Ludovic Sinet: As I sent you about Good Tech Lab, just to give you an overview about Good Tech Lab. We’re actually a research venture based in France. To be totally transparent, we are financed by three French corporations, the Comic Relief English Foundation, and the Autodesk Foundation in the US.

Ludovic Sinet: We are actually working on a global report on how technology can help tackle the world’s most wicked issues. We will publish this free-for-all report in September, and mainly we would like it to be actually divided in two parts.

Ludovic Sinet: The first part will be about how, completely, which technologies can help tackle all the 10 issues that we are actually listed. It could be about water sanitation, air quality, a system about agriculture and food, and so on, all the many issues.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a subset of the SDGs that are most wicked?

Ludovic Sinet: Yeah, exactly. We actually reshaped the SDGs to make it issues that can be targeted and focused as in industries, because SDGs are like most philanthropic issues.

Audrey Tang: You sorted the problems by how wicked they are?

Audrey Tang: OK, go on.

Ludovic Sinet: For each issues, we will actually analyze which are the current technologies available in development and trying also to analyze which kind are good tech or not. Just giving instance like vertical agriculture, we know from experts that it’s bullshit because it’s not energy efficient and consumes a lot of water, so it’s not the best system. This is the first part.

Ludovic Sinet: The second part will be about how the innovation ecosystems are actually changing to support this new trend of entrepreneurs coming from the deep tech, from the tech or the social business, but not making a difference in trying really focus on these issues. With technology, it can be low tech, high tech. This is quite a broad range.

Ludovic Sinet: We are interviewing mainly accelerators, incubators, hubs, VC firms, also a new kind of VC, hybrid finance corporations to understand how corporations work also to solve these issues, like a Unilever, or like Danone, these companies trying to solve these issues, also different kinds of experts or institutions.

Ludovic Sinet: I thought it would be interesting to meet you and to understand better the Taiwanese digital ecosystem, and especially the civic tech ecosystem, which is really strong here. It’s maybe one of the biggest thing we hear about, wrote of Taiwan.

Ludovic Sinet: I have...

Audrey Tang: A few questions?

Ludovic Sinet: Yeah, a few questions listed up. Give me...

Audrey Tang: Of course, take your time.

Lisa Lin: Sorry to interrupt.

Audrey Tang: Not at all. We’re just starting this interview about the technology for social good, as well as a innovation ecosystem, and how Taiwan’s civic tech and social innovation ecosystem plays together.

Audrey Tang: This is a effort, a joint research program, that will be published openly about how to solve the most wicked parts of the Sustainable Development Goals, and is jointly funded by some French and some American sources.

Audrey Tang: If you like, grab a chair.

Lisa Lin: Just listening.

Ludovic Sinet: Sure.

Audrey Tang: There’s a chair there.

Ludovic Sinet: You want to grab a chair?

Audrey Tang: You can use my chair over there, too.

Audrey Tang: No?

Lisa Lin: Thanks.

Audrey Tang: Lisa Lin, here, is one of the principal community organizers of the vTaiwan project, and in her day job very well connected to the startup ecosystem.

Ludovic Sinet: Great.

Audrey Tang: She just returned from a cross-Asian trip.

Ludovic Sinet: You, too?

Audrey Tang: To build connections between startup and...

Lisa Lin: Between startups, especially from ASEAN countries.

Ludovic Sinet: ASEAN?

Lisa Lin: ASEAN countries, yeah. That’s what we are doing now to connect more global startup ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: Connecting between accelerators, and so on.

Audrey Tang: She’s definitely the right person, actually. You should be interviewing her.

Ludovic Sinet: I would take your call, then.

Ludovic Sinet: I’m also in the middle of a trip. I was in Thailand, Vietnam before now. Heading to Hong Kong and Singapore. Now Taiwan. [laughs]

Lisa Lin: Is it about the tech world...?

Ludovic Sinet: It’s about, actually, how technology can help tackle the environment and social issues. It’s more generally, but civic tech and democracy tech, like self-sufficiency tech, also part of our target. It’s a pretty large vision, like trying to go above the deep tech, tech social division.

Lisa Lin: Your article is about all of Asia?

Audrey Tang: And it’s going to be a report or a white paper?

Ludovic Sinet: It’s going to be a report. We don’t know yet if it will be a slide deck, a traditional report, or a web report. It will be free. It’s a global report. I’m in charge of the Southeast Asia. There are other guys doing America, Africa, Europe.

Audrey Tang: You’re the regional delegate?

Ludovic Sinet: Exactly.

Ludovic Sinet: You can say this way.

Audrey Tang: How can I help?

Ludovic Sinet: To begin, I would like to understand better what are your activities as a digital minister. All the activities and the domains that you cover and how you work. What is your mission? How do you, in a way, use technology or not? What are your metrics for you [inaudible 6:25] success as a minister? To understand better all the fields you cover, so I can also get deeper in different fields.

Audrey Tang: It’s good. In Taiwan, we have this special form of minister called minister without portfolio, meaning that we’re technically ministers, but we don’t have a ministry. Most of the ministers without portfolio -- there’s nine of us -- work on emerging issues, such as sustainable development. There is no minister for sustainable development.

Audrey Tang: For example, the aging society. There’s no minister for aging society, and things like that. My tasks are not ministries. There are three of them. I’m in charge of open government. I’m in charge of social innovation, which includes social entrepreneurship and social enterprise, as well as youth empowerment, which mostly take form of the youth participation, the youth council, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: As the digital minister, I’m mostly tasked to absorb the risk of digital transformation by trying, in the administration, in our day-to-day operation, as much automation as possible, as much digital tools as possible, as much paperless work as possible. By doing this as a pilot in a minister’s office we eliminate the need for the low-level civil servants to petition for the digital transformation.

Audrey Tang: Once that I do this first, everybody can site me as an example. For example, every Monday and Thursday I am in administration office, but the other days I’m not. I’m actually touring around Taiwan, and bring with me live stream cameras, 360 cameras, and then let a dozen ministries see with their own eyes in the Social Innovation Lab here and project it with me in the rural areas.

Audrey Tang: Then visiting social entrepreneurs so that they can ask questions to those 12 ministries. They have to answer immediately. This is using digital tools to bridge the gap of space. All of my meetings are radically transparent, so everybody can see that if this particular public servant proposed a very good idea, they get the credit and I absorb the risk.

Audrey Tang: Whereas in the old model, the minister would get all the credit and the public servant absorbed all the risk.

Audrey Tang: This is a systematic way to engender innovation. In my capacity as the lead for social innovation we also have this Social Innovation Lab here, which is, again, a uniting of the force of the 12 different ministries in charge of all the different kinds of social innovation policies.

Audrey Tang: You mentioned incubation, right? We have the...Sorry, this in Chinese.

Audrey Tang: We have the matching social impact investing and NGO ecosystem. That is jointly managed by the Fiscal Security Council and the National Development Fund. Then we have the sustainable value, empowerment, and education that is jointly managed by the Minister of Education and Minister of Interior.

Audrey Tang: The incubation is managed by Minister of Economy with help from the Culture, the Transport, Indigenous People, and Hakka People. We have the Regulatory Adjustment program, which is a very interesting co-creation program where we use sandboxes and other mechanisms for the civil society who systematically ask to violate laws and regulations for 6 months or 12 months as an experiment.

Audrey Tang: If it’s a good idea, then we adjust the laws. If it’s not a good idea, then the investor pay the tuition for the whole of society so that we can co-create the laws and adjust the laws. This is managed by the National Development Council with help from the Ministry of Education.

Audrey Tang: We also have the advocacy arm, which is to work with existing co-ops, existing charities, existing agricultural communities, and try to work to with them as peers. Instead of seeing them as just something that we can assign tasks to, we instead solve the problems of the problem-solvers. They go into the society and come up with social innovation.

Audrey Tang: We make sure that their legal hurdles, their technology hurdles and whatever is solved. We do this by the way of, for example, the presidential hackathon, which is a...

Audrey Tang: ...very interesting way. I’ve not seen before in many places, which was a three-months hackathon, organized by the President herself, and for anyone in the public servant, in the civil society internationally, to propose ways that we can do public service better, through the sharing of data or sharing of algorithms and whatever.

Audrey Tang: Then we have a judge panel with 20 cases. The project management is the President herself, so there is no data that would not get cross-ministry communication and so on. Then we finally elect five of them to really absorb them into the public service ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: We do this by advocating basically that anyone anywhere in Taiwan or the world, because we don’t limit nationalities, can suggest ways for the public service to work better. This is jointly coordinated by pretty much all the ministries related to all the different organizations of social entrepreneurship.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Labor worked together on the SDG diplomacy. We basically worked with all the UN-related SDG and [inaudible 12:12] . If it’s the official UN meeting, we send iPads instead of ministers to make sure that we are engaged in the discussion in the actual exporting of the SDG-related technologies.

Audrey Tang: We have a very aggressive strategy of basically taking all the civic tech. For example, this is the civic tech that monitors air pollution. We see one of the sensors here actually. This is all citizen science, but also government-supported once it gets to scale.

Ludovic Sinet: Yeah, it’s the lass network.

Audrey Tang: Right, it’s the lass network. We will feature all of these cases very prominently. This is May 5th and 6th. In Taichung we’ll have 1,500 people, large summit, to get all the social entrepreneurs in the Asia Pacific, to get all the intermediary organizations here, and maybe sign a Taichung statement or something.

Audrey Tang: The entire idea is SDG ’17, Taiwan wants to be a connector that makes contributions without dominating, and the government basically is the problem-solver of the problem-solvers. That’s the five-minute pitch.

Ludovic Sinet: Really great. I’m really impressed, actually, by all the structure of the government and the focus on the civil society. By the way, I just thought about, I think you actually met, also, the guys from the team, with Benjamin Tincq, who was brought from OuiShare.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. From OuiShare, yeah.

Ludovic Sinet: He’s the founder, actually, of Good Tech Lab. There is Manuela from ColaborAmerica, yeah, I’m working with them.

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

Ludovic Sinet: We all know each other.

Audrey Tang: We’re in good company.

Ludovic Sinet: Maybe a second question would be just an overview -- even if I have already -- of the Taiwan digital innovation scene, and especially the civic tech scene. Just to understand how big is it? Is it major? Is it the major of the system, how it’s working?

Ludovic Sinet: So I can get it now, how is innovation supported by the government in Taiwan? Is there any focus, also by the government, to focus on the SDG for innovation, like by funding, by creating spaces?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, yeah. The civic tech scene is actually branded in many other names as well. The main group that use the term civic tech is the g0v movement. Its supporting organization would be the Open Culture Foundation. There are many other movements, for example, the Data for Social Good movement.

Audrey Tang: They bill themselves as a data science, data literacy movement. Not quite civic tech, but actually doing very much the same thing. There’s the Social Enterprise Insights, the SE Insights, which runs this iLab project, and they focus on social entrepreneurship, that is to say to solve concrete social issues. More than half of them are technological in nature, so they overlap a lot.

Audrey Tang: There’s the B Corp movement, which rewards, of course, companies that can take care of the environmental, social and governance values simultaneously. Mostly, they do this through technology. [laughs] There’s many, many different movements, I would say, in Taiwan, that not necessarily share the civic tech branding.

Audrey Tang: We tried to come up with the social innovation branding. This is the branding that everybody can agree with, and because it encompasses civic tech, civic participation, social entrepreneurship, you name it. As long as it’s not industrial innovation, it’s probably social innovation.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have two main projects to support this. One is called DIGI⁺. DIGI+ is an eight-year plan and there’s an English page that explains how this is about. There’s this committee called the Digital Innovation and Governance Initiative Committee.

Audrey Tang: The DIGI stands respectively for the digital infrastructure, the development, the innovation, the governance and inclusion, social inclusion. That encompasses all the different parts of the digital life. This is a very complex plan and it runs until 2025. There is a even more impressive committee headed by the Premier himself, and the vice convener.

Audrey Tang: There are three minister without portfolio. I’m of the three. Then it’s split into the development and infrastructure, of the innovation, of the economy, of the governance, as well as coordination and promotion. This is the main governing structure of the underlying infrastructure part. On top of it, we have the investments and connection to Silicon Valley, to other start-up and accelerator.

Audrey Tang: We call it Asia.SV. Asia.SV. I pronounce the dot as connecting, so Asia connecting to Silicon Valley, but everybody else just pronounce the dot as dot, so Asia.SV. Again, they have an English page, so you can see how ASVIDA is done.

Audrey Tang: Instead of a government entity, the ASVIDA is composed of mostly industry leaders, special interest group, and so on. They’re at arm’s length from the government, but they are in charge of telling us, "You really should look at autonomous cars by this year, instead of two years in the future." They are more application level. They have a lot of connections to incubators and accelerators abroad.

Audrey Tang: They are also in charge of working with the DIGI⁺ team, which is a government team, to produce vision statements, such as AI Taiwan, which outlines our action plan for AI, such as, these are the new things, talents, and the regulatory co-creation, which we see very important for the co-domestication of AI and human beings.

Audrey Tang: You will see a lot of this Taiwan.gov.tw sub-domains, like this is for biomedical, and things like that. Mostly it’s ASVIDA and DIGI⁺. ASVIDA is more application level, and DIGI+ more infrastructure level, but that’s the two main committees. I’m on the deputy convening of both meetings.

Ludovic Sinet: Is there any development fund from the government, like investing in startups or maybe spaces?

Audrey Tang: Very much so. The National Development Fund is the main fund, but there’s also a lot of small businesses funds. There’s small business funds for innovative services, for township development, -- let me look them up -- for innovation. There’s one for service innovation, there’s one for product innovation, and there’s one for township innovation.

Audrey Tang: For example, with the Social Innovation Lab, itself, that you are in, we’re replicating it. Taichung already has three spaces like this one. We have a lot of them in the major six cities, but now we’re spreading out to more rural areas.

Audrey Tang: There’s also, of course, maker spaces and other more "youth entrepreneurship" supporting structures. That is mostly co-collaborated with universities and colleges as part of their university social responsibility programs.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of spaces.

Ludovic Sinet: Is the government funding these spaces?

Audrey Tang: Yes, everything I said is government funded. For our National Development Fund, I should stress that they never become the largest investor. It’s more like a matching fund. A lot of value is in finding the right NGO. That is the primary of investor.

Ludovic Sinet: This question about this space. It’s a private-held space?

Audrey Tang: No, this is a military base.

Lisa Lin: Was?

Audrey Tang: Was. The TAF stands for Taiwan Air Force. The Air Force is not using it anymore, but it’s still state owned. It’s currently used as part of the Culture Lab to try to experiment with the creators actually residing in this space. The Social Innovation Lab is one of the first labs, but we will have more labs of creators working here.

Ludovic Sinet: I see. Note the things. It’s pretty interesting. Is there any weaknesses of the Taiwan ecosystem? What would you say are the weaknesses of the Taiwan ecosystem, digital ecosystem, or tech ecosystem?

Audrey Tang: Our infrastructure is really, really good. Broadband as Human Right, it covers a vast majority of population. The rest few percents we use special budget to make sure that there’s 4G, or at least microwave connection, so that everybody can enjoy broadband. That’s our advantage, and it’s mostly because of geography.

Audrey Tang: Of course, education’s really good. Constitutionally protected budget and the democratization of ICT technologies in K-12 education. These are the advantages. Of course, the diversity status is really good. We recently passed a series of laws that basically declares all the indigenous languages and the major Hakka, [inaudible 22:39] , and Mandarin as all our national languages. It’s linguistic or cultural diversity at one.

Audrey Tang: The gender balance, we’re the highest in gender parity in using Internet services and digital services. The digital participation rate is, again, one of the world’s highest. All this makes Taiwan pretty unique in trying a lot of digital participation and digital governance tools.

Audrey Tang: What are the weaknesses? Frankly, when we talk about social innovation or social enterprise, there was a poll last year. About 80 percent of people, when hearing the idea of social entrepreneurship, they would support it, saying, "I would buy it," buy their services or products, "I will invest in it, even, and support it with my cash."

Audrey Tang: When asked, "Can you name one social entrepreneur? Is there one social enterprise or civic tech model that you know of? Can you name one?" about four-fifths of the people cannot name one. They support the idea in general, but they can’t quite identify the particular type or particular social entrepreneur that actually affected their lives.

Audrey Tang: This is the main weakness, I would say. Many, like the [inaudible 24:03] , or the other projects, they’re really high profile internationally, but for the domestic population, it reaches, still, a relatively minor part of the people. It’s not part of the basic education system, for example.

Audrey Tang: Random people, if you ask, "Hey, what do you think about civic tech and social enterprise?" they’re like, "Yeah, they are very good ideas, but I can’t name anything."

Audrey Tang: This is particularly the case outside the six major cities. How to bring awareness, and a concrete awareness, of the actual SDG issues they’re solving, instead of just the umbrella of social innovation is good, is the main challenge. Additional tools, of course, can help with that.

Ludovic Sinet: It’s actually a thing we see in many countries, the lack of awareness of the SDGs from the general population.

Ludovic Sinet: Maybe we should get more into the topic about technology. I have a question, which is what do you think about the role of technology and entrepreneurship to solve these issues and reach, for instance, SDGs or any other frameworks? What do you think the role of technology and entrepreneurship is to tackle these issues?

Audrey Tang: Before we have the tech or the social entrepreneurs, many of the SDG goals are actually seen as a zero-sum game. You want better labor laws, then you trade your GDP.

Audrey Tang: There’s many fights between the two sides of a value. The government, by the way, is a [inaudible 25:41] here.

Audrey Tang: Our government system previously, because it’s democracy, supposedly we need to listen to what people want. People want two very different things. First, we see the government absorbing a lot of the tension, and the trust in government becomes declining, because whatever government do you can’t please half of the people, so it keeps getting thinner.

Audrey Tang: We cannot break, because if you break the society stop talking to each other. This is the reality when the many governments are implementing SDGs, in that many of the SDGs are actually not that easy to implement without sacrificing other development goals.

Audrey Tang: What tech, entrepreneurship, and innovation can do is to serve as a link between the social and the commercial forces. As well as, of course, the environmental and governance forces.

Audrey Tang: Whenever there’s a innovation happens, usually through technology, suddenly you can pull in the social forces, like the [inaudible 26:50] participants, and the commercial forces, such as [inaudible 26:52] manufactures, into something that actually for the common good of all.

Audrey Tang: It makes it possible to coordinate on a massive scale, and without which none of those coordination problems can be solved before. Before you can solve a coordination problem, it will always appear as a zero-sum game. Technology and entrepreneurship makes it possible, for example, through things like crowdfunding, to get everybody to commit before actually committing to an action.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of new technologies that engage a large number of stakeholders, make sure the stakeholders understand what everybody is at, do it transparently with accountability, and then solve those coordination problems together.

Audrey Tang: This is the spirit of entrepreneurship, as well as the massive participation of technologies, can jointly solve wicked problems by proposing a way for actors to participate in the solution of the coordination problem without suffering from the tragedy of the commons.

Ludovic Sinet: How do you then get the balance between one entrepreneur making a whole bunch of money, and still trying not to use the massive corporation, for instance the data of citizens? If you take Cambridge Analytica thing that just happened, how do you make sure the entrepreneurship is actually serving the rest of the population?

Audrey Tang: By promoting a open model of innovation. For example, I am here every Wednesday, 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM usually. Everybody gets to talk with me and use government resources, but they have to agree to publish their transcript publicly.

Audrey Tang: If the innovation happens in the open, if the innovation is CC licensed, or otherwise licensed under a open way. Like the g0v, most of our work is under CC0, which is totally in the commons, even the attribution. We don’t want attribution.

Audrey Tang: What this means is that the innovations in the commons is pooled, and it’s pooled in a way that enables further innovation to happen without the first mover having a de facto monopoly power. For example, I don’t have a monopoly power of how g0v moves. Neither does anyone, really, in the g0v movement.

Audrey Tang: This is really important, because the g0v logo is under CC0. Anyone can use g0v logo and say, "Hey, I’m a g0v project." This is why permission-less innovation need to be coupled with a mind of the commons and the common pool of open innovation.

Audrey Tang: If all of those innovations that you cited in the social network, mining, and whatever was open source in the first place, then none of this would have happened because the independent auditors would see something wrong that’s going on.

Ludovic Sinet: Because for the digital innovation you can easily make it open source. You can even raise funds if you are open source. It’s really like commons. If you take issues like working on new materials, or like in biotech, or really hot things, not digital, but real brick and mortar innovation, have you seen successful open models so far, or do you think we’re wasting?

Ludovic Sinet: If not, how do you actually make cooperation between the private funds, VC funds, civil society, government, and entrepreneurs so that you actually keep the use of the technology for the commons, for the bigger part of the population?

Audrey Tang: I’ll answer it in two angles. First is from a social impact investment angle. In Taiwan, we are now trying to pass a new company law that starts to make the company structure more amenable for what the US people call benefit corporations. A key part of it is to change the first clause of the company law, which used to say companies are entities that aims to make a profit.

Audrey Tang: We add to it, saying that it may, by the way, declare that it has social or environmental concerns that are equally, or even more important, to the for-profit motive. Exactly how important is left for the company founders, preferably in their charters, in their constitutional documents of the company.

Audrey Tang: Then we also have a part in the company law that says any company may elect to publish its constitutional documents, charters, and so on including the parts, for example, you want to make a public good announcement every year about their yearly report of their sustainability, or impact assessment, or SROI, or what have you.

Audrey Tang: They can submit it to the Minister of Economy, and the Minister of Economy has to make it open data so that anyone can independently audit how many companies are tackling, in a systematic way, issues in any particular SDG area.

Audrey Tang: Then we have a national registry of such companies. You can choose one of the SDG categories and see other companies -- co-ops, or charities that are making a profit -- engage with the market. What are the issues they’re solving? What are its value proposition, key activities? This is a national registry that is self-maintained by the social entrepreneurs. That’s renewed every year, by the way.

Audrey Tang: You have to go here and register here before you can participate in the social value procurement program, or the buying power program. The Social Value program, like in Canada, here. We have this registry. That’s one of the things that really assures the impact investors that this company will keep on to its social mission, even if it raises another round of funds. This is one part.

Audrey Tang: We see this kind of funding model really, really useful and helpful, so that it’s not technically digital. It may use digital tools, but many of those are actually working on, for example, a re-growth of the land by using agricultural methods that are completely pollution-free, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: All these social missions are supported by a company act that will soon make the independent audit and third-party analysis very easy and very, very powerful. That’s one part. For the government part, what we’re trying to do here is we tour around Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: In addition to this weekly office hour, every other Tuesday I also go to all the different four corners of Taiwan and listen in to the issues reported by the social innovators. Many of them are actually stuck with regulations that prohibits or hinders their social innovation. That is actually the number one pain point of the social innovators, because the existing laws did not anticipate the things they are doing.

Audrey Tang: This is especially true in non-digital areas...

Audrey Tang: ...because they want to disrupt the market, essentially. Before we have the sandbox law, which the fintech sandbox passed a couple months ago, and the autonomous vehicle sandbox will be in next month. All this has been pre-announced on vTaiwan, and so the society knows about it.

Audrey Tang: Whereas before the sandbox acts when a innovator proposed something, it’s easier for the civil servant to reject it, it costs them nothing, than to try to adapt and approve it, which costs them some time. Now, with the sandbox act, if you approve it, it just costs you some time, but if you reject it, it enters into a 6 to 12-month sandbox process.

Audrey Tang: For the civil servant involved, it’s actually more easy to just approve it. There is, actually, a key performance indicator of the National Development Council. At the moment is how many outdated interpretations can we abolish, because of the need of social innovators.

Audrey Tang: This kind of regulatory co-creation and adjustment is as important, if not more important, than the financial support of the impact investment area.

Audrey Tang: All these two are necessary to support a non-purely digital creations ecosystem, because then it can get the NGO funding that respect the social mission, while get the guarantee that the government will be working with them, in tandem, to allow for a regulatory environment that allows them to thrive.

Ludovic Sinet: It’s pretty interesting, especially that on the government side, this idea of sandbox. We still have a way to go in France about that. [inaudible 35:54] they don’t accept. It’s pretty interesting. I see. Thinking at the same time, because taking all the information.

Ludovic Sinet: How do you see the future of the digital world like innovation, civic tech? What do you think is over-hyped or under-hyped? In the near future, all the things are going to happen. How do you see the future? What are the different technologies that are over-hyped, under-hyped?

Audrey Tang: The Sustainable Development Goals can’t be hyped enough.

Audrey Tang: There’s no over-hyping of sustainable development. I don’t believe there is a over-hyping stage for it. If we bill particular technologies as a panacea to solve any particular SDG or multiple SDG goals, that’s doomed to failure because of the natural the curve of technologies. That’s not going to happen.

Audrey Tang: If we focus as part of the education, as part of our public message of one’s core mission in life, for example, for human beings, for students to work collaboratively to solve social issues, but then it is a, essentially, endless game that is non-zero sum from beginning to end.

Audrey Tang: If we advocate this value, then any technology -- automation, augmentation, or even fully autonomous technologies -- are helping hands toward this value-based or virtue ethics-based mission.

Audrey Tang: If we bill the same system with development goals in a utilitarian way, like KPIs, measurements, and whatever, then it’s very difficult, because then people will be judged in competition of the actual metrics they do. Once people are projected on this linear scale, then there’s competition, instead of collaboration.

Audrey Tang: Worse, when fully autonomous agents...

Audrey Tang: ...can do something more efficiently. Then you’ll actually hamper human dignity, because people become over-identified with the utilitarian value of one’s self.

Audrey Tang: The laws, the governance system, the ontological apparatus need to be tied more to the virtue, more to the character building part of the human dignity, rather than the utilitarian, calculative, competitive part, because that is dead end. I don’t think there really is any merit in doing this.

Audrey Tang: Even when we shifted the narrative of free software to open source, we don’t actually measure in [inaudible 38:47] lines of code. It’s never part of our narrative. I don’t think that kind of narrative can ever work.

Ludovic Sinet: Sorry, I have to... [laughs]

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine.

Audrey Tang: In our National Social Innovation five-year plan...

Audrey Tang: ...which we’re formulating this afternoon -- I just came from that meeting -- there’s this connection from the civic tech sectors to the SDGs and to how the government should play the part of providing a level playing field.

Audrey Tang: For example, high performance computing facilities. For example, data storage. For example, regulatory sandbox, or whatever system, and encouraging the corporate social responsibility or universal social responsibility programs to become impact investors into solvers of these SDG issues, and build an ecosystem now with it.

Audrey Tang: What should not be done is to over-highlight any particular part in those circles, because then we lose the tree for the forest. These are the trees, and this is the forest. We really need to focus on the human value that is here, rather than the particular technology that is here.

Audrey Tang: Of course, all thus will be competitive, instead of collaborative, if not for the transformative digital technologies. Again, we should not over-emphasize on any particular digital technologies.

Ludovic Sinet: I get what you mean, because a person become convinced that the answers is not business or technology but more political and spiritual, because otherwise it will be just like going into the wall. There is always this debate about technology. Is it an enabler? Is technology neutral or not?

Ludovic Sinet: From my point of view, it really depends on the type of technologies. If you take a look at blockchain, it actually unleashed new possibilities that were not possible before. What do you think, especially on...not blockchain, itself? Is it, for you, a new enabler for this kind of collective work towards reaching the SDG and blockchain?

Ludovic Sinet: Also, after that, can I have your view of the cryptocurrency mess? From right now, where do you think it’s going? Maybe [inaudible 42:00] blockchain.

Audrey Tang: I was part of the initial counterculture that is now surprisingly mainstream that calls itself cyberpunks. [laughs] I, of course, admire the work that is Bitcoin, and precisely because it stops [inaudible 42:19] tolerance problem of distributed networks.

Audrey Tang: Its real value, for me, is a distributed ledger. That could provide full accountability, but it doesn’t have to be done with a blockchain. Many people have tried Acyclic Graphs or some other technologies to provide a distributed ledger.

Audrey Tang: DLT, the distributed ledger technology is useful, and we have used it. For example, for charities’ crowdfunding we make sure that the money donated for good is well distributed, instead of being easily manipulated by the website operator.

Audrey Tang: It increases accountability for all parties involved. There’s no question about it. In that regard it can help, of course, with sustainable development by providing accountability, which is a large part of SDG ’17, as well as the other SDGs. I don’t think the cryptocurrency part is immediately relevant. It mostly is orthogonal.

Audrey Tang: The only connection, and it’s a very stretched one, I can see is that it provides a funding model for the fundamental crypto infrastructure [laughs] , like open SSR, and things like that, which was very difficult to get people to fund, but now the core developers are suddenly millionaires, so they don’t need patrons, anyway.

Audrey Tang: In that regard, it is useful for SDG 9, I guess [laughs] . That’s a stretch. I don’t think it’s otherwise related. We’re now witnessing a space where it’s like the Internet before the TCP or HTTP. We’re seeing a lot of protocols vying to become the dominant protocol, and that will still go on for a while.

Ludovic Sinet: What do you think, maybe more largely, about cryptocurrencies? Do you think in 10, 15, 20 years there won’t be just one money, like a Taiwanese dollar, but maybe really different monies, like different currencies that people will use for one kind of objects or one kind of services?

Ludovic Sinet: Where do you think it can go? Where do you think it can be dangerous or good, outside of the SDG...?

Audrey Tang: The fintech sandbox, which is a law here in Taiwan, is designed especially for this. You can try anything. Not really contributing to terrorism or money laundering, but other than those two, [laughs] anything in the fintech’s area and with a maximum limit on the people and the maximum amount that you can expose people’s risk to. You can try a smaller scale.

Audrey Tang: It’s always legal. Even if it’s illegal, during the sandbox it’s legal. We’re going to see, literally, hundreds of different experiments all around Taiwan, all with very limited risk. We will pluck those ideas that blossoms.

Audrey Tang: That’s our official government position. We’re not setting a direction for civil society. Instead, we’ll welcome anything that the society considers as solutions. If the society thinks it’s a hindrance, after six months it’s gone.

Ludovic Sinet: Is there any first outcomes or results from these experiments?

Audrey Tang: There’s quite a few, but they’re not yet done with the sandbox process, so I really shouldn’t comment on any of them. Like the Presidential Hackathon, you will know the result around June. It will be more informed late June.

Ludovic Sinet: So far, do you think cryptocurrencies can actually replace partly or create a new field for venture capitalism and for financing innovation or financing new products?

Audrey Tang: It’s already there. There’s the Pineapple Fund.

Audrey Tang: There’s the thing I talked about, about the basic cryptographic primitives, and things like that. It’s already there. I think it will continue doing that, because if you have a distributed ledger, you can piggyback existing charity-based, equity-based, or whatever-based crowdfunding techniques on top of it, because it’s a better replicated database.

Audrey Tang: It’s a enabler, but it’s not as hype-y as people make it. It’s just a better database for some scenarios.

Ludovic Sinet: What are some of the biggest risks you see in all the emerging technologies, so not only in the civic side, but also can be seen in biology, can be AI, can be other things, blockchain? What do you think should be done to mitigate them?

Audrey Tang: I think the most dangerous technology so far is utilitarianism.

Ludovic Sinet: I, as well.

Audrey Tang: It’s very attractive. It quantifies everything. Assuming you have infinite computing power, it can be very good ethical framework, but we don’t have infinite computing power, [laughs] so we make short cuts. When we make short cuts under utilitarianism, it actually moves us away from co-intelligence, from collaborative intelligence or collective intelligence.

Audrey Tang: It over-emphasizes on things that could be measured, but most of the interesting things can’t. It re-creates, for example, you just mentioned the social profiling, which is like a shadow image of the real person, which is actually the least important part about that person, but it’s treated as [inaudible 48:37] , and so on.

Audrey Tang: This whole idea of data market ownership, control, whatever, it’s really a utilitarian narrative underneath. I want to talk about, for example, freedoms. You can rephrase all the GDPR debates in terms of freedoms. That’s a Richard Stallman thing, but it still works.

Audrey Tang: You can rephrase the positive freedoms of access sharing and collaboration. You can rephrase the negative liberties from censorship, [inaudible 49:13] surveillance, and active way to migrate, to customize, to integrate. If you phrase it as freedoms, then it is a virtue ethic. It is a more, "I want to be this kind of person, and I want my neighbors to be this kind of person, to enjoy this kind of freedoms."

Audrey Tang: This kind of narrative is more useful if we want to have an informed dialogue of technology and how it fits into the society. Whereas if we overemphasize the industrial innovation part, then we fall victim to utilitarianism, and that is really dangerous.

Ludovic Sinet: Can take a photo of this one, even though I will try to get [inaudible 49:49] , to remind me?

Audrey Tang: Sure. There’s also poetry. Maybe you want to take a photo of the poetry, as well. [laughs]

Ludovic Sinet: It’s a pretty nice one.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Ludovic Sinet: [laughs] I know you worked with the startup called pol.is. For instance, for this kind of use of AI, how can you make sure -- you are already said [inaudible 50:34] was the law -- that the civic tech startups, like that one, don’t become an industry for private actors? Facebook, in a way, could have been said a civic tech at the beginning.

Audrey Tang: We convinced the hell out of the pol.is people to license it under [inaudible 50:50] GPL, which ensures in commons. We advised them into having a community governance model. We pay with taxpayer money to freedom from Heroku so that everybody can host it themselves, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we take what anyone who are still with the commons will do to increase, as I said, access, sharing, and collaboration of those tools that should be in the commons. Part of the pol.is bill is that it’s really simple to explain. It’s not AI in a mission learning sense. It is AI in a chatbot, like Eliza with a face, sense. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s basically just a visualization to put a face on the crowd, to use K-means clustering and principal component analysis. That’s the two main concepts. There’s no machine learning involved. This is basically an easier way for you to listen to millions of people, and that’s it.

Audrey Tang: While I can see it’s AI-powered conversation, I see the A as automation more than anything, so I don’t worry that much about the ethics part.

Ludovic Sinet: Do you feel great about automation in manufacturing robotics?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Ludovic Sinet: Yeah?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I think automation is great.

Ludovic Sinet: You think it’s great?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I think it’s great.

Ludovic Sinet: What is the good thing of automation to you?

Audrey Tang: The beauty of automation is that it’s part of the hacker ethic. If you can solve the problem once, don’t solve it many times. Don’t reinvent the wheel. The first time you do it, it’s creativity, it’s fun, but if you have to repeat it many times, it’s no longer fun. People become alienated, rarefied from their work.

Audrey Tang: It’s a liberating force, for me, automation. The question is whether the automation, the technology that implements automation is democratized, like police, or whether it’s monopolized, like in many other cases. That’s a separate outlook.

Audrey Tang: Automation in itself, when people encounter it in a way that people can understand what’s going on and can control and interrogate, it’s always a force for good. If you enjoy the artisanal experience, you can’t just not use automation.

Ludovic Sinet: Don’t you fear about unemployment, and large amounts of people having quite nothing to do in a way, in a traditional job?

Audrey Tang: If the traditional job is 100 percent automation tasks, meaning it uses no human communication or value judgment, it’s hard to imagine such jobs, actually. There’s not many jobs that’s 100 percent robotic. Most of jobs involve some kind of human interaction or value judgment.

Audrey Tang: If we automate a part that’s going to be the same regardless of who do it away, the overall quality of the worker increases. There’s no, strictly speaking, jobs that are entirely automatable away. I think that’s science fiction. There is jobs that will be redefined as part of it become automated, so that the people working on it has to continuously learn to work in collaboration with machine. That is true.

Audrey Tang: We have augmented intelligence or whatever. There’s a whiff of that. As long as way can make the relearning process fun and relatively worry-free, there’s a social safety network and so on, I don’t think it’s much of a big problem.

Ludovic Sinet: You don’t think there will be maybe just 10, 20, 30 percent more of unemployed people?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think so, no. If that really happens, we have the referendum system in Taiwan, so people can implement universal basic income just by way of referendum.

Ludovic Sinet: [laughs] By the way, I had a question about this. I see the time is running, but what do you think about basic income? Do you think it’s good? Do you think we should have maybe contributive income as Bernard Stiegler was talking about, or maybe basic services like in England now they talk about? There is a group talking about basic services.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a compelling issue to talk about in Taiwan’s public policy. We have very low rate of unemployment. The social safety network is generally OK. The only reason you want to talk about is perhaps with aging society and things like that, but that’s 10 years in the future.

Audrey Tang: Unlike many other places in the world, the UBI discussion is not as hot as other places. The Social Innovation Lab happens to be one of ground zero of UBI, one of the UBI foundation people who work as a worker here for this space. This is where people come to talk about UBI.

Audrey Tang: There’s an element in the society that thinks we should actually educate people about all the different options available, whether it’s implemented in partial replacement or in complete replacement of the current social welfare things, whether it’s service based or payment based, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: They are making tabletop games, simulations, and whatever that try to educate people about those things. From my understanding, I think it will only become a need to discuss a public policy topic maybe 10 years from now. This is a peculiar economic situation, Taiwan, because most workers are full-time workers, very low unemployment.

Ludovic Sinet: It’s pretty good. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s pretty good.

Ludovic Sinet: Maybe a last question, to [inaudible 56:53] things. A last question about how you actually hack the government, because maybe the biggest answer we need at the global level is to be like you -- to enter the government, to hack it, in a way, and to make it more easy.

Ludovic Sinet: How do you think these kind of things can happen in other countries? The culture can play a role, but is there a lesson you can give, like a recipe?

Audrey Tang: I bill myself as a public servant of public servants. I help the civil service. I don’t ever give commands. As a anarchist I don’t believe in commands. Basically, I treat the civil service as my peers and I try to make only Pareto improvements.

Audrey Tang: Meaning, all the stakeholder ministries or public servants I try to, for example, reduce the work of the junior frontline public service through automation to reduce a risk of the mid-level management through a shared co-creation framework and radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: To create credit and assign credit to senior government executives through innovative policies, presidential hackathon, for example, and ambitious programs. Many endeavors in other countries fail because they trade one to the other in those three, like reducing meaningless work, reducing risk, and assigning credible innovation.

Audrey Tang: They maybe do this at the expense of the other two, or do two at the expense of the other one. Those three are not fungible, and so it always fail without support of all the three groups. I always make sure that our stakeholder network includes career public servants of all three levels.

Audrey Tang: That all our programs are pre-approved, in a sense, that it doesn’t overly burden any particular level, and that it always make one of the three level’s life easier without sacrificing the two. Every step is very small, but taken together I have met no resistance.

Ludovic Sinet: I see. If I think of the French system as purely vertical [inaudible 59:20] , so when you’re at the top, you give the shit back to the one down, and so on. It’s pretty interesting to see that. I’ll check if I have any other question. Could be working.

Ludovic Sinet: Maybe one last question, a short one. How do you think the social entrepreneurship field, the civil society, and the technology, maybe digital or deep tech, can work together? They should work together, for sure, but how can they work together more?

Audrey Tang: In the open source world, we say we start with scratching one’s own itch.

Ludovic Sinet: You?

Audrey Tang: One start with scratching one’s own itch. We start open source project not for some ambitious mission, but to solve some problem that affects myself, to solve my own problem. Then we share the solutions, because it makes things better.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is that’s how it should be. If we randomly say communities should work together, it doesn’t really work like that. If we can systematically go around and that see people contributing to the same topic, like any one of the SDG’s items without them knowing about it, which is why I tour around Taiwan and go to international conferences, as a connector.

Audrey Tang: I can tell people, "Hey, look at the radically transparent transcript of two weeks ago. There’s one person there, over there, in the other part of the island, solving the same problem as you, using a different approach. You two should talk."

Audrey Tang: This kind of problem-based learning, it’s really good for co-intelligence, and is also very good to solve the loneliness problem for social entrepreneurs, because many of them think that they are the only one in their neighborhood caring about one particular global issue, but they’re actually not alone. There’s many people worrying and caring about the same issue.

Audrey Tang: What we can do as the space makers is to make sure there’s a kitchen, there’s plenty of food, there is a resident chef actually. There is a large room with white board, with no decorations, and people can use it however they want.

Audrey Tang: We charge no rent of using the space. It opens until 11:00 PM, and whenever you have a regulator issue, just talk to a minister. Yeah, this kind of environment is what we really can do, instead of filling in like this. There is one of my favorite Taoist passages. "The use of what is, is in what isn’t." The use of a cup is in a part of a cup that is empty. That’s the point.

Audrey Tang: The use of the room and the windows is in the part that it allow people to inhabit. We strive to become a channel and become a space. Make sure it’s comfortable, so that people when joining this space become acquaintances with good associations of each other’s radically daydreaming ideal like universal basic income.

Audrey Tang: Making sure that there is a productive discussion, and it is a facilitating space making role, I think. The government can still play, too, a role while there is still government.

Audrey Tang: It’s interim, transitional role before we can become fully anarchistic.

Ludovic Sinet: Thank you. Thank you very much. I think I got all the questions. It was really interesting to get further...You’re so open. The usual discussions I can have with VC firms or with business entrepreneurship people, enlarging your view, which is...

Ludovic Sinet: Sorry. I’m getting tired. My English is not making sense.

Audrey Tang: It’s good. It’s OK.

Ludovic Sinet: It’s also part of our reflection that we talk about how the fact that it doesn’t go only about business and entrepreneurship, but rather in the political field, in the spiritual field, if I can say in the physical field. Still, we need to find a way to get the attraction of this point through talking about the business.

Ludovic Sinet: It’s pretty interesting. I will communicate. If we have verbatims of you, we will ask you first to make sure that you agree with them.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Ludovic Sinet: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: It’s all good.

Ludovic Sinet: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.