Audrey Tang is a civic hacker, co-author of Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy, and an inaugural Senior Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI.
Taiwan's first Digital Minister and the world's first nonbinary cabinet minister, Tang was awarded the 2025 Right Livelihood Award for "advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides."
A child prodigy who practiced Taoism to manage a congenital heart condition, Tang left formal schooling at 14 to pursue self-education. By 19, Tang was already an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and a leader in the free and open-source software communities, revitalizing the Haskell and Perl languages.
- Cyber Ambassador Taiwan
- Senior Fellow Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI
- Co-Curator, TED 2026 TED Conferences
- Omidyar Senior Advisor Mozilla Foundation
- Senior Fellow Project Liberty Institute
- Plurality Initiative Advisor Ethereum Foundation
We the People Are the True Superintelligence
Geothermal Democracy
Transforming the negative heat of disagreement into positive energy for renewal — civic tech, plurality, and Taiwan’s model for collaborative governance.
Technology, Democracy & AI
“To give no trust is to get no trust.” On Taiwan’s citizens’ assemblies, the illusion of polarization, and how pro-social media built inside the occupied parliament became today’s Community Notes.
Sustained International Acclaim
Civic AI & the 6-Pack of Care
The dominant AI safety narrative is vertical: one superintelligent system, aligned once and for all to human values. But no amount of what is produces what ought to be. The 6-Pack of Care, developed with Caroline Green at Oxford, offers a horizontal alternative — many bounded, purpose-specific AI stewards, each devoted to one community’s relational health.
These stewards are modeled on kami: guardian spirits bound to a specific place. A kami that knows “enough is enough” won’t cling to power or expand beyond its purpose. Instead of coding the “right” values once, the framework builds continuous governance rooted in care ethics — alignment by process, not by fiat. Six packs, drawn from Joan Tronto’s political ethics of care, make this concrete:
Attentiveness
What do the people closest to pain notice that we’re missing? Bridging algorithms surface cross-cutting concerns and amplify unheard voices — not the loudest ones.
Responsibility
Who is accountable, with what authority, and what happens if they fail? Engagement contracts with real deadlines, escrowed funds, and named officers.
Competence
Does the system demonstrably work? Graduated releases, decision traces for every action, guardrails-as-code, and automatic rollback when thresholds are breached.
Responsiveness
Can those affected correct the system — and does correction actually change it? Community-designed rewards, clear appeals with timers, and public repair logs.
Solidarity
Does the ecosystem reward cooperation over lock-in? Data portability, federated trust & safety, and bridging metrics that make bad-faith factionalism mathematically visible.
Symbiosis
Is the system bounded, sunset-ready, and incapable of imperial creep? Resource caps, non-expansion pacts, and succession plans. The component sunsets; the service duty persists.
Deliberative Poll on Deepfake Regulation
AI-generated scam ads impersonating Jensen Huang were costing Taiwanese citizens millions of dollars. 200,000 text messages went out to randomly selected numbers across Taiwan, asking one question: what should be done? Thousands volunteered; 447 were chosen by lottery to mirror the country’s demographics. They deliberated in 44 rooms. A sovereign language model synthesized their proposals the same day.
Three measures emerged — label unsigned ads as probable scams; hold platforms liable for losses from unsolicited deepfakes; slow down non-compliant services 1% per day until they comply — actor-and-behavior regulation, not content moderation. 85% of the assembly agreed. The law passed with multiparty support. Within a year, deepfake ads on Taiwanese social media fell by more than 95%.
Good Enough Ancestor
Oscar & Emmy-winning director Cynthia Wade's documentary on democracy, mortality, and the courage to leave a wider canvas for future generations. Best Professional Documentary Short, SCAD Savannah Film Festival. Screened at the Woodstock Film Festival and Athena Film Festival. 21 min.
Scholarly Writing
- Science
- CACM
- McGill
- arXiv
- arXiv
- arXiv
- RSA Journal
- Digitalist
- Book
From Open Source to Open Government
Tang was instrumental in the creation of g0v (gov-zero), now one of the largest civic technology communities in East Asia, and played a pivotal role in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, facilitating digital consensus-building during the occupation of Taiwan's legislature. By bringing live streaming and civic tech into the movement, Tang proved that radical transparency could transform governance from the bottom up.
As Digital Minister, Tang implemented radical transparency and participatory democracy platforms, including Join.gov.tw with millions of registered users. Tang's tenure saw public trust in Taiwan's government rise from single digits to over 70%, driven by innovations such as the real-time Mask Map during COVID-19 (used daily by 16 million people, operational within 6 days) and pioneering prebunking defenses against cyber interference in the 2024 elections. Tang transitioned to the ambassadorial role in 2024; the platforms, the methodology, and the legislation outlasted the tenure — which is what “the component sunsets; the service duty persists” was designed to mean in practice.
Before government, Tang made foundational contributions to open-source software — initiating over 100 projects on CPAN, leading the first working implementation of Perl 6 (now Raku) in Haskell, and creating EtherCalc with Dan Bricklin, the inventor of the electronic spreadsheet. Tang also served as a computational linguistics consultant to Apple (2010–2016), developing software used in Siri.
Currently, Tang is developing techno-communitarianism — a synthesis of her Plurality framework with, Glen Weyl and Patrick Deneen’s communitarian critique of liberalism — as a theory of Civic AI that fosters community rather than atomizing it.
Connect
For speaking engagements, contact ProjectSpeaker.