Kevin Tan: We’re just admiring how progressive the government here is, open and transparent.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Kevin Tan: We were talking about vTaiwan, very exciting.

Audrey Tang: This evening, if you linger around, you meet most of the vTaiwan.

Kevin Tan: Oh, really? Interesting. We could really use some of that in Singapore.

Ray Chen: Please, go ahead.

Ray Chen: Some feedback.

Kevin Tan: Yeah, I would love to get some of your thoughts, actually, about the pay for success work that we’ve been doing, and some of our case studies today. Maybe just by way a introduction, I should tell you a bit more about pay for success, and some of what we heard. Just so we’re on the same understanding, this is basically what we discussed earlier with the model.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Kevin Tan: What we’re trying to do at the end of the day is move from this world where the time we spend in social services without tracking, to one where we do it more reflexively but how we get there is by using data to pave my results and then having some financing to it.

Kevin Tan: What we heard today actually was that there are a couple of areas that were top of mind to everybody. There were four areas. One in drug recidivism, one in long-term care, one in healthcare and the last one, early childhood education.

Audrey Tang: Pre-schoolers?

Kevin Tan: Yes. As you see from the structure, it all depends how you get the data to measure the results.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. So basically, how do you define a valuable position? How do you define the value of the results based on the...?

Kevin Tan: Exactly. Oftentimes, for example, to give you a concrete example of the one we did in Boston, we did one on drug recidivism where the government said, we’ll do a clinical trial, like a control trial, we used our jail database to measure how many people go back to jail after two years.

Kevin Tan: For each person, we can tell you transparently how much it costs us to put them in jail. We’ll pay you the difference in cost. The question I want to get your thought on this, which of these four issue areas are there already data champions, or most transparent data? Maybe that’s where we should start, if we were to look at it.

Audrey Tang: To answer this, I have to answer in a very roundabout way. The Taiwan Medicare is somewhat special. It’s universal healthcare but it’s very reasonably -- many people would say too reasonably -- priced.

Audrey Tang: To maintain this level of efficiency, there’s this huge team of evidence-based policymaking that’s happening inside the ministry of health and welfare. They’re one of the highest concentration of data scientists of any ministry here.

Audrey Tang: That’s all within the ministry though. We don’t see it outside the ministry because it’s healthcare data and it’s clinical data. It’s by the supreme administrative court ruling. It only can be transferred upwards. It cannot be transferred sideways.

Audrey Tang: The society had some concerns because we have a European Union style privacy law and medical data is obviously one of the most sensitive, private physical data. There is a lot of data but not many of it can be used for public good let alone the party validation, the way we’ve proposed. Hands down, healthcare, Medicare has the most data but it’s...

Patsian Low: But it’s out of the picture.

Audrey Tang: Well, it needs innovation to protect privacy and enable use for socila good.

Audrey Tang: One of the reasons why we’re doing this presidential social innovation hackathon -- you may have heard of it -- is to get the public servants out of your comfort zone and propose something wildly impossible. With the blessing of the president, we’ve seen 108 proposals so far, we can turn plenty of them into a free mass incubation period and to get the data situation figured out.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, they are data silos. Some because of regulatory restrictions, but some of them not because of regulation, just a lack of planning for data integration. Now with the president as the project manager, there shouldn’t be any issue in getting the horizontal data integration, which is why we need to cultivate 20 cases for the presidential social innovation hackathon.

Audrey Tang: That’s our main strategy. We have sandbox laws. We have presidential hackathons. We have this kind of way for people to build outside of their daily job patch and go as a social innovator from the outside, even though they’re the same person just wearing different hats, then challenging the status quo as well, based on this public sector expertise.

Audrey Tang: If we look at the presidential hackathon website, there are hundreds of proposals, but here it outlines the 20 cases for the president’s office to consider for this year.

Kevin Tan: Ray chatted with us earlier about it.

Audrey Tang: You can see healthcare is big. Drug rehab is big. Long-term healthcare as part of the social network is key. Preschool education I don’t quite see it in it here, which is just this year’s priorities. Maybe by next year, we will have more early childhood education as decision integration software at the presidential hackathon.

Audrey Tang: For the rehab and long-term healthcare, I think the rehab system at the moment, again, is very siloed. There’s a lot of data, but many of them quantitative, some of them still in non-structured form. There’s many ways that we can improve it by actively visualizing it.

Audrey Tang: The reason why it wasn’t visualized was because, first, the government ditched those service principles. It was done, in fact, when those systems were built. Second, they don’t have extra money to procure solutions that will help them to turn it into the national AVI platform that we’re pushing forward.

Audrey Tang: Again, this presidential hackathon is a way for people to get the political will for them to upgrade their systems for digitization. I think there’s a lot of potential here. At the moment, the Ministry of Justice, I wouldn’t say it’s the most digitized or the most progressive one. Mostly because it has also to work with the Judicial Yuan and this cross-UN information system.

Audrey Tang: We just turned the prosecution document itself into e-document for this year. We can’t expect many other evidence-based policymaking to flow from this thing. If it’s part of the presidential hackathon, I’m sure we can make it happen in another year or so for the neccessary data flow.

Audrey Tang: The general system around the drug rehab and things like that, I think that I very much agree it is within the purview of the Ministry of Justice as well as the Judicial Yuan. Traditionally the two have not been very good sharing relationship with each other for data sharing, but it’s improving now.

Audrey Tang: Actually, I think areas of innovation, despite not being the Social Innovation Hackathon, may be one of the places where the Minister of Education is very progressive and willing to share data. When we challenge its data ownership, the dictionary for example, I was personally maintainer of this dictionary project, which was the Ministry of Education dictionary project.

Audrey Tang: We just published the public data of the Ministry of Education’s dictionary data for education, for preschoolers, for schoolers, for adults, into open data, and mashed it up with Wikimedia data and other kind of data. They used to say all copyrights reserved, but then we challenged it they very quickly relinquished and released everything under Creative Commons.

Kevin Tan: Oh, wow. Great.

Audrey Tang: The budget for education is constitutionally protected. Also, there’s less children coming out, so they have extra money.

Kevin Tan: I see.

Audrey Tang: For the extra money, they’ve got to work to innovate. Their funding situation is better. The social expectation is for it to be public. They are one of the earliest adopter of Creative Commons and, therefore, with data and other kind of data sharing mechanisms.

Audrey Tang: Despite it not being the presidential hackathon thing, I think it actually is one of the strongest open data culture in the cabinet. There’s more.

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Finance actually have a very strong data ownership and they have control departments. The Council of Agriculture also is pretty strong, the Ministry of Interior also. That’s about open licenses. They’re very strong in that. The Minister of Education certainly is one of the leading ministries.

Kevin Tan: Got it.

Patsian Low: I was going to ask. Council of Agriculture, that’s interesting, what kind of data do they hold on to?

Audrey Tang: It’s ag tech, agriculture technology. One of the cases that I handled was to make visible all the prices of the fruits and vegetables from when it’s growing, monitoring its progress as well as its bulk sale price, its price on the Taipei and other markets, its sale at the endpoints using electronic invoice data, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There is this quotation chart, quotation that have the bench price platform in which we absorb all the different open data as well as weather prediction of the storage, because there’s the storage of the Council of Agriculture that was charged a balance by the price of vegetable if it was frozen. They never published the stock of this data, because otherwise the market manipulators with whom...

Audrey Tang: It would defeat its purpose. Where we have, even national secrets released...

Audrey Tang: ...after 30 years at the most, so there must be a time after which you can release this data for the analysts to analyze. They’re like, "Yeah, sure, 24 hours." They don’t like, OK.

Audrey Tang: Nobody really asked them that question. Now after originally forecast they say they’ll publish the stock level of all the vegetables. In a sense, it’s just policy. When we ask for data it’s all there, so that in that sense it has very good management.

Kevin Tan: I think you’ve answered our question of where the lowest hanging fruit is. I’d like to ask where the greatest need is. Our strategy in the US actually has been to use this finance tool to encourage data openness. Here’s why, oftentimes the reason why the government is siloed is because they don’t want to be embarrassed.

Kevin Tan: If you shared much data people would react, "Actually, your program isn’t working." This way we actually find that it reverses the incentives, because the government says, "Hey, I’m not going to pay back the private investors unless we manage it really well and show that it works."

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Kevin Tan: Where would this be most useful in encouraging the data openness culture across the ministries?

Audrey Tang: I totally agree. It basically turns the face culture...

Audrey Tang: ...and again, it’s the culture that the other isn’t losing and is actually gaining face...

Audrey Tang: ...by publishing data. I totally agree with this.

Kevin Tan: Is there a particular area where that would be most useful given that you already have a open data culture for the government?

Audrey Tang: One of the issues we’re dealing with right now is actually around the healthcare data. Everybody has their eye on the national medical insurance data, some say because it’s potentially the most social good, but mostly because it’s where all the privacy fights are happening. We’re trying to find ways that is a solution for everyone.

Audrey Tang: We’re looking at ways, for example an open algorithm, in which that researchers publish their algorithm. Instead of the ministry publishes data, it’s an algorithm that is audited and we hire like white hat hackers to make sure the algorithm doesn’t expose any particular person’s privacy, that it is actually a statistical algorithm, like an aggregation algorithm, for example.

Audrey Tang: Then, after it’s verified, then we deploy it, run it by the data controller and they only publish the result of the algorithm and never the data itself. It turns the open data around. For personal data, the previous paradigm was data anonymization, but data anonymization has this problem of rendering data not very useful, and this is especially general data.

Audrey Tang: Even in such cases it can’t be guaranteed statistically the same as real data, so it’s still a bit suspect in a way. By using the open algorithm effort, we’re trying to use the actual data for such effort without breaching privacy information. I don’t quite know how the open algorithm, Data Protection Agency, and all of these information as well will work with Pay for Success one.

Audrey Tang: Maybe the guarantee that the evaluator can work in some way with the data protection or data authority to agree on a globally agreed, it’s just like accounting or auditing principles, like, "These are algorithms are good for anyone who has a database that is this shape to determine the success of this particular database model."

Audrey Tang: If we can establish this internationally, then it’s much easier to integrate and to develop an algorithm flow. That’s one of the possible strategies we may explore together.

Kevin Tan: Great solution. My doctorate is exactly on that, which is integration with the nonprofits’ data sets. One thing that we’ve been trying to do recently is work with the universities to get access to large federal databases, for example, tax, where it’s centered, and foster care databases at a horizontal level.

Kevin Tan: We’re trying to integrate it with all the other databases at the government level and also the nonprofits. Who are the data integration people in Taiwan on the government side who would be able to do that or do you need like an academic to help out?

Audrey Tang: The National Development Council is the go-to agency for data integration, mostly because it’s a merger of two government agencies. There was the Economic Planning and Whatever Agency that you know and the Auditing and Control Agency that went away.

Audrey Tang: These two, one for planning and one is for accountability. When these two merged into the National Economic Council, because it’s in this unique position relative to every other ministry in the sense that they can set this yearly execution plan, and they can also hold them to account, which is why our national data platform, our national citizen participation platform, our national platform for participation on budgeting, our national platform on education, whatever is all under the National Development Council, because it holds this unique position in relation to other ministries.

Audrey Tang: MIS department is not MIS in the traditional sense. It’s more like a true data office in other countries, so the head of MIS NDC is the go-to person for data integration, which is why he at the near-term time is the de facto operator of the participation platform, because all this integration has to go over him.

Audrey Tang: The NDC has very good connection with the legal community as well as with the tech community. Through the MOEA’s, who have the Triple I and ITRI, they also have access to data anonymization data integration experts. All of this is actually has extended the NDC. They’re technically nonprofits, but in Taiwan we wouldn’t say that Triple I or ITRI are NPOs.

Audrey Tang: They are an extension of the government that specialize in governance issues like this. I think they have no shortage of data scientists, is what I’m trying to say.

Kevin Tan: That’s great.

Audrey Tang: What they do have is generally speaking an issue on the public trust. When our statistics department, independent of the NDC or anybody else publishes statistics, everybody believes them, but when we publish forecasts based on the same statistics, less people trust them.

Audrey Tang: That’s the main issue and that’s why we’re bringing out citizen participation platforms, to increase trust, not only NDC and not the extended units, in general. What they will obviously do for them is as you said to turn around the face culture to make sure that when they release say our Economic Ministry releases data independently, it’s a way to regain the face instead of to lose face.

Audrey Tang: That would be the incentive to partner with NDC. Nothing else is comparable in the position in the executive Yuan, in the same agency.

Kevin Tan: Got it. That’s really helpful.

Patsian Low: It creates the sense of co-ownership, as well, if everybody else is involved, in a hackathon knows they have a stake in the data, and the use of that data, subsequently. That’s really exciting. A question about the NDC in terms of data integration is, they have that same mobilization power across sectors, People, Profit, and Policy?

Audrey Tang: Yes. However, [laughs] Taiwan is a place with absolute freedom of speech. All the government regulation regulates the agencies and the cities, at most. For the private sector and the third sector, it’s guidelines. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s not like people have to follow the NDC guidelines. When we publish things like The Platform Economy, a guideline which outlines how a service provider should behave based on whether they’re telling you advice, they control the labor, they control the shifts and things like that.

Audrey Tang: This is basically a modularized way to deal with things like Uber or Airbnb. The NDC publish it. The regulation set a clause, actually, "Refer to NDC website," [laughs] just saying, "When you have case like this, come to our website."

Audrey Tang: Still, it only has control over city-level agencies and the other ministries. If a disruptive innovator decide to not go through the NDC way, there’s nothing in its enforcement power that tells them they have to.

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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Patsian Low: I understand. Thank you.

Kevin Tan: That’s really interesting. Thank you. The takeaway for us sounds like, as we go through this project, look at early title first. If we need data, we should go to the NDC and see whether or not they...

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

Kevin Tan: ...collaborator, how you advise us.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Kevin Tan: I see. Similar to the States, where the copies of the...you hear the first-movers.

Audrey Tang: Exactly right.

Kevin Tan: It took us seven years to get the federal government into...

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Patsian Low: Actually, even just based on our recent success in SIB models, as well as other innovations that are happening around the region, most of it is being catalyzed by city-level work, because it’s just much more flexible and nimble.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Patsian Low: I’m just really intrigued by the fact that actually, cities here in Taiwan have a "CIO." It’s really very progressive in terms of thinking of having that as an investment of government resources, or saying, "Information is that critical."

Patsian Low: I actually had some questions, taking a step back, about the innovation policy environment. Do you have any more questions?

Kevin Tan: No. I’m good for now. Why don’t you talk about policy...?

Patsian Low: Fundamentally, I have two questions that I’d like to ask. First is to just better understand from establishing a policy environment that enables innovation, particularly enabling social innovation, what do you think are some of the different ways, or different kinds of capacity the government has to build for itself?

Patsian Low: It’s great to hear that civil servants are joining things like hackathons and so forth. Broadly speaking, are there certain directions that you think government and civil servants ought to be building their work competencies and capacity in this area?

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Patsian Low: I see.

Patsian Low: That’s a good point.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Patsian Low: You don’t move the curve outward, actually?

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Patsian Low: That’s OK.

Audrey Tang: 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 into 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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 cuff, its KDI cuff, which procurements it has in agenda, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: If it’s like we have one now, which at the administrative level, major KDI, 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Patsian Low: I see.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: The reason why is that before, when we have a 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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 he 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."

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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, their actual professional designers, professional programmers, professional journalists.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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 agent. Everybody are main agencies. [laughs] When it’s nobody’s business, it’s everybody’s business.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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."

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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 Premiere, who then makes a decision about it.

Audrey Tang: Sometime, because we vote every month what cases are we going to do cross-ministry collaboration, there’s some realted 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

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

Patsian Low: Because it affects their own time off as well.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

Audrey Tang: 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.

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

Patsian Low: I think it’s fascinating, because I was discussing this with Ray earlier, actually. AVPN has been working on the policymaker engagement for two reasons. One is that we know that policymakers are obviously mobilizing infinite amounts of resources in capital.

Patsian Low: We also know that policymakers can actually create and catalyze very enabling environments for other forms of impact and innovation to happen. Now, clearly in Asia, there’s a lot of exploration into that, because we’re all looking for innovative solutions.

Patsian Low: There’s no real thought leadership about how can innovation come about, and what role can government play? We wanted to explore, actually, without having to rely on thought leadership coming from US, UK, and their particular form of government and civic engagement models.

Patsian Low: Is there something that is unique about the way that Asia does it? We really wanted to dive deep into this, because what you’re saying here about civic participation, about creating an environment of trust, about using data as not just a playground, but actually a lubricant to inspire more conversation and innovation, I think it’s really exciting.

Patsian Low: It reflects a particularly unique way that, our governance structure, right?

Audrey Tang: When I was in a UN sustainable economic network in Vatican, talking with Professor Jeffrey Sachs about sustainably long goals, he mentioned that when he teaches economy in the textbooks, they are always start from the utilitarian values, and then deontological.

Audrey Tang: It never mentions virtual ethics. It’s as if virtual 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.

Audrey Tang: 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 virtual. 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.

Audrey Tang: Then he moves onto deontological. The rules, the laws are there to support these virtues in everybody, including our education centers, and so on. Then he talks about the utilitarian values, which are just instruments for those deontological manifestations of virtues. This is unheard of in the European or American context. I think this is something very uniquely Asian.

Patsian Low: It is. What I’m hoping that maybe we have an opportunity from AVPN’s perspective to work with your office on in the future is to actually try to disseminate and share a little bit more about this kind of thought leadership.

Patsian Low: Recently, Nestor started their innovation policy accelerator with Southeast Asia. They were working with Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam. It’s quite closed right now. We don’t actually know how things are progressing.

Patsian Low: That being said, because there is this additional interest in social impact financing, in SDG investments, and in a lot more collaborative, collective models to want to deliver solutions to complex problems.

Patsian Low: Having this kind of context to say that, "How can we leverage the unique cultural legacy of what drives Asia forward?" to then encourage that kind of social impact innovation something that I’d love to be able to share.

Patsian Low: Maybe if there’s an interest, we could consider trying to create a platform for knowledge exchange, experience sharing between other different countries in Asia that are trying to do social innovation. That may be very unique thinking for someone coming from Thailand, given that they have that long history of the royal family, and that very Buddhist spiritual underpinning.

Patsian Low: Compared to, say, Singapore, which is a colonial past. We have a lot of UK baggage with us as well. I think that would be a very interesting contrast to say, "Therefore, in a policy environment, what does this translate to, into actions?" We can take those policymakers to encourage an action.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. In our office, we do values, policies, and processes or procedures. The green one are what the people actually see. These are easily transferable. They wind up in the Slido, the AI.taiwan.gov.tw website, etc. All these are green cards.

Audrey Tang: We have a lot of working relationships with other governments, policy labs, and data service or digital services on the green part. I think what you have just mentioned, the Asian context, actually, we can align our values.

Audrey Tang: We can start our value-based discussion, and then do the policy as manifestations of those values, instead of introducing processes and retrofitting policies to work with those processes, which is the norm in the US, of course. We don’t have to do it this way.

Patsian Low: Exactly, and particularly because the dynamics. To be practical, a lot of the dynamics comes from the fact that much of the developing countries of this region are getting their funding from US, Europe, and UK.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Patsian Low: What that effectively means is that therefore, there’s a particular way of doing things, a family of solutions that need to be aligned with the founders’ objectives. Now, we have an opportunity to actually explore something different. I think it’s worth exploring. I hope that we can maybe work with your office in the future to take some of this innovation and sharing it with the rest of the region.

Audrey Tang: We have many number of ambassadors. We can, at any time, send people to Japan for two months, to Singapore for two months. We have a lot of very dynamic fellows, because our office does entirely virtual. As long as they’re in Asia, we’re in the same time zone.

Patsian Low: Plus-minus a few hours.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, exactly, exactly. The farthest is New Zealand. We’ve survived that, so it’s all OK. We have a lot of fellows and ambassadors. We also welcome people who come here to study. We have a lot of people who came from various backgrounds.

Audrey Tang: There’s a PhD student actually working for us on her thesis now for what they call the human geography, which is like cultural anthropology but focuses on spaces instead of people, if I got that right.

Kevin Tan: My sister’s a human geographer. You got it right.

Audrey Tang: All right.

Patsian Low: That’s distinct from physical geography, is human geography, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, exactly, but they use a lot of the same ethnographic methods, and things like that. What they are exploring is those connected spaces, online spaces, commercial online spaces, the hybrid spaces, like the recursive public here in the Social Innovation Lab.

Audrey Tang: They co-create the social knowledge of that. How it affects policymaking, how it happens, because every other Tuesday, all the policymakers know that social innovation is here to talk remotely with people from a rural background, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think the human geography component of this really merits a lot of academic attention, and we do get that. We do get people writing thesis out of collaboration here. We send our fellows, but we also welcome fellows.

Patsian Low: That would be great. For example, one of the foundations that we are interacting with in Indonesia today actually has a very dedicated program to build the competencies of city-level policymakers, so mayors, district governors, at that level.

Patsian Low: They particularly focus there, because what happens is that, when they go to remote Indonesia, the national policymakers’ reaches are actually quite limited.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, that’s right. It’s very locally context.

Patsian Low: Exactly. I think what would be also really interesting is we can continue a pathologic exchange about some of the specific practical initiatives that have been piloted and tested. For example, we talked earlier in the workshop about sharing the case studies that were done on pay for success contracts.

Patsian Low: We also are looking to then collate other more interesting innovative ways of using social finance to encourage innovation, like with impact models, particularly the ones that break down these silos and boundaries. We want to also gather examples both from Taiwan, but also from other countries in Asia. We can really disclose some interesting and knowledgeable learning policies.

Patsian Low: I’d like to extend an invitation also to someone in your office to join us, actually, at our conference. Our conference in June this year, we will be looking at a variety of issues that first of all, will be of interest in terms of where the social challenge is residing, like education, like healthcare, sustainable cities, among other things.

Patsian Low: We also want to be able to inspire some more innovative thinking on the part of how policy interacts with other sectors to address some of these issues. If I can email some of the information to you later on about that, it would be great for somebody from your office to join us.

Audrey Tang: I was at your virtual conference with Professor Feng Yin when all this started, right?

Patsian Low: Yes.

Audrey Tang: I can also participate as a robot, if not in the flesh. I will make sure that there is someone in the flesh also.

Patsian Low: That would be great. In fact, one of the things we may want to discuss internally is whether sustainable cities is a topic, if it’s something we can take to the next level. The world city summit is happening in Singapore again this year.

Patsian Low: The first time ever, if you look at the agenda, they actually are dedicating a session to sustainable financing in cities. They are dedicating some sessions to inclusion, inclusive development. Compared to the last city summit agenda, you see so much more focus on that now. It’s really exciting.

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome. That sounds fun.

Patsian Low: It’s so inspiring to hear about this. Thank you so much for sharing.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for sharing. I look forward to be part of the network. There is a lot of material that’s locally very well-known, but internationally, not people know about. You might have heard something during this day’s conference.

Audrey Tang: We’re using the opportunity of the APAC Social Enterprise Summit this May to make sure that all the exemplar cases are translated to English, and at least there is an English interpreter that we can collect into something that is in a shareable form, like little handouts and so on, the case studies that’s happening here.

Audrey Tang: That may also add to your network. I told our Ministry of Health and Welfare, as well as agriculture, labor, whatever, that all their introductory material must be under a Creative Commons license, meaning that you can use it to make derivative material was asking their permission. So we look forward to contributing to your courses.

Patsian Low: That would be great. To the extent that we can take the social impact bond journey to the next level, I think your suggestions earlier about where are the low-hanging fruits will be really valuable. I suppose if, in doing the discussions, we come across any potential challenges, we can maybe have a further conversation with you.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, for someone to try out a creative programming model, it is not legal. The public servant who signed this, they have the responsibility to explain to their minister. That actually is the main issue. If they choose the lowest price fit, there is no risk whatsoever, which is why they tend to use this traditional procurement method.

Audrey Tang: In our proposed bill now in the legislative UN, we are change the procurement law, that they no longer require explanation in this arm. The risk is not concentrated. The traditional way, and the best value, whatever the value means, it could include such value, are now on par. They no longer have to justify to this.

Audrey Tang: I think as I stated in the opening, this procurement the law, and the company law, which allows the company to fix to its social mission, is on the way, and announce this mission lock to the greater investors, as well the data. I think these two, they are not necessarily for SIB to happen, but they would remove two of the largest ecosystem burdens of this kind of procurement.

Audrey Tang: I’d really hope to work with MP Karen other MPs to fast track these two laws. If they could pass this year, then I think the journey would be much easier from the end of the year onwards.

Patsian Low: From an all of government point of view, do you foresee, are there any other potential regulatory constraints that would have to be overcome to address some of what we talked about, in terms of these issues, education?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. If you see any regulations that’s in your way, just apply for a fintech sandbox.

Patsian Low: True. That’s always a way to go around that. That’s good. It sounds like there’s already a lot of very good ingredients already there, particularly with respect to the presence of data, the role of the National Development Council, for example, and this data integration landscape.

Kevin Tan: I’m actually very curious to see how this tool metamorphosizes within the Taiwanese context. I don’t know if you have a particular vision for how we could adapt it to further your goals in the innovation front.

Audrey Tang: The cross-sectoral trust in this kind of referee, I think, is a core of your method. We talked about the National Investor Board and things like this a lot. The accountability of this multi-stakeholder model must be greater than the government itself, or any stakeholder in particular, otherwise, they will just drive the traditional procurement model.

Audrey Tang: Everybody’s the first challenge is, "OK, so, can I buy out the referee?"

Audrey Tang: It has to establish an even more transparent, accountable way of governance, than either the government or the traditional charities. This is, I think, the main social challenge for this innovation to happen. Everything else, I think the regulatory, everything are good to haves. If we get those local laws passed, it will make your job easier, but there is nothing blocking your way.

Audrey Tang: What is currently blocking, in a sense, is that whether this kind of multi-stakeholder governance model can actually engender something that’s increased trust over time, instead of the increased trust over time until the next election.

Kevin Tan: Do you have any thoughts on how we could make it have the best of increasing trust over time?

Audrey Tang: Just publishing our dialogue in a publicly addressable, search engine friendly transcript form actually is a part of it. It means that you are not traditional lobbyists, and I’m not a traditional minister. We’re not here to advocate for any particular issue to be solved. We’re advocating for a new way for people to collaborate.

Audrey Tang: I think this spirit, if it continues like this, as we talk about at NAB, as long as anyone who think they have a stake can have a stake, I think this will only increase over time. Even slowly, at first, but I think it’s much better than we get a mayor or whatever saying, "This is the future," and it turns out, it’s not, right?

Patsian Low: That’s true. I think it’s a kind of modestly holder collaborative governance that we will hope to have, which should be inspired by an open approach to engender their trust. As you say, if nobody wants anything and everybody wants everything. It’s that kind of spirit. I think hopefully we’ll be able to also take that spirit and start the NAB activities and the social finance activities in that direction.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and actually the discretionary procurement threshold has just moved from 100k to a million NT dollars to Taiwan. So now, below a million NT dollars, there is no bidding process. This is new of this month I think. One of my tactics or strategies would be actually to choose something really, really small. It doesn’t even need a bidding process.

Patsian Low: I understand.

Audrey Tang: It could be discretionary budget for pay for success. One million Taiwan dollars is OK. It is an OK amount. That’s one of the tactics before emarking on the full process.

Patsian Low: That’s a good opportunity. There was a question earlier about competitive bidding actually, about how to find the right service provider. It’s good that if the procurement environment allows that kind of possibility.

Kevin Tan: The other big procurement question people have always asked us is, what happens after four years? In the US, we have exactly the same problem and we’ve kind of pressed into it, one, instead of a bank account, the current government puts in money and then that lasts for the leadership program.

Kevin Tan: The other is tie the procurement in the back-end to some kind of bond rating so the future government can’t back out. I don’t know what then in the Taiwanese context would be the appropriate way to solve that.

Audrey Tang: There’s many legal instruments invented to solve issues like that. There’s the Charitable Trust tool designed exactly to solve this kind of problem.

Audrey Tang: There’s many legal scholars who came out with various ways. I think it all boils down to whether you publish not only the results but a rational mode for sustainable impact. As long as the drafting stage is transparent and accountable, I think people has no qualms with people trying and failing. When people fail, it just adds to everyone’s knowledge this way.

Audrey Tang: If the initial drafting stage is not open, then people can kind of be worry, because the next party will not have the access to the previous party’s internal documents when still in the drafting stage. I think that’s one of the things. Whatever the legal instrument that we choose -- there’s many to choose -- as long as the drafting stage discussions is open and transparent, I think we’re good.

Kevin Tan: OK, great.

Patsian Low: That’s good.

Kevin Tan: Yeah, interesting.

Patsian Low: Yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Tan: Do you guys have any thoughts or questions?

Patsian Low: No. I think it’s a fascinating and very inspiring conversation.

Kevin Tan: I’m very inspired to see what you’re up to.

Patsian Low: Thank you so much.

Kevin Tan: I really loved it. Great advice.

Ray Chen: We’re meeting with Feng Yin tomorrow, so we will discuss the NAB thing.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, very much so.

Ray Chen: I will keep you updated.

Audrey Tang: The very fact that I can work with you and Professor Feng, in the UN meeting, says a lot that this is not tied to party politics at all.

Audrey Tang: We’re all in it for the international collaboration.

Ray Chen: Professor Feng is very supportive to forming a NAB.

Patsian Low: Very much. We’ve been working with different countries to see what else we can do to encourage a NAB type of a model, the creations of NABs. They tend to be the lead drivers in any form of innovation with respect to social finance and impact investments.

Patsian Low: In different places the NAB formation takes different context. What we found that was really exciting, what was happening in Taiwan unlike in other places, is that there is actually very little competing agenda between different sectors. That’s actually a very fertile ground a NAB movement.

Patsian Low: Now that you’ve got the initiative on the part of the government to want to create an open culture and risk absorption culture, I think the pieces are good to move it forward. What would be useful is to identify an opportunity to say, "Let’s put theory into action." That would be our next test.

Patricia Chu: Have a specific pilot.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I think when the stakeholders all come from innovation, virtual ethics background...

Audrey Tang: ...it’s always possible to find what we call noncontroversial essence, an abstract enough thing that everybody can rally behind, but concrete enough that you can translate one into a pilot project. It’s always possible in a virtual ethics society. It’s not that easy in a utilitarian society because we have to ask each other utility functions, and know sometimes don’t measure it.

Patsian Low: Cost benefit and so forth.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Patsian Low: Because when you think about the NABs that have been established now in Asia. There is Australia. There is Korea, India and Taiwan who potentially would want to set one up. I know they have been exploring in China. They’ve been exploring in Singapore.

Patsian Low: Among all of these countries, actually, the background and the principles behind, as you say, tends to be generally more utilitarian, the degree in Australia and in India. Taiwan is an opportunity for a different kind of map.

Kevin Tan: I think that AVPN has an annual conference every year, this year we kind of have an Asia-based, right?

Patsian Low: Yes.

Kevin Tan: Maybe, I’m thinking next year AVPN could be panel to work with.

Audrey Tang: Any time.

Patsian Low: We actually partnered up on Asia Tomorrow. We have myself and another AVPN colleague will be speaking...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, you’re one of the network pundits.

Patsian Low: That’s right. That’s right. It’s really exciting then to just see what else is developing but we’d like to explore just something more long-term about being able to bring the knowledge and experience of Taiwan to other parts of Asia. Likewise, to see if they have any interest and want to also come here and explore more.

Patsian Low: I think we will love to keep you apprised about our continuing conversations with other policymakers in other countries. Let’s see if we can also, after Asia Tomorrow, publish some of the case studies that you talked about as well, on our platforms. I think that would be very useful.

Patricia Chu: Yeah. I’d be very happy to spread the word.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, let’s do that.

Patsian Low: Good.

Ray Chen: All right, thank you.

Kevin Tan: Thank you.

Patsian Low: Thank you so much. I’m grateful for your time.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Patsian Low: When this is published, I want to click on it. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I’ll send you everyone for editing for 10 days.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.

Patsian Low: Thank you.