E30: Co-Authoring the City: Audrey Tang on Digital Democracy, Civic AI and Who Gets to Decide
What does it mean for a city to be genuinely co-authored by the people who live in it?
In Episode 30 of Talking Place, host Tanisha Raffiuddin speaks with one of the most consequential figures in the global conversation about digital democracy: Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Cyber Ambassador-at-Large and the world's first openly non-binary cabinet minister.
Audrey didn't enter government by campaigning. She occupied the parliament - as a civic hacker during Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Movement, helping coordinate deliberation among half a million people on the streets of Taipei. Out of that moment came vTaiwan: a participatory platform that turned citizen voices into legislation, resolving disputes from Uber to social media scam advertising by surfacing the ideas both sides could actually live with.
In this conversation, Tanisha and Audrey explore:
• What it means to be a civic hacker, and how to hack a city
• How vTaiwan works, and why it rewards bridging voices rather than outrage
• Why the biggest risk of the smart city is that it becomes smarter than its citizens
• The difference between data as oil (extractive) and data as soil (tended together)
• What mayors and city leaders should actually be doing about AI today
• How to move cities from tick-box consultation to genuine co-authorship
Episode recorded during SXSW London 2026 · Shoreditch, London
All images courtesy Audrey Tang, Wikimedia Commons
Links and mentions:
Audrey Tang: audreyt.org
Right Livelihood Award: rightlivelihood.org
Plurality (public domain): plurality.net
Civic AI toolkit: civic.ai
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Talking Place is hosted by Tanisha Raffiuddin, Creative Director at Concept Culture.
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