Audrey Tang

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 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...

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.

It is a design for inclusion, so that’s transparency, participation, accountability, and inclusion. That’s the central administrations of the government strategy.

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 an 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.

They 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 an administration level, all within the same year.

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 an opportunity cost. Everybody else is free riders after a certain while. The early adopters cannot bootstrap an 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 an 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.

Yeah.

To support social entrepreneurship, not to create. Otherwise, it would be state-owned enterprise.

We don’t do that. [laughs] We support social entrepreneurship.

The 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 an 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 an aging population, for example the loss of identity of many smaller townships, it’s not about a law 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 an 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.

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."

PDIS is the Public Digital Innovation Space. We’re not an 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...

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...

...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 an 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.