Audrey Tang is a Taiwanese programmer and politician who served as founding Minister of Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) from 2022 to 2024, and as Taiwan's Digital Minister at Large from 2016 to 2022. Tang is associated with participatory digital democracy and the use of tools such as Pol.is, vTaiwan, and Alignment Assemblies, and co-authored "A Vision of Democratic AI" in Digitalist Papers Vol. 1.
Background
Tang is a self-taught programmer who was a leader in the Perl community in the 2000s and part of the founding core of the g0v civic tech movement in Taiwan from 2012. Tang was appointed Digital Minister at Large at age 35, the youngest minister in Taiwan's history and the first openly transgender cabinet minister worldwide.
Roles
Tang served as Taiwan's Digital Minister at Large from 2016 to 2022 and then as founding Minister of Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) from 2022 to 2024.
Participatory digital democracy work
vTaiwan
vTaiwan, in use from 2015, is a consultation platform that processes public input on regulatory decisions via Pol.is, surfacing consensus across political divides. It has shaped Taiwanese regulation on ride-sharing (Uber), online alcohol sales, closed-captioning, and fintech.
Pol.is deployment
The Pol.is wiki-survey platform has been used at scale in Taiwan, engaging as much as half of Taiwan's population on some topics. Eric Schmidt cited it in Democracy 2.0 as a proof-of-concept for scaling deliberative democracy.
Alignment Assemblies
In a 2023 collaboration with the Collective Intelligence Project, Tang's work included Ideathons, the Recursive Public AI governance deliberation, and an information-integrity assembly held in March 2024, ahead of Taiwan's presidential election. See Alignment Assemblies and Collective Constitutional AI.
TAIDE
TAIDE, Taiwan's open-source LLM, uses a constitution drawn from the 2023 Taiwan Alignment Assembly for alignment-tuning.
Digitalist Papers Vol. 1
Tang co-authored "A Vision of Democratic AI" with Siddarth and Huang.
Positions and statements
Tang's work is cited as evidence in debates over participatory AI governance. Proponents present Tang's record in Taiwan as a proof of concept for the claims that participatory digital democracy can scale beyond a few hundred participants, that democratic legitimacy can apply to AI governance decisions, and that state capacity and civic tech can cooperate productively, in contrast to the cascade-of-rigidity concerns raised by Pahlka in The Digitalist Papers (Stanford, Volumes 1–2).
Relationships
- leads: Taiwan Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) (founding minister, 2022–2024)
- collaborates-with: Divya Siddarth / Saffron Huang / Collective Intelligence Project (CIP)
- supports: Alignment Assemblies and Collective Constitutional AI / The Digitalist Papers (Stanford, Volumes 1–2)
- related: AI in Elections and Democratic Institutions — Tang's information-integrity assembly work
- related: China — Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services — regulatory counterpoint (China's top-down AI regulation vs. Tang's participatory model)