Audrey Tang

Audrey Tang is a civic hacker, coauthor of Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy and the forthcoming Civic AI. She is an inaugural Senior Accelerator Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI.

She served as Taiwan's first Minister of Digital Affairs (2022–24), preceded by six years as Minister without Portfolio for Digital Affairs (2016–22), and is the world's first nonbinary cabinet minister. In 2025, Tang received the Right Livelihood Award — often called the Alternative Nobel — “for advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides.”

A child prodigy who practiced Taoism to manage a congenital heart condition, Tang left formal schooling at 14 to pursue self-education. By age 19, she was an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and a leader in the free and open-source software communities, revitalizing the Haskell and Perl languages.

Tang was instrumental in the g0v (gov-zero) network and played a pivotal role in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, facilitating digital consensus-building during the occupation of Taiwan's legislature. As digital minister, she implemented radical transparency through participatory democracy platforms like vTaiwan and Join. Her tenure saw public trust in Taiwan's government rise from single digits to over 70 percent, driven by innovations such as the “Mask Map” during COVID-19 and increased cyber defenses against interference in the 2024 elections.

In 2025, she colaunched ROOST — Robust Open Online Safety Tools — at the Paris AI Summit to build decentralized safety infrastructure for democracies. Across Asia, Europe, and the United States, governments and civic groups are adapting her playbook to local contexts. She describes her philosophy as becoming a “good enough ancestor,” striving to leave future generations a wider canvas for democratic possibility.