Please share with us about your background and role as civic hacker and technologist who rewires systems for the public good?
My background is rooted in the civic hacker movement, where I embraced the Taoist philosophy of conservative anarchism — preserving the collaborative spirit of the internet while working without rulers. I realized that democracy is essentially a social technology that can be improved, just like software. This led me to the g0v (gov-zero) community, where we did not seek to destroy the government, but to “fork it.” By replacing the “o” in government URLs with a “0,” we built shadow sites that visualized budget data and made political information accessible. I saw my role not as a disruptor, but as a bridge, using radical transparency to build tools that turned passive observers into participants in the democratic process.
When I became a cabinet minister in 2016, I brought this open-source ethos into the cabinet to rewire how the government interacts with the people. I championed collaborative governance through initiatives like vTaiwan, utilizing the Polis consensus-building tool to visualize areas of agreement on contentious issues like Uber, rather than letting algorithms amplify our divisions.
This approach was put to the test during COVID-19, where I worked alongside civic technologists to co-create real-time mask maps. By trusting the people with open data, we found that the people trusted the government in return, proving that we can build a listening society where policy is debugged and improved by the people in real-time.
How was the experience of being recognised as Right Livelihood Award 2025 and how did it help with your activities and mission to boost urgent and long-term social change in your country?
The 2025 Right Livelihood Award was an affirmation of my personal journey, as well as the Taiwan Model of digital democracy. This recognition validates my belief that technology should be used to heal divides rather than deepen them. To be cited for “advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides” sends a powerful message to the world. Polarization is not an inevitable consequence of the digital age, but a design flaw we can fix. It inspires me to continue proving that Plurality — fostering our shared values while innovating without top-down control — is a viable path for governance globally.
This honor has also significantly amplified my current mission to take these local innovations to the global stage. As I carry out my duties as Taiwan’s cyber ambassador and a fellow at Oxford’s Institute for Ethics in AI, the award serves as a platform to champion civic AI and initiatives like the Robust Open Online Safety Tools, or ROOST, initiative that was launched at the 2025 Paris AI Summit.
I am empowered to push harder for Plurality, ensuring that common challenges like online safety and long-term goals like AI governance are met with solutions that prioritize human dignity. In recognizing that cyberspace is a borderless contested area, the award helps me gather the partners, resources and opportunities needed to transform the geothermal power of conflict into an energy source for co-creation, turning “power over” into “power with.”
How are you benefiting from all this visibility? How could we support your cause?
Being named a 2025 Right Livelihood laureate is not about personal recognition. It is about validating the Taiwan Model as a blueprint for a better world. This visibility acts as a high-bandwidth signal, broadcasting the message that democracy and technology do not have to be enemies. It provides the platform I need to scale concepts like civic AI and Plurality from local experiments to global standards, proving that we can build digital spaces that foster co-creation rather than polarization.
The Global Campus of Human Rights, with its vast network of universities, is uniquely positioned to operationalize this vision by integrating digital human rights directly into the DNA of future leaders. It can support the cause by moving beyond traditional advocacy and teaching students how to debug the systems they will one day govern. I urge GCHR to incorporate our open-source book, Plurality, into its curriculum and to use its campuses as living labs for testing consensus-building tools like Polis. By training the next generation of human rights defenders to be legal scholars and civic architects, we can ensure that the digital infrastructure of the future is built to protect human dignity by default.
What is your opinion on the importance of human rights education in the field of technology?
Human rights education in technology centers on a crucial shift from digital literacy to digital competence. In Taiwan, where broadband access is a human right, we believe that education must go beyond teaching citizens to be passive, literate consumers of content — mere readers of the internet. Instead, we focus on competence, which empowers individuals to become producers, fact-checkers and co-creators of the digital landscape. True human rights education in this field means giving people the tools to access information and shape it, ensuring that technology serves as a space for civic participation rather than algorithmic consumption.
This approach is vital because it transforms the internet from a medium of surveillance or polarization into a public square for Plurality. By integrating this competence-based curriculum into our schools, we are training the next generation to view democracy itself as a social technology that they have the right and the ability to debug and improve. When we teach the leaders of tomorrow that they are the stewards of digital rights and communities, we are sowing the seeds for more inclusive and prosperous societies of the 21st century and beyond.
What are the most important challenges ahead in the field of Human Rights and Democracy in the world? Could educational programmes like ours at the Global Campus of Human Rights contribute?
The most pressing challenge we face today is the weaponization of digital connectivity. This is illustrated by algorithmic polarization turning cyberspace into a contested area, threatening the very foundation of human rights — our ability to trust and listen to one another. We are seeing a rise in digital authoritarianism where technology is used for top-down control rather than bottom-up co-creation, creating a crisis where freedom of speech exists without freedom of listening.
Educational programmes like those at the Global Campus of Human Rights are uniquely positioned to contribute by transforming universities into civic gyms — spaces where students do not just study democracy, but exercise the muscle of deliberation. GCHR can support this mission by shifting its curriculum from digital literacy to digital competence, teaching future human rights defenders how to use collaborative tools like Polis and Plurality to bridge divides. By sharing these technologies of listening, GCHR can ensure that the next generation can be architects of a digital peace, co-creating a common future built on rough consensus and running code, rather than silence and surveillance.
Could you give a message to the students, professors, alumni, partners and staff of the Global Campus of Human Rights?
To the students, professors, alumni, partners and staff of the Global Campus of Human Rights: I invite you to view the defense of human dignity as a resistance against oppression and an infinite game of co-creation where we constantly debug our social systems to be more inclusive. As you navigate the intersection of technology and rights, remember the Taiwan Model and that Taiwan Can Help strengthen digital resilience, transforming the internet from a vector of polarization into a space for Plurality and mutual understanding.
By practicing the art of active listening and collaborative governance, we can ensure that democracy remains a living technology that serves everyone. Let us rewrite the source code of society and free the future — together! My friends and partners: Live long and prosper.
For more information contact our Communications and Press Offices:
Elisa Aquino – Isotta Esposito
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