Exactly. I’m totally fine with that, with joining through a city.
If other people in the network...I’m not too familiar with Uruguay, but otherwise, I think all the other ones are our friends already. Let’s make it happen.
If we’re going to some fellows all around the world, at some point, I will need to explain that to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
We’ll still have to work on official level over the next year or so. The operation-level collaboration can start now.
The transcript? Not at all, not at all.
You can, after all, take out everything you said, so that it looks like me monologuing.
Somebody actually did that.
Yeah, because they’re a journalist. They said the way they framed the questions, as a correspondent, is proprietary or something, that they don’t want the other news outlets to access. I’m like, "Sure, why not?"
It’s usually the Minister who says that to journalists.
Anyway, non-journalists usually are OK with that.
Oh, yeah, a lot. I hear there’s going to be a direct flight.
Later, yeah, but it’s to Auckland, not to Wellington.
That’s right. I do look forward to visiting more often. At least there will be the OSOS-ish conferences, which I very much look to join.
At the very least, there’s Kiwi Foo. If I am invited again, I will be sure to share it with you.
Really? Half of people get rotated, you know. [laughs]
OK, cool.
Of course. Or Sheau-Tyng can help us.
Unless you strongly prefer selfies.
OK. [laughs]
Just use this.
OK. I’ll send you the links.
Yeah, next time.
Very much so.
See you.
Cheers.
My background is very transparent.
I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister. I’ve been holding this position for almost two years now, one year and a half.
I was an understudy for the previous Cyberspace Minister; I’ve been engaged in the public service since late 2014.
We did that because we occupied the parliament for 22 days. That’s called the Sunflower Revolution. We did that because the parliament at the time refuses to deliberate a trade-service agreement. We occupied the parliament to demonstrate in a demo-scene kind of way, to demo how to deliberate on all aspects of this agreement.
We are aligned with half a million people on the street and many more online. It’s a demonstration of what we call scalable listening technologies. People can see that technology’s not just for broadcasting but actually to listen and to come to rough consensus and come up with things that we can live with .
The magical thing is that after 22 days, the head of the parliament actually saw the consensus reached, including calling up a national convention, and agreed on that. It is a triumph of direct democracy.
Then all the occupy sympathizers and occupiers themselves won the city level election the end of that year. The central government faced a legitimacy crisis. There was a new premier, and with help of his deputy premier who was a Google director of engineering, they enlisted the civil technology people to come to the cabinet as understudies to solve issues like Uber regulation, and discuss AI, blockchain, and everything together using the same technique we did during the occupy.
Basically, we’re saying in Taiwan as well as many democratic countries the force of the social good and the force of capitalism, the forefront of business, are like this. The public sector we must not break because the society need to still have the empathy to reach out to these positions. All the tension is concentrated in our work. The public sector is like this rope in the middle.
Really? Have you worked in public service?
What’s your social mission, then?
Wow.
That’s awesome!
Empower the people that empowers. It’s recursive.
We’re in the same business as you will very quickly find out, because I’m also the minister in charge of social enterprise and social innovation. Taiwan has this huge growing social enterprise sector with B movement as part of it. We have a publicly listed bank that’s a B corp.
The whole bank and also law firms. It’s not just the mission-driven companies themselves but the supporting ecosystem are also themselves mission-driven. That creates a mission-driven value chain.
The idea is really is just to get people who care for social good and people who care for business profits to see that if you have the right mission, you can combine those two forces just while you work instead of like this.
Right. This is where social innovation happens because whereas it was scarcity, it was zero sum game, they will live like this. If innovation happens, it could look like this.
In Taiwan, there’s ideas of all the various co-ops, charities, companies part of social enterprise. We’re seeing a lot of merging of design companies. Also, different people providing service design and fair trade and all sort of civic tech companies now are merging together with charities and co-ops in a new, more nuanced social enterprise mission.
We’re connected to the AVPN which the Asia Venture Network. We’re also working our own national advisory board for impact investment because there’s very similar things that’s happening all around Asia.
I think the main challenge as you mentioned...There was this survey we did just a year ago that says when we talk to people whether you think the tech or other process innovations enable people to use business model for social good. Do you think it’s a good thing? Would you invest in it? Would you selectively, preferentially purchase it? Almost four people out of five said yes.
When we said, "Can you name one such mission? Can you name one such brand? Can you name one such company?" they’re like, "Nah, not really." That’s our main challenge is just 19 percent of people have engaged with a social enterprise or a mission-driven company before.
That’s the main thing we need to solve. We do this with social innovation labs. Every Wednesday, I work 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM as my office hours, as mentors to these people. We hold hackathons actually every evening.
Both. We don’t discriminate. The main idea is just to work in the open.
Even in the administration, for all the meetings that I chair, I make a completely public record just like in the Parliament, in the court system. It’s idea of structured data for everyone to analyze. By working in the open, people gradually learn how public service works. Then they can work with it.
Otherwise, it’s just shouting at a distance. That’s just demystifying the public service is the main work. The other thing that we’re doing is this idea of a sandbox. Have you heard of this before?
