Right Livelihood 49d ago

Many countries treat technology as a threat to democracy. Taiwan has spent the years proving the opposite, and Audrey Tang, a 2025 Right Livelihood Laureate, has contributed much of the infrastructure that made it possible. Taiwan's approach: the right digital infrastructure, built in the open and accountable to the public, can strengthen democratic participation rather than erode it. What began as student-led protests in 2014 became a generation-long experiment in democratic technology. Audrey Tang, a self-taught programmer who left formal schooling in her teens, became its most visible architect, joining the government in 2016 and going on to help build some of the most ambitious civic technology projects in the world, including vTaiwan and Join.gov.tw, platforms that let ordinary citizens draft policy alongside government officials. Under her leadership, Taiwan responded to COVID-19 with a real-time public mask-supply map, an open-data contact-tracing model that preserved privacy, and a rapid-response disinformation strategy that became a global benchmark. She insists that technology, properly governed, is one of democracy's most powerful tools, not its enemy. 💻 In this conversation, Audrey Tang explains: ▪️ How Taiwan built civic platforms where citizens take part in policymaking ▪️ How Taiwan's pandemic response became a global model for democratic technology ▪️ How transparent, open-source governance can rebuild trust between citizens and government ▪️ What others can take from Taiwan's example 🔗 Learn more about Audrey Tang: https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/audrey-tang/ @AudreyTang #DigitalDemocracy #Taiwan #CivicTech #Plurality