustainability seven generations down the line. They never argue for something that is just for private gain.

I think this is the trick. It is not about coming up with the best ideas in a room, but rather inviting the room in and letting the room speak.

Most of the career public servants I worked with joined the Presidential Hackathon, which they also helped design.

Every year, there are around 200 teams. Each team has at least one public servant, one person from the private sector and one person from civil society.

If the ideas do not pan out or do not work well for the public servant, they remain anonymous. They were just participating in a hackathon.

But if they become one of the top five teams, they receive a trophy, which is a projector.

When you turn the projector on, it projects the president giving you the trophy and promising that whatever you did in your locality, district or department will become public infrastructure in the next fiscal year.

There is no money involved, but your whole career changes.

This inverts accountability. If things go wrong, it was just a hackathon. But if things go right, your idea has just become national policy.

Charles Landry: That’s a good way of developing ideas. But what about trust and distrust? People have historically distrusted public institutions. How did you manage to flip that around? Have you already broadly answered that question, or is there another dimension?

Audrey Tang: I travelled to 28 countries over the past year or so. I am really geo-flexible, changing time zones every week.

I have yet to see a polity with an approval rating lower than 9 per cent. So there was something really special about Taiwan.

We recovered that trust not by building smart cities, but rather by empowering smarter citizens.

To give no trust is to get no trust.

Whenever and wherever people in Taiwan saw something that was not working in 2014, 2015 or 2016, they had a way to collect 5,000 signatures online and force a ministerial deliberation.

More than 100 of those later, and with a network of participation offices, the level of trust was back at more than 70 per cent by 2020.

Now, according to the BTI Index, at least 90 per cent of Taiwanese people feel that the democratic process is at least fairly good.

We overcame the global wave of democratic backsliding by having a larger civic wave within society.

Again, to give no trust is to get no trust. You trust people not by broadcasting, but by broad listening.

Charles Landry: That’s amazing. That really is something.

But you know better than anyone else that bureaucracies are designed to avoid mistakes and experimentation. How did you get people to feel that they had permission to experiment?

Audrey Tang: Very easily: by keeping them anonymous.

We have this platform that has now also been adapted by California. It is called Engaged California, and it is now becoming a permanent part of the California government. A bill is making its way through the process. I think it is out of committee now, so any day now.

The idea is that if you are part of the civil service in California, you can go into Engaged California and have a deliberation with nine other people at the same table.

You only roughly know what kind of work they do and what kind of level they are at. You never know the real names of the people who are brainstorming with you.

Again, you have to convince the nine other people. The policy was good enough that we call it not a chainsaw for government efficiency, but a chain reaction for government efficiency.

The best ideas do not always come from the top down, but rather from the middle level, such as the section chiefs. They can communicate across departments with other section chiefs and come up with what we call uncommon ground.

These ideas can then be ratified by the governor through an executive order or something similar.

This worked so well within the civil service that they are now opening it up to the entire California citizenry.

Any California resident who feels their job is being affected by AI, perhaps in relation to apprenticeship, belonging, care or dignity, can participate in the same way and interact anonymously.

They know that they are not shadow-boxing with trolls or robots, but talking with real humans, while each civil servant is protected from being doxxed.

I think this is really the best of both worlds.

Charles Landry: My penultimate question: you seem to have got Meta and all these tech bros to be quite respectful and behave like good citizens. How did you do that?

Audrey Tang: Two years ago, if you scrolled through Meta, YouTube or TikTok, chances were that you would see a Taiwanese celebrity, such as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, trying to sell you investment advice, free cryptocurrency or something similar.

If you clicked, Jensen Huang would actually talk to you very convincingly. Of course, it was not Jensen. It was a deepfake clone of his voice running on an NVIDIA GPU.

The problem was that it was so convincing that people really lost millions.

When we looked at the algorithms of those platforms, we found that they earned more per click from scam advertisements than from genuine advertisements. Their algorithms, optimising for engagement and click-through, actually showed more scams to people than advertisements from small and medium-sized enterprises.

So what could we do?

Taiwan has the freest internet in all of Asia when it comes to internet freedom. We cannot censor based on content. It is simply not a policy option.

As Minister of Digital Affairs at the time, I sent text messages to 200,000 randomly selected numbers in Taiwan. The messages came from 111, the official number, so people knew that they did not come from a scammer, but really from Audrey Tang asking: “What should we do together?”

Thousands of people volunteered and gave us their ideas. We randomly chose 447 people to form a mini-public that was statistically the same as the larger population when it came to gender, occupation, place of residence and so on.

Again, they met in tables of ten, but this time online, with each person looking at nine other squares. They were facilitated by a civic AI that was like a chess clock with manners.

It reminded quiet people to speak up and limited disruption to five seconds. It was a very good facilitator, but it did not make decisions for any table.

Each table could come up with an idea that everyone at the table agreed on, and that idea would enter the deliberation.

For example, one table said: “Let’s label all advertisements as probably scams until somebody signs off on them.”

Another table said: “An unsigned advertisement was pushed to me. I lost seven million. Facebook should pay the seven million through joint liability.”

Another table said: “TikTok does not have a Taiwan office. For every day they ignore our liability requirements, we slow down their videos by 1 per cent.”

All of these were very good ideas in the sense that they did not touch the content.

We put them to a vote, and 85 per cent of the mini-public said it was the best idea. The other 15 per cent said: “Okay, we can live with it.”

Within just a few months, it became law. Throughout the following year, impersonation scams in advertisements fell by more than 94 per cent. It is now a solved problem in Taiwan.

The point is that the social licence to operate for new technologies can be co-written by the people using civic AI.

Then we do not have to debate endlessly about whether we need acceleration and a bigger pedal, or a stop and a bigger brake. Instead, we can all build a steering wheel together.

Charles Landry: Final question before my friend comes: what is the next frontier for creative bureaucracy? What advice would you give us?

Audrey Tang: I think co-creative bureaucracy really needs to work out how we can build the steering wheel without losing our data.

Last week, I migrated my Bluesky account, a social media account, from Silicon Valley to Europe, to a Swedish company hosting data in Finland.

Throughout this process, I lost zero friends.

Actually, nobody knew about the change until I posted about it on Atmosphere, on the AT Protocol network, because it runs on interoperability.

This information superhighway has an off-ramp. If you move between telecommunications providers, you can keep your number. Your old friends can still call the same number and find you.

In fact, the US state of Utah has already passed the Digital Choice Act, ahead of Brussels. It says that, starting next July, if you are a Utah citizen and want to switch from, say, Facebook to Bluesky, Blacksky or Truth Social, the old network has to keep forwarding your likes, followers and reactions to the new network.

This interoperability means that big tech can no longer drill our data like oil. They have to till the community like soil.

Whenever we do not like how the soil is tilled, it is portable. We can put the soil somewhere else, such as Finland, and the community can continue to grow in this newly transplanted soil.

We should let no one tell us that data is the new oil. We should refuse those foreign rigs that drill for data oil, and we should all till the data soil together.

Thank you.

Charles Landry: Thank you very much.

Now I want a drum roll. Is there a drum roll?

Sebastian Turner: Audrey, let me read the certificate.

For your dedication to creating a citizen-centred vision of democratic digital governance, you are presented with the Creative Bureaucracy Festival Award.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Sebastian Turner: We won’t let you go without a message of hope.

Taiwan is very often called the West Berlin of Asia. The message is that freedom can prevail. Freedom can win, no matter how powerful the adversary is.

All the best to you and your fantastic ideas. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Thanks a lot.

This speech was delivered following the Global Forum of Public Sector Leaders, held on the evening before the Creative Bureaucracy Festival 2026. Learn more about the Creative Bureaucracy Festival and the Global Forum of Public Sector Leaders.

ABOUT THE CREATIVE BUREAUCRACY FESTIVAL  

Public administration, too, has excellent, creative solutions for almost every challenge facing society — the Creative Bureaucracy Festival brings them to the stage and the people behind them into conversation. The festival, in the words of its President Charles Landry, stands for the shift from a "No, because" culture to a "Yes, if" culture that embraces new ideas with enthusiasm. Through the presentation of the Creative Bureaucracy Awards, the festival also aims to strengthen the public reputation of administration. The Global Forum of Public Service Leaders, which begins on the day before the festival, is the annual gathering of public sector leaders from around the world. The Young Bureaucrats Event addresses the next generation of creative talent in the public sector. Further information can be found at https://creativebureaucracy.org/. 

ABOUT THE GLOBAL FORUM OF PUBLIC SECTOR LEADERS

The Global Forum of Public Service Leaders is an invitation-only international gathering that complements the Creative Bureaucracy Festival. It brings together state leaders, ministers, senior government executives, presidents of public institutions, mayors, agency heads and other senior leaders responsible for shaping and delivering public-sector transformation.

Held in a confidential setting, the Forum creates space for candid exchange, peer learning and international collaboration. It connects leaders facing comparable challenges across different political, administrative and institutional contexts, enabling them to explore how governments can strengthen their capacity to act, innovate and deliver.

The Global Forum takes place in Berlin on the day before the Creative Bureaucracy Festival. Further information on the Global Forum of Public Service Leaders can be found at https://creativebureaucracy.org/global-forum-of-public-sector-leaders.