Audrey Tang

Taiwanese civic hacker and g0v co-initiator and longtime core contributor — the most internationally-recognised figure associated with Taiwan's grassroots civic-tech community and with the vTaiwan and Alignment Assemblies of AI deliberative-democracy infrastructure the corpus tracks under the g0v entity. Born 18 April 1981 in Taipei. She is in the make-AI-good corpus as the principal Taiwanese organiser publicly identified with the participatory-AI-governance and deliberative-democracy movement-area; her 2016–2024 tenure in Taiwan's cabinet is the period in which the g0v community's civic-tech infrastructure was scaled to national-ministerial deliberation work, but the corpus's interest is the grassroots civic-tech register through-line rather than the cabinet career.

g0v co-initiator and civic-hacker register

Tang identifies herself as a "civic hacker" and as "a driving force behind the creation of g0v (gov-zero)", and the GoVocal Pioneers profile records her self-described co-founder relationship to the community as a collective of independent software hackers. Wikipedia's biographical record places her as a core member of g0v who joined shortly after the September 2012 founding — the late-2012 period when Chia-liang Kao (clkao), ipa, kirby and other early collaborators built the community around the Budget Maps central-government-spending visualisation project at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day "Hacker #15" team. By 2018 the MIT Technology Review profile was identifying her as "a famed hacker who helped the thousands of Sunflower protesters build and maintain their internal communications network", and the Right Livelihood Foundation's 2025 citation describes g0v as "a leaderless civic-tech collective" whose infrastructure she helped shape into the broader Taiwanese deliberative-democracy apparatus. Her standing self-positioning toward state institutions is captured in the GoVocal Pioneers interview: "Civic hackers are often producing work that threatens the existing institutional structures. In Taiwan, the institutions have always taken a we can't beat them, so we must join them approach, which is a rare occurrence in Asian jurisdictions. That is, ultimately, why I remain in Taiwan."

Sunflower Movement and vTaiwan

In March-April 2014, during the Sunflower Student Movement occupation of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan over the opaque trade-services agreement with mainland China, Tang volunteered with the g0v community to broadcast the protesters' messages from inside the occupied parliament and to maintain the protest's internal communications network — the Right Livelihood citation describes the civic-tech infrastructure as "bringing citizens into the same room as lawmakers" for the first time. After the occupation, the Taiwan government asked the g0v community to build the vTaiwan multi-phase collective-intelligence consultation process that became the country's longest-running national-scale Polis implementation. The GoVocal profile records that Tang was recruited as the right hand of then-Minister Jaclyn Tsai and helped launch vTaiwan from inside that portfolio; the 2018 MIT Technology Review article captures her account of why removing the reply button on Polis "drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll" so that senior public servants come to see online commenters "not protesters or mobs, but actually people with distinct expertise". The Right Livelihood citation credits her with leading the integration of Polis into vTaiwan as a "broad-listening" space that elevates bridging ideas over divisive statements — a framing that recurs in her later AI-deliberation work.

Cabinet tenure (2016–2024) — adjacent

On 1 October 2016 Tang was appointed Minister without Portfolio in the Executive Yuan under Tsai Ing-wen, becoming the youngest minister without portfolio in Taiwanese history at age thirty-five and the first transgender and first non-binary official in Taiwan's top executive cabinet. On 27 August 2022 she moved to the newly-established Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) as inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs, the role she held until 20 May 2024 when the Lai Ching-te administration was inaugurated and Huang Yen-nun succeeded her. During the cabinet years she handed the operational running of vTaiwan to the Public Digital Innovation Service (PDIS) under her portfolio while g0v community contributors continued as the load-bearing volunteer base, and the moda Alignment Assemblies of AI of March 2024 ran on the upstream g0v deliberative-democracy infrastructure rather than as a freestanding ministerial product. The cabinet tenure is recorded here as the bridge through which Tang's grassroots civic-tech work scaled to national deliberation work — adjacent to the corpus's interest in her, not its anchor.

Post-cabinet civic-tech and AI-governance work

Since stepping down in May 2024 Tang has carried a distributed portfolio of grassroots civic-tech and participatory-AI-governance roles outside ministerial structures. The Reboot Democracy interview of 25 June 2024 captures her standing methodological position that "progress can only be achieved when AI is grounded in participation: to build AI for the people, with the people", and her framing of the Alignment Assemblies of AI — launched March 2024 with the Collective Intelligence Project, Anthropic, OpenAI, The GovLab, and the GETTING-Plurality research network — as a model in which "everyday citizens are invited to co-govern AI in the context of information integrity". On 7 October 2024 she was appointed one of ten new Taiwanese ambassadors-at-large under the Cyber Ambassador title, posted to the University of Oxford Accelerator Fellowship Programme at the Institute for Ethics in AI as a Senior Accelerator Fellow on digital-democracy and Plurality questions. Her current public-record portfolio — Cyber Ambassador Taiwan, Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI Senior Accelerator Fellow, TED 2026 Guest Curator, Omidyar Senior Advisor at the Mozilla Foundation, Senior Fellow at the Project Liberty Institute, and Plurality Initiative Advisor at the Ethereum Foundation — keeps her in the cross-platform civic-tech and participatory-AI-governance register rather than in any single institutional role. She sits on the DemocracyNext International Advisory Council and is the co-author with Glen Weyl of the 2024 book ⿻ Plurality on collaborative digital democracy. In 2025 she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award — citation: "For advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides." Her current place in the make-AI-good corpus is as the principal Taiwanese organiser publicly identified with the grassroots civic-tech and participatory-AI-governance register and with the through-line from the 2012 g0v Budget Maps and the 2014 Sunflower-Movement-era civic-tech infrastructure to the present-day Alignment Assemblies of AI and recursive-public AI-deliberation framings.