Audrey Tang

Mostly, we make the consultation as open as possible, just like in Singapore, we did a fintech sandbox. Even at the early consultation period, you make sure everybody in the world knows there is a consultation going on, a fintech sandbox.

That’s mostly because it really takes voluntary collaboration. There’s no way that we can force people to follow these guidelines. We can only work with them collaboratively on this.

Get there early, and do participate in next year’s presidential hackathon. [laughs]

There’s city-level hackathons, also. There are now all of those extended fashion. It’s not a two-day party relationship thing. We have that every week now. It is more of a long-term partnership thing.

The cities that do have CIOs and smart city PMOs, such as the Taipei City, Taoyuan City, Taichung City and so on, talk to their CIO. Their CIO actually are much more progressive than the central government by nature because they just have more citizen-interested data to work with. They don’t have to go to the logistic UN.

They just have to convince their city council, which is much easier job. In the central government, we’re mostly highlighting the cases the local governments are doing really well, operating to a national level, telling to international friends, but all the innovation really comes regional.

Exactly right.

That’s exactly right.

Exactly.

Very much so. I have three key principles. When I joined the cabinet, I billed myself as public servant of public servants, meaning that I am a minister who never issues a single command. I’m here to solve everybody’s problems.

It still turns out that to foster innovation, we’ve either introduced things that makes the entry level, the front-line staff save their time, and/or make the mid-level staff to reduce their risk, political risk and other kind of risk.

And for the upper level senior executive who actually has a vision, to make sure they get credit, and align our political mission with their administrative mission, so mission alignment and credit sharing. Many innovation policies failed because they treat these three as fungible. They work on two of them at the expense of the other.

Everything I work on is a Pareto improvement, in the sense that I don’t sacrifice anything. As soon as I can make some improvement in one of the three, I do that.

Exactly. There’s many, many, many innovations that we try to do. I will very quickly share some of our core values. I’m going to give you this five-and-a-half-minute version of this 15-minute talk.

The rallying cry is open government. This is our team with about 20 to 25 full-time, 35 interns, so a reasonably sized office. This is our core values. Rebuild trust is the core. Then, empowering civil society is the second. Simplify the administrative process, the third. Then, foster innovation, like the risk absorbing environment for the public servants.

Finally, to popularize digital service. Those are our five values. They are often intentional, they complement each other from time to time, which is why there is an order. We always prioritize rebuilding trust. That is our fundamental core value. Based on this core value, what we do is to make sure that trust is...Sorry that you have to look upside down.

To make sure that people can see for themselves how the government is doing. If the government has promised something, the people have a way to hold them to account, by having an audit trail of policymaking. Again, people can voice their concerns. People who complain the loudest get into the kitchen. Make sure that people in rural places are included also, as well as other localities.

Socially disadvantaged people are involved in policymaking, so there’s an open government principle for inclusion. Since 2015, we have a national regulation that says we have to allow citizens to petition. We have to allow the government, 60 days before any regulations and any proposed bills, for public commentary to happen in public.

We argue it by, for example, auditor spending, public spending, public procurement. Starting next month, all the thousands of ministry projects, they will publish on the same platform. How, if it’s quarterly reported, then every three months, it has to publish spending stuff, its KPI stuff, which procurements it has in agenda, and things like that.

If it’s like we have one now, which at the administrative level, major KPI, maybe it’s updated every month. If there’s a way for everyone to see how a government project is doing and comment publicly, and for the public servant to reply in public, so that they only have to reply once instead of 50 times.

For every budget item to have a write-up so that people can talk on it in a full discussion, instead of a very general fashion. This is actually, we put a lot of thought into this by concentrating all the knowledge management, budget management, procurement management system, gradually infused by everything into the NDC and then telling the NDC what you see. Now, all the citizens see, too.

This is a major undertaking, which we’ll complete by next month. The other thing, I think equally important, is for every ministry to have a dedicated team of participation officers. This is the model for media officer. We talk with traditional journalists and parliamentary officers and groups. These people talk with stakeholders, so everyone.

These people remain the same team. We have people who have all those different skills to build this cross-departmental team inside every ministry. Now, many of the major ministries, such as Ministry of Finance, of Health and Welfare, of Interior, Agriculture, the have the third level agency also. They have participation officers in the third level agency, too, so it’s a fractal tree relationship.

The reason why is that before, when we have an evolution case, or now the Referendum Act has passed and we will have referendum cases, if it’s concerning only one ministry, usually they do it really well. If it’s cross-ministry, suddenly it just explains the problem. It never really takes on more responsibility than it already has.

That’s because in a game theory way, if you have an ever-shifting relationship, of course your tendency will be pushing the responsibility around. If now every ministry are in the same PO network, we are all in it for at least four years, then it makes no point to make the relationship bad. Every month we meet. We always highlight the PO who made the good decisions because we show the credit.

This is the Ministry of Finance PO. Somebody petitioned our income tax filing system really sucks on analytics. Instead of defending, he actually went on the petition platform before it reached 5,000 people. When it was 50 people, he said, "We’re now explaining, we’re inviting all the ones who complains into a co-creation workshop."

All of the sudden, he turns the negative emotion into a positive emotion, by inviting people to collaborate. We use service design, a lot of post-it notes. We make sure that everyone who ever uttered anything useful on the Internet is included verbatim, very shocking language.

People really feel that they’re part of it. They’re in it together. In service design, the important thing is that over the different touch points, people’s sentiment, their emotion, must get better and better. As someone very acutely pointed out over the Internet, with the thing about filing the income tax, they can’t feel well.

This is why we can’t actually make them feel better during the progress of their tax, but we can at least make it not like this. The co-creation workshop has a lower goal. After the co-creation workshop, something very interesting happened. It turns out, people complained the loudest, they're actual professional designers, professional programmers, professional journalists.

They actually know a lot, which is why we say [non-English speech]. They care so much that they complained this loudly. When we invite all of them, the result is that we need five more co-creation workshops and one to resolve one particular step in the tax filing process. The participation office eventually amassed a supporting team that redesigned this year’s tax filing system.

We have 27 cases like this, where it’s a cross-ministry collaboration on this e-petition initiated agenda, but works across silos. It’s not just national cases. We also have regional cases, like people asking for helicopters on the southmost part of Taiwan in Hengchun, because their distance to a major hospital is 90 minutes.

People die, because they can’t get operated in time, so they want helicopters. Actually, the real solution, after exploring all the possible solutions in shared mind manner, everybody went to Hengchun and had a meeting for five and a half hours.

Why is that? Why we can work with all these completely different ministries? There’s the helicopter ministry. There’s a military helicopter ministry. This is the build a faster highway ministry.

This is an expand the local hospital ministry. This is the NDC. It’s very special. This is the local county, and these are the local stakeholders. They’re literally [non-English speech], EU, and all those organizers.

Why we can do this is because in our regulation was explicitly, whenever an agency or ministry aide think that B is the main agency, and it’s just a supporting agency. B thinks C is the main agency. It’s just a supporting agency. C thinks A is the supporting. I mean, C is just a support agency. Everybody are main agencies. [laughs] When it’s nobody’s business, it’s everybody’s business.

When Hengchun has a vision like this, all these people, like 40, 50 of us, all went to Hengchun, on a very focused meeting, with everybody involved. With me in the town hall, like an ESPN anchor, live streaming the small room where the experts are, analyzing their every move to the local people, and translating local people’s inquiries into the small room.

We explore every possible solutions, and finally said, "OK, we really need to build a larger hospital here to make sure that people who are born there, who feel they belong there, they can reside there, and exercise their skills."

Maybe fly from some excellent surgeons from the north to here when the incidents and accidents happen, but not fly the patients northward. Otherwise, the local hospital will just keep losing its doctors and nurses.

Then we allocated some budget, so around US$10 million to build this hospital. It’s not because of this meeting that we have this proposal. We’ve seen this proposal for years. That we can see that the social return of value is acknowledged and agreed by all the stakeholders involved, as well as all the ministries involved.

It will be not seen as power grab by the Ministry of Health and Welfare from the Ministry of Interior if everybody has already explored every other option. This every other Friday, we have this kind of collaboration meeting. The next Monday, I present this mind map to the Premier, who then makes a decision about it.

Sometime, because we vote every month what cases are we going to do cross-ministry collaboration, there’s some related to public servants. For example, this is this 5,000 petition about to change the take an absence, the vacation rules of the public servants, so that public servants can take a leave based by hour, instead of half-day. There is more room to take an absence.

Of course, the original rule is very unreasonable and very rigid, but there’s never any rationale to fix it, because it’s involves the Examination Yuan and the Executive Yuan. Nobody really wants to be the first initiator break the status quo. Now, there is a petition, I think, 4,000 of the public servants. The special office is all stakeholders. They all voted for it.

We just had all the ministries saying, "This is really a good idea." Then the Examination Yuan, they’re the stakeholders, too. They passed this in 15 days. It was the fastest ever.

They didn’t want to offend the Examination Yuan. Now, since they accepted, the Executive Yuan has 20 different ministry voting for it. It must be something good. Then it very quickly allowed for this kind of innovation.

Just to very quickly recap, what we’ve done, essentially, is to internally build a culture for civic participation by making it cost them very little time to participate. Everybody has two minutes of kindness.

Then making it risk free, or virtually risk free, for innovation to happen by having the minister or the president to absorb the risk. Finally, by making sure that whenever anyone makes a good decision, I publicly present our ministry of finance PO here; here is the PO from the ministry of the interior, and so on, by sharing the credit, essentially.

That’s my five minutes. Actually, ten minutes, but yeah.

When I was in a UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network in Vatican, talking with Professor Jeffrey Sachs about Sustainable Development Goals, he mentioned that when he teaches economy in the textbooks, they are always start from the utilitarian values, and then deontological.

It never mentions virtue ethics. It’s as if virtue ethics doesn’t exist. When automation, AI, and all that advance, it really creates a real existential crisis, because people are measured in their efficiency, and the machines are always more efficient.

I happened to read the economy textbook authored by our previous premiere, Lin Chuan, who is an economist and professor. In his textbook, " [non-English speech], the New Horizon for Economy," it starts from virtue. It’s interesting. It starts from prosperity, start from the common good. It starts from, like we said, planning for seven generations, from sustainable development.