Audrey Tang

Why organisations work with Audrey Tang

• She has run the experiment that most boards are still debating: AI governance, digital deliberation, and disinformation defence deployed at national scale, with measurable outcomes during a pandemic and a presidential election.
• She offers a working alternative to the binary of techno-libertarianism and centralised AI control, set out in “Plurality” with E. Glen Weyl and tested inside Taiwan’s government.
• She built the civic infrastructure she talks about. g0v, the Mask Map, vTaiwan, and Join.gov.tw are operational systems, not concepts, and have been adopted in Japan, the EU, and the United States.
• Her authority is rare in this category: a TIME100 AI honoree and Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinker who has signed off on policy decisions, not just commented on them.

Biography highlights

• First Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan, 2022 to 2024; Digital Minister from 2016.
• Co-author with E. Glen Weyl of “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy”.
• TIME100 Most Influential People in AI, 2023.
• Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers, 2019.
• Co-founder of g0v and architect of Taiwan’s open-data COVID-19 response, including the Mask Map.
• Ambassador-at-large, University of Oxford Accelerator Fellowship Programme.

Biography

Most governments responded to COVID-19 with top-down distribution and mandates. Taiwan ran an open-data Mask Map built with civic coders, a participatory platform called vTaiwan, and a disinformation playbook with a 20-minute response window. The minister responsible was Audrey Tang.

Tang served as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister from 2016, and as the first Minister of Digital Affairs from 2022 to 2024. Before government, she was a Silicon Valley engineer and a core contributor to Perl and Haskell. She joined the g0v civic-tech community in its early years and helped shape the open-government practices that later became state policy.

Her book with E. Glen Weyl, “Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy”, argues that AI and digital tools can be designed to widen democratic participation rather than narrow it. The book was written openly on GitHub, translated by volunteers into more than a dozen languages, and released into the public domain. It draws directly on what Taiwan built and ran.

She has been named to TIME100 AI, Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers, and serves as an ambassador-at-large in the University of Oxford’s Accelerator Fellowship Programme. For a senior audience weighing how to govern AI inside a regulated organisation, she offers something most speakers in this category cannot: a record of decisions made in office, with results visible in pandemic outcomes and election integrity.

Key speaking topics

• Digital democracy and participatory governance
• AI ethics and trustworthy AI design
• Plurality and collaborative technology
• Disinformation defence and election integrity
• Open-source civic infrastructure
• Public trust in technology
• Cybersecurity as democratic resilience

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees setting AI governance and risk policy
• Chief Digital, Data, and AI Officers designing deployment frameworks
• Public-sector and regulated-industry leaders facing trust and legitimacy questions
• CISOs and risk leads responsible for disinformation, election, or platform integrity

Audience outcomes

• A working mental model for AI governance grounded in a national case, not a thought experiment.
• A clear view of what participatory and open-source approaches add to organisational decision-making, and where they break.
• Specific tactics for disinformation response, drawn from Taiwan’s 2-2-2 playbook.
• A vocabulary for “Plurality” that gives leaders an alternative to the techno-libertarian and centralised-control framings of AI.