In much of the world, democracy is at a low ebb, with autocrats, authoritarians, and outright fascists on a seemingly inexorable rise. Could the UK be different, despite the lack of a sense of excitement or transformation around the General Election campaign? Could this be a place where the democratic tide turns, and rises? What would it take to make that happen?

There is a blueprint. In the face of the intense geopolitical pressure and deep disinformation, Taiwan has in the last decade become a beacon of hope for how democracy might be built on a foundation that enables pluralism and broad human flourishing, rather than stagnation and polarisation. Audrey Tang has been a key figure in the story throughout, working first from outside government and later as a Minister.

Often, the narrative puts technology and democracy at loggerheads but through her work, Audrey has shown that they can be powerful allies.

Join us to hear Jon Alexander, Co-Founder of The New Citizen Project, in conversation with Audrey to discuss how we can learn from Taiwan’s democratic journey to make this a turning point in UK democracy.

Speakers:

Audrey Tang is Taiwan’s first Digital Minister (2016-2024), and the world’s first non-binary cabinet minister. She was a key contributor to the g0v (“Gov Zero”) hacker movement and the activist Sunflower Movement in the early 2010s, then became a mentor to a central government Minister, before joining government herself, first as Minister Without Portfolio and since 2022 as the country’s first Minister of Digital Affairs. She played a pivotal role in Taiwan’s crowdsourced Covid-19 response. Built around the three principles “Fast, Fun, and Fair,” this saw the Taiwanese government set challenge prizes for developers to create apps that would track PPE availability, case outbreaks, and more. A national telephone hotline was established, which any citizen could call into with ideas to improve the national response. A strategy of “participatory self-surveillance” was preferred to legal restrictions. The end result was the second lowest death rate anywhere in the world without ever going into lockdown. In Tang’s new book, Plurality, co-authored with E. Glen Weyl and a community of contributors, a new vision is laid out for how technologists, policymakers, business leaders, and activists might come together to use technology to build a more collaborative, diverse, and productive democratic world – by rethinking the role of technology as involving and empowering people as citizens to shape society for the better, not just delivering convenience and efficiency for people as consumers.

Jon Alexander is the Co-Founder of the New Citizen Project, a strategy and innovation consultancy that aims to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. Alongside this, Jon is author of CITIZENS: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us – a book that seeks to reframe the moment in time we’re living in as one of huge civic opportunity, not just crisis and collapse, and in doing so opens up a world of possibility for organisations and leaders across sectors and across the world.