This will be on SayIt, right? [laughs]
You will be on SayIt. You did your homework. That’s awesome.
Thank you very much. I have...
Two name cards?
Two cards, yeah.
One is the TfD?
TfD is one. The other is my new job for a political party.
You’re a party member now?
Is this a new party?
It’s a new party.
"Future Forward".
Yeah. For next year election, we’re going to have the election at the 24th of February.
You will be a candidate?
(laughter)
Although I’m not your constituent...
(laughter)
I can do my recording?
Of course.
[laughs] Yeah.
It’s always good to have backup.
I have to finish my paper in next two day, maybe tomorrow. [laughs]
I think it’s not going to take long.
It’s OK. We have 40 minutes, an hour. No problem.
The question is about the open government, about your policy, and also how you led that with the civic tech. Let me check my note. [laughs]
Before that, I should officially introduce myself. I’m Klaikong Vaidhyakarn from Thailand. Right now, I working for the Future Forward Party, but I’m also the director of the Social Technology Institute. We working on the promote open data in Thailand, also try to support tech social enterprise in Thailand.
It’s like we open a hackathon and have some group that have the idea about the technology to solve the social problem. We support them maybe to be the new social enterprise or to do the project that have some product that can be used for the public.
For example, disaster risk reduction, health promotion, and also transparency. I got the grant for do the research here about how success of civic tech in Taiwan and also how to replicate some kind of that in Thailand.
You were in the g0v Summit, right?
Yes, but I missed your session.
Oh. You went to the larger hall, the g0v, about how the community works with government? You went into that panel? Or the general one?
No, actually I missed that panel. [laughs] Yes, I’m sorry about that.
All the transcript, everything I said during my panel is on SayIt now. [laughs]
Of course, yeah. That one is about the question about the civic tech and open government, so you are the digital minister.
In charge of social innovation.
Can I ask about the policy about the open government in Taiwan?
Yes, certainly. In Taiwan, we have a strong model of devolution, especially with the six municipalities. Open government happens in two levels -- the municipal and city and county level, and the central administration level.
The central administration mostly work on the four pillars of open government, which I will explain in detail. We work on transparency, making sure that all our regulation or our budget or our data that’s part of the freedom of information is available in a structured form. That’s transparency.
We work on participation. For example, people have... In addition to the right to vote, now 18 years old can do referendums now. They can, for example, work on e-petition, where after 5,000 people collected e-petition signatures, ministers need to come and respond.
They can comment on each and every budget item. They can comment on each and every regulation change that’s announced for 60 days before every regulation change and proposed bill. All of this is on a national e-participation platform. That’s the Join platform, join.g0v.tw.
Unlike many other countries, we don’t have three or four platforms for these functions. All of it is on the Join platform. The central administration provides free hosting for other branch of the government to consult with people with the same system, but a different domain name.
We have the Corrective Yuan here. It’s a different branch of government that does the auditing and accountability. Whenever an administration want to try something that is new that they don’t have the accounting principle yet, they can use the same Join platform to ask people what they care about.
For example, Taipei City, instead of subsidizing the disabled people to run their shops, are now renting, for one dollar a month, a good space for them to run their social enterprises. It’s a shifting, not subsidizing, to social entrepreneurship.
This is very easy to audit, but this is very hard. For Pay for Success and so on to work, you have to have a lot of evidence. Normally, the Corrective Yuan, if they don’t have popular support, they will block this kind of administrative innovation.
Now, with the Join platform, all they have to do is running a public consultation saying, "Taipei City is running this. Do you have any fear? Any uncertainty? Any doubt?" We kind of are jealous, because when we ask for their recommendation, maybe only 30 people came. When the Corrective Yuan ask, "What’s your worries?" hundreds of people [laughs] express their worries.
They collect those worries, and send it to the minister in charge of social innovation, to me, saying, "People have those nine worries. Please give us a clear guidance of how to do accounting on these." I gave them, and now they established a new accounting mechanism. Then, of course, the administrative innovation can happen.
As we can see, this is a very good collaboration, both side using collective intelligence. Then, the Corrective Yuan can say, "OK, I am now working with the will of the people," instead of just a few accountants. That is Corrective. We also use the same system to share it with local and municipal governments. Like Taipei city used the Join platform for e-petition also, but their e-petition is tied to the i-Voting system.
While our e-petition is more about demanding an explanation of facts, having face-to-face meetings to share feelings, and to make a "How may we?" question together, like the first diamond, in Taipei City, they actually connect to the second diamond by having the i-Voting system be the final decision-making process.
They use our platform to do the first stage and use i-Voting for the second stage to connect the two diamonds. That is, again, a good participation example.
This is under your office? The platform initiated by you?
Basically, I’m a conservative anarchist, so I don’t give orders. What I mostly do is to make sure the stakeholders meet together, find that is something that’s a common value. I wouldn’t say it’s my office actually doing the work. The platform is commissioned and operated by the National Development Council.
You create the...
Synergy, yes.
...ecosystem.
That’s right. This space also, I provide my time. Every Wednesday, I’m here, but I’m not ordering anyone to do anything. I’m just making sure our conversation’s online, so people who are supporting your work can find you and contact you. That’s my main work, is a channel.
Your way of work?
Right, that’s participation. The third pillar is accountability. We work to make the policymaking itself accountable and have an account of how a policy came to be. The key work here is in our Freedom of Information Act, the FOI only applies after a decision is made, just like pretty much every other country.
A citizen can demand information of the "what?" of decision-making, but they cannot demand information about the "why?" because that is before the decision is made, this drafting period. According to most of the FOIA law, in the drafting period you cannot request information about it.
At most, we would tell you how many people we have consulted. The brainstorming process, because the theme may change many times before the career public service bring it to the ministry, if the minister says, "No, it’s not a good idea," then none of this context is visible to the public.
Even if the minister says yes, and the publishing of the account of policymaking is useful for the public, in our FOIA Law, there is a clause that says if the official deem that this drafting period is useful for the public, then they may publish it.
It’s very difficult, because if you are a director general of an agency, you must first convince your deputy minister. Your minister might want to convince the Premier to publish this contextual information before policymaking.
When I joined the government, I said, "Any policy that I am the chair I deem it for public good for everybody to see." Even if the policy does not come to pass, our discussion is already online. That’s the accountability.
When we make new policies that’s under my purview, like e-sport, e-gaming, social innovation plan, everybody know the why leading to this point of conversation. That’s why we call the policymaking accountability.
Finally, it’s about inclusion. Inclusion means...In open government it’s very clear that people who are very good with words, lawyers, or people who are very good with numbers, like coders, they’re privileged because they can make cases using open data. They can make cases using data pre-visualization.
They can even build new governance system using distributed ledger technology. Other people who are not that versed in either text or code is at a disadvantage. In many countries, the more open data there is, the more transparency and participation space there is.
It actually creates space for a civil society, but only if you’re a lawyer or a coder, and that’s something we don’t want to see happen here in Taiwan. We make sure that the people who are wise will know a lot about their local context. We don’t force them to make their cases in numbers or in law, because it’s not their native language.
The native language is in their indigenous nation, is in their rural community, is in their coop. If we make it so that they have to travel all the way to Taipei to meet me here to give a 40-minute presentation, it doesn’t work.
That’s why I made this system of what we call a regional innovation system, where I go to a rural place. I go to an indigenous tribe and maybe live there for a day or two, and then I meet everybody who’s working on social innovation, and they can say which sustainable work they’re working on a roundtable.
In the roundtable, what we’re doing is that we project what I see to the Social Innovation Lab. Every other Tuesday or so, 12 ministries meet in a meeting space there, and they see through my eyes what the people there are like, what they feel like. When they ask a question, the minister here must answer. It’s a two-way video conferencing.
Then if the ministry...Usually if you write them, they will say, "Oh, I’m ministry A. This is ministry B’s business." And ministry U will say, "Oh, this is ministry V’s business." Because all the 12 ministers are in the same room, they cannot do that, because they’re sitting right next to them, so they will figure something else.
Yeah, together.
Yeah, together and in real-time response. Then, because everything is radically transparent, all the transcript is on the web, so they’re not working just the benefit of one single social innovator, but rather for the public good.
It relaxes them a lot, because first, they get a credit. Everybody has names on it, so everybody will know that this is career public service that is doing the inclusion, that makes financial inclusion, makes social inclusion. Second, they don’t have risk. If this thing doesn’t work, it is my fault.
Third is that it saves them time, because they have been asked this over and over, like 40 phone calls, but everyone is tired of explaining the problem without delivering a solution. Now we have a system called the sandbox. You can try for a year for alternate regulation. If it’s a good idea, we...
...try and learn.
If it’s not a good idea, we learn that we must innovate somewhere else, and so it reduced the risk, saved the job, their work, the workload, and also even credibility.
You have to expect for people to do something wrong in the sandbox.
It is a design for inclusion, so that’s transparency, participation, accountability, and inclusion. That’s the central administrations of the government strategy.
I see. [laughs] Yeah, so that is...In Taiwan by the open government, why is so important after the Sunflower Movement in your opinion?
Because the Sunflower Movement is a demo. It’s a demonstration but it’s not protesting something. It’s a demo that you can have hundreds of different NGOs, and like 20 large NGO, each one is pretty vertical, but through Occupy they link together, become something horizontal, and with half a million people on the street, they’re cross-pollinating between the different NGOs.
The people who occupied the parliament, they initially only have maybe a very vague idea of what this Occupy is trying to do, but after people converge on a consensus, at the end the people occupied the parliament, have a very clear set of like five points that is deliberated by people on the street, and so they have legitimacy, their political will.
On the last day, the head of the parliament agreed to their demand, and so for the people who occupied inside the parliament it’s a victory. Of course, people in the different NGOs, they don’t always get their demand met by Sunflower.
What they gain is new solidarity with horizontal power, because maybe their constituents are a aging population, maybe younger people no longer care that much about that large NGOs, but through Sunflower movement, they recruit and build connection with new media, with civic media, with crowd funders, with people who have talents in design, and so new collaboration is fostered.
Because of this, at the end of that year, the mayoral election, basically anyone who oppose the Occupy lose the election. Anyone who participate or support the Occupy or use open government in their platform, in particular Mayor Lai Ching-Te and Mayor Ko Wen-je in that year both use open government as their main platform.
The won a lot. That really gave legitimacy to the open government. That made the central administration...After the election, the premier resigned. The new premier, an engineer, said, "OK, so now open throughout is our national direction."
Next year, we’re going to be number one on Open Data Index and that become the national direction. It’s led by the Occupy, realized by the municipals, and then finally ratified at a administration level, all within the same year.
Wow. In your opinion, how civic tech, open government, and your government support each other?
Civic tech is kind of the connector of social innovation. In social innovation in Taiwan, what we mean is anyone working for a clear, sustainable goal that can reconfigure the society, so that things that were previously in tension can support each other. That’s innovation.
To do this, you need to solve what we call "wicked problems," or problems that require coordination. Things are the way they were because nobody can make a unilateral move to make things better. In economic terms, it’s the Nash Equilibrium. Things were like that because it already is at Nash Equilibrium. You cannot make things better by acting alone.
Civic tech brings a new player into this game, that is, the power of data and code. With data and code, previously you have to make trade-offs. Now, maybe you don’t have to make trade-offs anymore. For example, before, the first person to donate to a new NGO is at a disadvantage.
Maybe the NGO does not deliver. Maybe not enough people support their cause. The campaign may not happen, so they waste at least a opportunity cost. Everybody else is free riders after a certain while. The early adopters cannot bootstrap a NGO very easily.
Now, with civic tech, you can have crowdfunding. You can even have subscription-based crowdfunding. You can even have blockchains to support a token-based crowdfunding. Civic tech can make the formula, the incentive, different, so that people are more incentivized to participate, even on a early level, which is where, really, the social entrepreneurship needs the social resources.
Civic tech, to my mind, is basically the enabling technology for social innovation. It doesn’t replace social innovation. Of course, you still have to live with indigenous people to understand what they really want, but at least you can incentivize more people to live with the indigenous people.
Through their technology platform?
Why, in your social innovation, would you think it’s a way to create more social enterprise?
To support social entrepreneurship, not to create. Otherwise, it would be state-owned enterprise.
(laughter)
We don’t do that. [laughs] We support social entrepreneurship.
Should not use that word. [laughs]
They reason why is that the government, we can only change our direction once every year. That’s how the national budget works. Emerging social issues, they don’t wait for the budget cycle. [laughs]
Basically, the government is not very well equipped to have a rapid response to a emergent social innovation or a social situation. That’s why we have the sandbox system, to make new, emergent players willing to try with us in a co-creation relationship, instead of a law-breaking relationship.
Sandbox is only for regulatory or place-based problems. Of course, we can do that, but for many other issues, for example a aging population, for example the loss of identity of many smaller townships, it’s not about a low or a regulation change. It doesn’t matter.
They’re not suffering because of we don’t have a law for anything. They’re suffering because the constitutive power of the community is changing. Maybe they all went to large cities. Maybe they don’t care about their local culture anymore. Maybe their traditional language is disappearing, and no laws can completely solve that.
Why we need to encourage social entrepreneurship is because they help us set a direction. They can talk with the local people. They can be the local people. They can talk with the people to set a common will of the community, and then we will know how to make our budget wisely.
If we just allocate budget, then it is a blunt tool. We can only allocate toward things that we already know. Social entrepreneurship is about discovering things we don’t know, the entire society don’t know. By social entrepreneurship, we make sure that it’s embedded in the education system.
You can already do social entrepreneurship, starting next year, in high school or even primary school. This year, you can already do it as part of your college degree. You can have a capstone project that solves a social need through the USR system.
What we’re saying is that, even if you don’t end up being a proper B corp, Yunus corp, or whatever, there’s a Call You start for that. Even if you don’t actually create a enterprise to be a social enterprise, you can still do social entrepreneurship while you’re a student to learn things.
The society is better, because they near to see university as something that’s not just for the elites, but something that connects well with the community. A important part of our social innovation plan is to have the university to be in the forefront, looking for emergent issues.
They can respond much faster because, every session, the teacher, the professor, can invite a different community. It’s not like a budget. It’s not like the legislative. They can change every week, so they can rapidly iterate. The national government can look at two years of iteration by all universities, and reset our expectations, our plans, on new solutions.
This place, Social Innovation Lab, it also have this place on other provinces?
We’re replicating it, starting next year. This place is special, because it’s co-created. The fact that we have a kitchen, we have a chef -- if you go to the kitchen, it smells very good right now -- the fact that I’m here every Wednesday, the fact that it opens until 11:00 PM, everything is co-created.
Basically, it’s not like other cities don’t have the room. It’s just it used to be a top-down process. What we are exporting is not the physical space, but rather the co-creation, the social infrastructure. Any city, like Taichung City, who’s willing to engage with stakeholders in co-creation, we say, "OK, now you can run Social Innovation Lab in your municipality."
Your office, PDIS, what are the exactly role of the PDIS and how their role to support the social innovation, also the people participation?
PDIS is the Public Digital Innovation Space. We’re not a office. We’re a space. We’re actually six offline space and about five online spaces. We’re literally just space. You’re now in PDIS, because here is one space of PDIS. The second floor of that building, the A9, I think, is also a space in PDIS. In the basement, for VR experiment, is also a space in PDIS.
Just here in Social Innovation Lab, there are three spaces for PDIS. In the administration building in Zhongxiao East Road there’s also three space. There’s the Digital Minister’s office that is part of PDIS. There’s the office of the Chief Commissioner of National Development Council. She donated her office to be part of PDIS.
On the third floor of the administration, as part of the Education, Science and Culture, the ESC Department, there’s also a room for about nine people that’s also part of PDIS. Three spaces here, three spaces in administration building, so we’re six physical spaces. Anyone can freely flow between those spaces.
When I joined the cabinet, location-independence, voluntary association, and radical transparency are my compact, so anyone who work with PDIS also enjoy...
It’s like a liquid administration. [laughs]
Yes, it’s entirely horizontal. Everybody rank themself, score themself. I don’t give them scoring. I agree with the Secretary General that PDIS can poach, at most, one person from each ministry. We have 33 ministries now, so we can have, at most, 33 people. Now, we have about 22.
Basically, their ministry are still paying their salary while they’re in PDIS. We do co-creation workshops. We do stand-up meetings. We use the Agile Kanban and we use...
Agile. [laughs]
...the entire methodology.
To create something that is of core value to all the ministries, how to rebuild trust in the society, this is why we unite together. We may have people who care about culture more. We may have people who care about national communication. For example, the Minister of Interior maybe care about the social order.
They care about different things. It’s not like we agree, but we don’t have to agree, because this is a space where we brainstorm something in social innovation, in open government, that is to the benefit of everyone. This is a entirely horizontal space that connect then with the Participation Officer Network, which is about 60 or so people, again in every ministry.
The whole reason is that, first, we make sure that the entire society know what each ministry care about. They’re like 30 non-profits. They care about different things. [laughs] Also, we’re like the central co-op, because people pay tax. They vote. It’s like a co-op.
We have a central co-op to unite the 32 charities and the central bank, which must make money, into a governance structure. That structure is not very visible from the outside. What we’re making is that it’s like a VR glass. You can put on VR glass and feel how it’s like to be a digital minister and to make sure that all the different tensions and co-creation process is visible to the entire society.
Their idea is not just idea in the vacuum, but they read our transcript and give us very good suggestions based on exactly the context of co-creation. I always say PDIS is just a space for collaboration.
All of this, all of the ecosystem, it support open government, and it make more open data?
Yeah, and open innovation and an open mind and open will. If you use the Theory of U, it’s all the different levels.
Thank you for the interview. Would you mind if I make some small video clip?
Video clip.
I have to talk into the camera or something?
Just use the mobile phone.
What would you like me to say?
It’s about open government and democracy in the future.
I’m going to talk about what?
Your idea about open government and the future of the democracy.
Let me do the video. I have the phone here.
We have a rule here, though. If you record, I’m going to also record.
It’s OK. Zach will help me to do that.
No problem. Here, we have the same [laughs] similar files, equipment. This like a low-cost mobile journalism.
Mobile journalism, I like the word. Zach will just take this, and I will remote-control the recording.
...hold it.
All you have to do is hit play.
I will turn off the screen lock.
(background sounds only)
Display, yeah.
(background sounds only)
It’s OK. Take your time. I’m not in a rush. We have 10 more minutes.
Is this OK? You want to sit next to me?
Yeah. It’s just in the same frame.
In the same frame, OK. Maybe Zach...
I got it.
...can also take us in the same frame.
We need to make sure that the UN Global goes in the frame.
I start recording. Are these live?
No, it’s just recording.
I’m with Audrey Tang, the digital minister and acting social innovation minister. I have the question about the open government, because our party also put the open government in the policy. I would like to know your idea about open government and the future of democracy.
Through radio and television, one person can speak to millions of people, but now, for the first time, we can listen to millions of the people over the Internet. Like many of you, I’m a digital migrant. 22 years ago, I moved into the Internet when I was still young and drop out of high school.
In the cyberspace, just like in the physical world, the new migrants and the natives, we have much to learn from each other. Our particular approach is through open data and through open space. Open data turns raw measurements into social objects, so people can gather around budgets, around laws, around regulations. These become topics of discussion, just like today’s weather.
Open space lens our individual feelings into shared reflections. Within a reflective space, we gradually become aware of ourselves and we form a crowd, the demos in the democracy. Transparent like a glass, reflective like a mirror, these are the two democratic properties of the future spaces.
We are the early makers of digital democracy in the 21st century. We’re like the early makers of reflecting telescopes in the 17th century. We’re full of innovations. We want to look at all the stars.
Personally speaking, I’m very happy to learn with our international friends in making an inventory, a catalog, of such innovations around the world. Only through learning with each other can we truly enter a age of science, and then eventually going beyond it into a age of reflection. Thank you.
Thank you. Actually, I know it’s, yeah, but I’m thinking it’s not appropriate ask you for a comment for the next election of Thailand.
I cannot be seen as partial to any party in Taiwan. The whole approach relies on the fact that I’m not partial to any ministry. If I’m partial to a party, every party has their favorite ministry. The Green Party would have a favorite in the Environmental Protection Agency.
That would destroy the multi-stakeholder nature of PDIS, which is that we’re not partial to any ministry. Again, international parties have your favorite ministries, as well, I’m sure.
So I cannot be seen as partial to any party.
I understand.
Thank you.