Audrey Tang: We can edit this transcript for 10 days before publishing.

George Poulakidas: Perfect. I’ve read about you before. I think it’s great. Thank you very much for having me. Maybe I can explain a little bit about the project we’re doing.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

George Poulakidas: I know you were at the University of Toronto recently.

Audrey Tang: You mean virtually? I was there in the flesh a few months ago, but I actually just gave another talk in Toronto.

George Poulakidas: Oh really? I didn’t know.

Audrey Tang: Like three days ago.

George Poulakidas: I didn’t know about that one. Great.

Audrey Tang: The TECO people, our representatives over the world, has now learned to summon me anywhere.

George Poulakidas: Perfect. What was the topic?

Audrey Tang: The event was the DRIVE conference. There’s some public sector people, some academic and business people. The main topic was how to reverse the brain drain to Silicon Valley and also how to make sure a digital economy is helpful to the domestic solidarity and community as well for it to make domestic sense.

Audrey Tang: If it doesn’t make a domestic connection, people observe that they just migrate to Silicon Valley or to some other places very quickly from Toronto. That was the main topic.

George Poulakidas: That’s fascinating. [laughs] I was planning to ask that a little bit later, but since you mention that about Taiwan’s brain drain because we’ve shared in a few interviews. We came here to learn a bit more about the digital ecosystem and see where Canada is placed in East Asia. Before that, we went to Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and all this place.

George Poulakidas: Now we came Taiwan and see how you do things here and then potentially what we can learn or there’s potential collaboration. One of the things that we found out is that either brain drain or also a talent gap between what firms want or need and what’s offered. Right?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

George Poulakidas: I was thinking. What’s your opinion on that?

Audrey Tang: I think we are seeing a brain gain or as I want to phrase it as a good exchange with especially Silicon Valley companies in the past couple years. One of the main signature event is Google’s purchase of the HTC mobile phone department and the announcement that Taiwan is going to be the APEC R&D center for Google, as a kind of entire what we call AI IoT here, IA plus IoT ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: That really brought a cultural perspective because previously, when people see that if...I’m a software architect, and most of my training is online anyway. There’s a lot of mobility for me to choose where to live and where to work. For a decade or so, I worked with the largest Silicon Valley companies, but I’m based in Taiwan through teleworking.

Audrey Tang: A lot of Taiwanese people see that as not quite a career. [laughs] It’s something that you do after you complete your career.

Audrey Tang: Now, with Google positioning the R&D center, people suddenly find that there’s not much a gap between the hardware ecosystem and the newer AI ecosystem, because they’re actively looking for people like experienced designers and people who specialize in merging these different iterative, what we call AI embodiment work.

Audrey Tang: Just here in the Social Innovation Lab, we have people working on AI embodiment, like these are self driving tricycles from MIT.

George Poulakidas: Nice.

Audrey Tang: That’s just running around, and we iteratively improved that because it’s openware and open source. Now, it has two eyes, it can follow people and blink at them, and so on. [laughs] Basically, co domesticate AI with people.

Audrey Tang: People found, especially at the undergrad level, that they can really use these open hardware or open AI ways to improve their community without actually flying over to Silicon Valley to get such chance on education.

Audrey Tang: Microsoft, I think, announced that they will hire 200 AI application researchers and engineers in two years, and I think they’re one quarter there. Practically all the big names, IBM, Amazon, Facebook, even Uber, you name it, has been establishing some sort of either AI lab or AI fellowship exchange program with Taiwan in the past couple of years.

Audrey Tang: I think that really gives a different take on...The previous model was, you complete your training and education and then you do some application.

Audrey Tang: Now the model is more and more even in the senior high school level, or even junior high school level, you can already do some application that betters your community and you also get some AI training out of it. We’re really seeing an improvement especially in undergrad level, but also senior high level in the past couple of years.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that we did anything particularly right. It’s more like a chain of small but sure improvements. For example, the special foreign talent visa, the Gold Card, recognizing and rewarding through public procurement new and innovative MSME products, and also any enterprise that proves that it can solve one of the sustainable development issues, the SDGs.

Audrey Tang: They also get recognition and an award for what we call the buying power for people who merge their supply chain into something that creates social value. That’s also something we do here a lot.

Audrey Tang: Also, the university’s social responsibility program, where as I mentioned, the undergrads learn something that betters their community, but also introduces AI as a way to communicate co domestically with people.

Audrey Tang: There’s easily dozens of such programs and each just changing the MSME a little bit. I think after these two years, people generally think they don’t have to go to Silicon Valley to get those skills and apply them in a useful way.

George Poulakidas: Great. I have too many questions now. Let’s start from the end. You mentioned the dozens of programs. Are you referring to government programs?

Audrey Tang: They’re all very cross sectorial. What we’re basically doing is the government asks a different set of questions. Previously, when the government does a program, usually there’s like the voice for economic development on wind, sun, and for environmental protection on the other, and so on.

Audrey Tang: If we treat the government, the public service as this rope, they’re in a place where it bears all the tension and maybe ministers are those knots.

Audrey Tang: We’re now shifting into a co creative view, which is why our office is literally named the Public Digital Innovation Space. We position ourselves as a space and we ask the question. Everybody has different positions, but are there common values after all?

Audrey Tang: Given the common values that’s identified, can anyone come up with an innovative solution? If someone delivers a solution, we’re willing to reinterpret or relax or even change the regulation because of the social innovation after it’s proven it has social value.

Audrey Tang: There’s five programs along those lines but they all share the same portal, the same entry point and symbols that are achieved by TW, where you can challenge any existing laws and regulations, aside from money laundering and funding terrorism.

George Poulakidas: OK, that’s good.

Audrey Tang: We know what would happen. We don’t have to experiment on that. Basically, each ministry set up their own symbols, acts.

George Poulakidas: Each ministry.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, each ministry still has its own symbols, acts, or regulations. If you want to experiment on self driving vehicles, as I mentioned, it’s the Ministry of Economic Affairs. If you want to do some AI banking stuff, it’s the Finance Council. For 5G experimentation, it’s the NCC, and so on.

Audrey Tang: For the Ministry of Economy, they don’t really care about the form of the vehicle. We see lots of applications on hybrid vehicles and some autonomous, I think the first jurisdiction to encourage hybrids, multi modal, self driving vehicles.

Audrey Tang: The sandbox acts all look the same. You get every year or one year of experiment with one particular region, or one particular audience, like 5,000 people, and so on. Once a year passes, they collectively decide whether it’s a good idea or not.

Audrey Tang: If it’s not a good idea, then it’s open innovation, everybody learned something. The next innovator will try something else. If it’s a good idea, then we commit ourselves to merge it back into our regulation.

George Poulakidas: How do they decide if it’s a good idea?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. Regionally, they must first set a common vision for the regional revitalization. Each district, or each county or township can host such scenario workshops where they look at the raw numbers of how the population has been declining, for example, young people don’t come back after university, or whatever the local issues that they identify in the population economy.

Audrey Tang: They set a common goal for the next few years of how to reverse that trend because even within Taiwan, there’s brain drain as well. Also, they want to, for example, brand that locality as particularly suitable for something and what kind of technology are they looking to incorporate.

Audrey Tang: If they’re in a remote place, we often hear that they want self driving drones for delivery, or self driving ships for delivery if they’re on remote islands, and so on. After they identify these things in the scenario workshops, based on that vision, they propose the projects to the national ministries.

Audrey Tang: This year, the National Development Council, NDC, formalizes this as the regional revitalization plan. In the past couple of years, we’ve been prototyping these kind of tours.

Audrey Tang: Every Wednesday, I’m here, 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Tuesday, I tour around Taiwan and meet with people in those scenario collaborative meetings.

Audrey Tang: Along with me, through telepresence, is 12 ministries of people here in the Social Innovation Lab, so people see them eye to eye. It’s on transcript, it’s all open anyway. Previously, the economics, the industry, the co ops, they would talk to different ministries. They’d never get a whole picture and may receive actually conflicting answers.

Audrey Tang: Here, because it’s multi sector, people ask a question and the Ministry of Interior can no longer say, we’ll have to check with the Ministry of Healthcare or Ministry of Economy because they’re literally sitting next to one another.

Audrey Tang: They really have to brainstorm and deliver a consistent interpretation right there. Everybody knows the transcript goes out in two weeks. Usually within two weeks, people just figure out something together.

Audrey Tang: It’s very helpful because individually, those public servants, they appear on transcript under their own name. People who delivered those creative interpretations and decisions, they actually get due credit, whereas before, the minister takes all the credit. Now I take all the blame instead because if it goes wrong, it’s all my fault.

Audrey Tang: Then we formalize it this year. We encourage people in the central administration to go back to their hometown and telecommute just as I do, and basically act as their reliable gateway between the central authorities and the local vision. It’s their hometown after all, so that’s the plan.

George Poulakidas: How often do they meet?

Audrey Tang: Pretty often. It used to every couple of weeks during our prototyping. Now we’re encouraging, especially 134 places that are suffering population decline to have such meetings all within this year if possible. That means much more frequent meetings.

George Poulakidas: Perfect. I’d like you also to expand a bit. You touched on the role of academia and the private sector, if you could expand a bit.

Audrey Tang: The whole point of the Social Innovation Action Fund is that the government invests rather than subsidizes. We follow up existing investments rather than leading investment. Given those two constraints, the sustainable social financing model really needs to be developed locally before the government even steps in and do anything.

Audrey Tang: This is essential because previously, the township office, Chugonsua, receives lots of subsidizing funding from a lot of ministries, but they all have different schedules, different KPIs.

Audrey Tang: Even people with a very coherent vision need to mutate their vision, or slice and dice their vision in order to fit five different ministry buckets. That actually weakens solidarity because for each facet, only some part of the local economy benefits.

Audrey Tang: It reduces both the capital intended for social responsibility, the CSR capital. It also reduces what we call the BD capital, the capital that could be used to better the society because they want it as part of their supply chain for business development purposes.

Audrey Tang: If the people rely on subsidy from a particular ministry then only the supply chain related to that particular ministry will benefit from it.

Audrey Tang: Now by the NDC taking 10 percent cut to each ministry’s projects, they basically recreate a different way. Once you have this scenario, the vision, the transcript to prove that you can then apply and then the NDC just diverts whatever funding they have from those ministries into those local programs.

Audrey Tang: It’s the beginning of a conversation. It is not a hundred page long proposal. It’s usually just 10 pages.

George Poulakidas: I’m trying to understand how it works practically. Let’s say there’s some town, especially isolated this is a problem that we have in Canada as well. They come up with some vision but then there is no talent to develop that.

Audrey Tang: Concretely speaking, these are the places where we’re focusing on because their population is declining, or they have a structural social issue, or things like that. I think the Ilan case will be published soon where there will be more data for you.

George Poulakidas: That would be great.

Audrey Tang: It goes like this. Just a second. First are the facts. People look at the facts and then they figure out a vision. They’re helped by the public service from the central administration that has moved back to the hometown to help planning.

Audrey Tang: Once they find what we call the DNA of the local township, they put forward proposals, and then identify both the stakeholders that have formed the proposal, and as you said, the talents, the capital, the resources, or the knowledge that they identify as crucial but missing from the local people.

Audrey Tang: On step three, the National Development Council takes it and brings it to those different five ministries and basically do some matchmaking.

Audrey Tang: For example, in the Ministry of Economic Affairs, there’s already reward programs, essentially award programs for people who want to improve a township through business means. Sometimes they’re like professional design companies, professional building companies, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t really matter for them where to operate, and so the NDC will now say, "Oh, you get to operate here first."

Audrey Tang: If, as I said, they want to experiment with some technology that makes reinterpretation or relaxation of laws, this is the place where the sandbox system can now say, "Oh, for the next year, let’s just try this out, and we’ll not rule you based on the existing transportation rules or whatever other rules.

Audrey Tang: "We’ll see whether this regulation that you propose works good on your locality," and so on. Both the talents that’s being match maked across the island and also the regulations that may need to be relaxed, is in the same package, and then they implement that throughout the year.

Audrey Tang: It’s very different from previous regulatory schedule because you can apply whenever, and it goes on in a continuous, democratic way. It goes on like forever. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Around end of year, every year, we have a expo where we share the cases of that year, and also ask for collective feedback to improve the program, and also maybe increase the 10 percent to 15 or 12 percent the next year.

George Poulakidas: The percent of...

Audrey Tang: Currently, it’s 10 percent of each ministry’s subsidizing programs being repurposed into the RR plan. If the RR plan works well, then we plan on gradually improving this percentage until maybe half of all the budget is done in a...You can almost say it’s participatory budgeting, except it’s not. It’s participatory planning plus budgeting kind of way.

George Poulakidas: Out of curiosity, what did the other ministries think when you first proposed that? I assume some were not very comfortable.

Audrey Tang: Two answers. The sandbox system were mostly met with reservation from the parliament because we’re a continental law system. Essentially, it’s them carving out a year or two and say, "You can do whatever." [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That runs counter to the whole continental law system idea, so they have a clause here that within the experiments, says one year or two year, at any point, the MPs may say, "This actually requires a law change. It’s not just a regulatory change," and they can take it back to the parliament.

Audrey Tang: For fintech, they can debate for up to three years, for autonomous vehicle, up to four, and so on. The MPs have the final say, but during those three or four years, the experiment still keeps running, waiting for the parliament to decide.

Audrey Tang: Even their service, their business model is still running, essentially creating a three year monopoly locally because for everybody else, it’s still illegal. It’s a incentive, actually, for the innovators. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: But at the end of the day, when the MPs legalize it, of course competition will enter the area. That’s how we work out a truce with the MPs because they always have the final say anyway, so that’s the idea.

Audrey Tang: Eventually, MPs woke up to it and say it’s actually good because they don’t have to legislate something they don’t have first hand experience, which is the thing that nobody want to do. It’s a win win, but it took a year or so of communication. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: As for other ministries, the Ministry of Economy actually is happy that they are no longer tasked with pure GDP. Inclusive growth is something that I think the modern contemporary policymakers all wish that we can do this full time.

Audrey Tang: As minister of economy, previously, they have to represent the more traditional capitalistic values, but now because the projects they receive are much more balanced, the local co ops, the local associations, they must be fine with it, so it’s by default more sustainable and less about short term GDP.

Audrey Tang: The message I heard from the Ministry of Economy is that they’re, because Taiwan is 90 percent miss me anyway, so they’re happy that they don’t need to focus only on the GDP now and they can make more of their miss me connections to help formulating a ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: I think this wouldn’t work if not for the fact that Taiwan is mostly miss me, which can be rapidly redeployed.

George Poulakidas: Actually, that’s a good point. In the next stage of that, let’s say they decide they co create regulation. I would assume, I’m thinking as a starting point in a town, when they have an idea, they have a longer plan, right?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

George Poulakidas: They want this change for something else.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Based on the same vision, they can propose any number of proposals.

George Poulakidas: What happens after that? Let’s say they change the regulation, but then they need...

Audrey Tang: Something else.

George Poulakidas: ...some significant investment or something.

Audrey Tang: Basically, the proposals may be any of the 3, actually 10, but roughly bucketed as 3 shapes, the KPI being making more jobs locally, and making more people want to move in or stay, and also make the local identity more widely known in Taiwan and worldwide.

Audrey Tang: That’s the three goals, but they don’t have to do this in one proposal. They can just try one of it, and for a year, and receive funding and talent. Next year, based on the same vision, they can propose something more, and something more. Everything is continuous. It’s very different from the yearly or quarterly review thing.

George Poulakidas: Can I ask again back the role of academia in this process?

Audrey Tang: The University Social Responsibility project, the USR, was the first ministerial project to try this continuous improvement model. It starts as a pilot around two or three years ago. Each university, acting as kind of a think tank for a wider community, proposes the five year plan, well, a two year plan to be followed on a three year plan.

Audrey Tang: That was pretty innovative because previously, the university are very much used on yearly plans with quarterly reviews. Now, it’s a five year plan with a review on the two year point, and that’s it.

Audrey Tang: It gives them far more flexibility in building rapport with the local community, and also for the fact that the universities are tasked with this being the undergrad students’ capstone project, so what they learn now is in service of this social, or environmental, or economic sustainability.

Audrey Tang: It is ultimately graded by how subjectively fruitful the student feel at participating meaningfully in their local community, and autonomously decide which classes to enroll in, and things like that. I think the USR really showed people that it is possible for the academia to play not a planned economic role, but really a brain trust or a think tank role locally.

Audrey Tang: It also helps to the local people because previously, some of the families think if you send your children to university that’s far away from home, chances are that they won’t go back, that they will just stay in that city and maybe won’t raise a family because it’s too crowded there. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Now, with the USR, it’s the other way around. You have students from the large cities but staying in such communities and identify it as their new home, and so the communities feel much more welcome at the academic interventions as compared to before.

George Poulakidas: Is that something you’ve already seen happening?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

George Poulakidas: That’s amazing.

Audrey Tang: If you interview the USR office, they have the raw numbers. This year, we asked them to re index every USR project in terms of the 17 sustainable goals, and so we’ll have a SDG map of Taiwan soon.

George Poulakidas: Perfect. Two themes that I’m interested in, or main ones, because I have to choose what to ask you. It’s so interesting. One is, I’m thinking about international collaborations, especially since you work on SDGs.

George Poulakidas: I worked briefly on that. I was in New York for a period, working on the SDGs there, and I know there’s a global discussion about this and a need for positive examples like this one. Do you see Taiwan playing a role through these projects?

Audrey Tang: Yes. That’s literally...It says on the card. [laughs]

George Poulakidas: I didn’t see that. Right. Perfect.

Audrey Tang: That’s actually a official tag line for Taiwan as shared by our president. If you want to summarize Taiwan’s relationship to the worldwide system of development in one sentence is, Taiwan can help not just on one or two SDGs.

Audrey Tang: It starts as, I think, a hashtag for the WHA in terms of Taiwan can help on global medicine and global health, but it turns out that we can help on the pollution of the sea and how to recycle those plastic back into fuel. That’s something we can help too, or through the Presidential Hackathon, which is an annual event.

Audrey Tang: We also use machine learning to solve water leakage, which is a climate change action. We also shared that to New Zealand for three months as a co creative event. Basically, our Presidential Hackathon is every April to July ish. Right after that, last year, the winning team then took to Wellington.

Audrey Tang: We have five winning teams every year, and for each winning team, there’s no prize money. The only reward is that the president herself commits to be the project manager, to integrate these ideas into the public service by the next year.

Audrey Tang: It’s for impact. It is not really for private or prize money, but that means that any data that’s previously unavailable will be made available. Any regulation that need to be changed will be changed, and so on, so political will as the prize.

Audrey Tang: The machine learning for water leakage detection was one of the cases that the New Zealand people saw corresponding to SDGs, and worked very well. They share their water company data, water pressure, water flow, and so on, to detect leakage, because climate is a new problem for New Zealand, so we co created such a solution.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we do have quite a few such stories, and we’re looking to extend that even more in this year’s Presidential Hackathon by inviting...Previously, we were shipping our teams worldwide, but this year, we’re inviting the international teams, especially in the APEC region, to come over and...

George Poulakidas: When is that?

Audrey Tang: I think the submission goes open on April. I think the whole event concludes by, I don’t know, July or August, or something.

George Poulakidas: Then the other area we’re interested in is indigenous perspectives on all this. That’s something that we care about in Canada as well.

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

George Poulakidas: I think also this is an area where maybe there could be some collaboration. That would be great.

Audrey Tang: The original revitalization plan, actually most of the area that the ones painted in orange are the indigenous ones. Area wise is the largest in Taiwan. We’re already seeing some pretty good social entrepreneurship cases. For example, in Taitung, there’s a brand called Blueseeds.

George Poulakidas: Blueseeds?

Audrey Tang: Blue as in the color seeds. In a nutshell, they work with indigenous people to revitalize their land by introducing what we call a subgrass, which is a kind of grass that grows without you needing to tending it. It automatically restores the fertility of the land.

Audrey Tang: They work with indigenous artists to basically do a Aveda like branding on this whole thing and releases products like shampoos and things like that, body care products. Now it’s been sold in the FamilyMart all over Taiwan for more than a year now.

Audrey Tang: People generally identify that because it’s zero percent chemical edition, it’s branded in a way that corresponds and respect that indigenous culture, the Amis culture. It actually opened a branch in Vancouver I think.

George Poulakidas: Oh really?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. During the opening, which I attended, I think the local public service is very interested in taking the same model, maybe different plants, of course, but with indigenous people in a mutual way rather than a planned economy way, just to work with them and grow not just their indigenous plants but also to amplify their culture through this kind of co branding.

Audrey Tang: They’re very popular in our annual Social Impact Buying Power Awards. A lot of people purchase that.

Audrey Tang: There’s many cases. There’s one we’re figuring out this year which is the Orchid Island, which is a more remote place, not part of the Taiwan main island. They’re using local currency in forms of a distributed ledger to essentially have a currency, what we call colored coin. It can only be used in a way that furthers the Taoyu tradition and sustainable to the local island.

Audrey Tang: We’re still figuring out the details. I think they’re planning to release that to the general public sometime this year.

Audrey Tang: We’ve invited one of the main people behind it, Taoyu person working on that local association, to speak in Ottawa’s Open Government Partnership. We don’t know whether he’ll be accepted yet, but we’re very happy to share.

George Poulakidas: We talked a lot about the social aspect of innovation, which is amazing. Could you elaborate a bit more on the technological? I’m also trying to see, maybe compare notes with what we have in Ontario or in Canada, which technologies you see that have more applications in these issues. Is there enough talent here to do this or do you have a need for collaborations?

Audrey Tang: From what I observe is that, locally, we have lots of very talented people in specific domains like IoT, manufacturing, optics, and so on. For AI, I think our research is also top notch.

Audrey Tang: Previously, the problem was that the brain drain was caused by the people doing the research and the people doing the application or development was essentially two groups of people.

Audrey Tang: These people pursue their PhDs. They find out they could be very mobile anywhere in the world. During their undergrad and graduate years, they didn’t build a rapport with the local community. Naturally, they just visit anywhere in the world and stop connecting back.

Audrey Tang: But in the past couple years, there’s some quite high profile people returning from Silicon Valley, and also some returning from the PRC territory as well, in order to found nonprofits essentially working on talent matching in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: One of the first cases when I just became the Digital Minister is what we call the Taiwan AI Labs. The director used to be director of Cortana Technology in Microsoft, one of the brain drains. [laughs] He doubles as the founder of the PTT, which is the local equivalent of Reddit like Zipper. He founded as a student in the NTU. To this day, the whole platform is open source.

George Poulakidas: Nice.

Audrey Tang: The NTU doesn’t have any financial interest. It’s kept alive by generations of NTU computer science students. That gives a very different tone on social media here. There’s no surveillance capitalism on website [laughs] and general public forum interest on the other side. For people participating on PTT, it’s all for the public interest.

Audrey Tang: When Ethan Tu founded AI Labs, he took a page from the PTT and said that this is a nonprofit, a little bit like open AI. Their research on healthcare, Smart City and Human Interaction, is not bound by capitalistic motives, but they do bring cutting edge technology in order to crowdsource a way that is comfortable in terms of healthcare, smart city, and human interaction.

Audrey Tang: They roll out quite a few products. Actually, many of them premiered here, like the AI Pianist that can just listen to you telling its emotions and it compose some sonata or whatever... [laughs]

George Poulakidas: Nice.

Audrey Tang: ...for you. They also work on a drone that takes the aesthetics of the late director Chi Po lin who used to fly the helicopters all around Taiwan and letting people see the beauty of Taiwan. After suffering from a helicopter incident, this picks up his aesthetics and then films parts of Taiwan and patrols for environmental protection but also for people to just understand Taiwan better.

Audrey Tang: It learns to produce beautiful films based on the work of the director Chi Po lin. They work as a catalyst to merge very different backgrounds, like people specialists on drones, on 360 cameras, on optics, and so on, into a coherent project that has public value. Then the local government take notice and just merge it back as part of the public service.

Audrey Tang: That’s the innovation model that we’re pursuing here, the cutting edge technology but always with a aim toward public interest.

George Poulakidas: That’s something that we’re trying to unpack. It’s hard. As you know, there’s a wide spectrum of starting with, let’s say, social corporate responsibility, which is not really the same thing, right?

Audrey Tang: No.

George Poulakidas: Then going to non capitalistic models.

Audrey Tang: The whole co-op movement.

George Poulakidas: Especially as a minister, how can you navigate in that?

Audrey Tang: First of all, we change our Company Act. Our Company Act used to say that the company exists to earn a profit, period. [laughs] We fix that. We now say the company may declare that it has other purposes and exactly how many percent is up for the company.

Audrey Tang: We introduce innovative structures. I’m taking a little bit too much credit. People in the region of revitalization tours propose innovative structures, like they want their local association to own a subsidiary company. The association takes donations. They used what we call shares by labor rather than shares by capital to take maybe 10 percent of the company’s initial stock.

Audrey Tang: Then, they use the special voting scheme to designate those 10 percent shares that has maybe 80 percent voting power or 49 percent voting power. Basically, the association maintains de facto control on the company while being able to raise capital their usual way. The investors are in this for the capital gains, but they never gain control based just on their shares.

Audrey Tang: The public proceedings of the company is released in tandem with the association that controls it. It’s the NPO controlling a PO. This was a really popular model.

Audrey Tang: We see a lot NPOs now taking part of their work that could receive additional investment and set up subsidiary company for that. This is a model actually I’m very familiar with.

Audrey Tang: In the open source community, we introduced the term open source to sell this, to sell a free software, which is software freedom which is a very socialist thing, as a capitalist tool to make money. We call it open source.

Audrey Tang: In the very early days, we managed to convince, say, Netscape to rebrand as Mozilla. Then the Mozilla Foundation controls the Mozilla Corporation which makes Firefox, which makes lots of money. 100 percent of them goes back to the mission of the Mozilla Foundation. This a well established case.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have a equivalent case with the Tzu Chi, which is a Buddhist humanitarian association, a charity. It also controls the Da.ai. The technology company that does recycling and advanced circular economy research, which is quite profitable but 100 percent controlled by the charity.

George Poulakidas: How can you scale up some of these, especially the local? You mentioned that some of them start from local communities.

Audrey Tang: From a local charity, yes.

George Poulakidas: If there’s no connection with a major organization or foundation, how do you scale this up?

Audrey Tang: What we’re doing here essentially is to bridge the world of impact investment. Like our Labor Pension Fund, I think last year or two years ago, recently, introduced the ESG Index where they invest only in very patient, very long term. Being a pension fund, that’s what they do. They beat the market by selecting based on the sustainable values.

Audrey Tang: We bridge that community, which is growing. These people here that just set up their company subsidiary or the company forms or a B corp, which is also very popular here, we build an ecosystem within those two spaces.

Audrey Tang: I think we benefit from the fact that there’s some old industrialists in Taiwan that really firmly believes in the social value. Because of that, the initial kickoff was very, very successful.

Audrey Tang: Previously, if you don’t take scaling up into account, it is just one very wishful thinking line [laughs] to which we add the impact entrepreneurship and design to make sure that capital can contribute directly to solutions. That’s where everybody is at this point.

Audrey Tang: What we are building here in the Social Innovation Lab through awards and annual hackathons and things like that is just to cultivate impact leaders and actors that can go out and say, "There’s one banker whose father has a publicly listed, well respected bank that she rebranded that brand bank as the old bank and gets the B Lab certificate." We have a publicly listed bank that’s also a B Corp.

Audrey Tang: Flagship cases like this and impact leaders such as Ms. Lou makes sure that everybody see the B Corp movement as a legitimate form, not just a alternative, its own legitimacy. With more people doing the intermediation, we can then design for scale.

Audrey Tang: The design for scale happens as a natural result of the supporting ecosystem underneath it. It doesn’t appear on its own. It never appear in a top down way. It can only appear in a emergent way. As a government, I limit my role as just providing the accountability layer.

George Poulakidas: That was the next thing I wanted to ask about, the role of government, especially knowing your beliefs before becoming a minister.

Audrey Tang: I still believe in voluntary association.

George Poulakidas: How do you see the role of government, especially now with your role is from the inside?

Audrey Tang: I think the government, mainly we focus on accountability and inclusion, accountability corresponding to these pretty icons from the SDGs. Really, at the moment, the governance mechanism, like the whole original revitalization plan, is based on enhancing availability of reliable data. This is crucial.

Audrey Tang: Most people remember the world as maybe based on the framework of when they step out of the undergrad or graduate school. In vast majority of cases, Taiwan was a worse place [laughs] back then, especially for people who still remember the martial law, like me. People younger than me don’t.

Audrey Tang: People who still remember martial law, we do remember a much more authoritarian world. If we can show people the data that since the democratization, actually the violence went down, the whole domestic solidarity went up, and so on, there’s some really good numbers to look at those trends.

Audrey Tang: If people really embrace that co creation and what we call continuous democracy is there the cost of such results, then they’re much more likely to participate rather than just vote once every four years. These two targets I think still the government has some role to play in a democracy by providing trustworthy numbers in a timely and fun way. [laughs]

George Poulakidas: That’s hard.

Audrey Tang: But we have deputy premier livestreaming a video game...

George Poulakidas: Oh really?

Audrey Tang: ...well into the night [laughs] with the premier commenting constantly. We have a pretty live Cabinet here.

Audrey Tang: That makes it fun for people to view through the governmental statistics in a way that they feel that they can be part of it and also hold the reins on privatization by saying, "We prefer social values. We prefer open innovations. We prefer open source and open APIs when they’re in procurement," and so on.

Audrey Tang: Basically, an open innovation system based on open innovation that when the international counterparts, like Canada or in New Zealand, decide to take those innovations, it’s always a partnership and never a colonizing view, which was very much the norm back in the martial law era.

Audrey Tang: All this taken together is the government’s role. It’s all based on just holding accountability and inclusion as the main themes and without any kind of top down planned economy. That’s ensured why I think the governance system still need professional public servants.

George Poulakidas: Then, on the flip side, the difficulties of being in government. I’m thinking, especially ministers like current development or science and technology, I’m not sure how strong lobbying is here. In North America, it’s really tough. When trying to implement some of these projects and trying to increase this kind of mentality, you will definitely have a really strong pushback.

Audrey Tang: I think my principle of radical transparency means that the lobbyists, when they come to me, always speak in terms of public good. [laughs] They can’t really bribe me. That helps.

Audrey Tang: Also, by mandating that all those co creative meetings be multi stakeholder, it means that even if people do lobby, first, it’s on the record and, second, it has to make sense to everybody else on the table. Otherwise, it will sound ridiculous.

Audrey Tang: I think we’re helped by two facts. The first one is that the bills, the acts are drafted in AD, administration, before sending to the Parliament. There’s a clear we as the drafting stage and the MPs as where the party politics happens.

Audrey Tang: This helps because then the people see the administration as someplace where you can discover common values. The real tension lobbying goes on in the Parliament. We’re in a neutral ground. That helps.

Audrey Tang: The second is that, because Taiwan lifted out of martial law end of ’80s and our presidential election is ’96, there’s around a decade where there is freedom of speech, assembly, and so on. But there’s no legitimacy in the president following directly of the election.

Audrey Tang: The legitimacy of large associations, charities and co ops, that grew out of that decade, Tzu Chi being one, the homemakers union, and so on. There’s many associations with a legitimacy building effort that went before the directly elected president.

Audrey Tang: They, I guess, counterbalance. To this day, if there’s a disaster area, the government publish a number, and Tzu Chi publishes another number, the majority of people actually believes the charity’s number.

Audrey Tang: That establishes a more equal relationship. While there is industrial lobbying, while there is developmental or international lobbying, the social or domestic lobbying is at par with these efforts. Once they are at par, they are much more willing then to adopt a co creative approach. They can’t really roll each other over.

George Poulakidas: Do you see this almost two different, I don’t know if that’s the proper term, worlds, the social and industrial, let’s say, as necessarily coexistent? Could it be only social, for example?

Audrey Tang: I think what they’re saying is a standard answer, no. [laughs] That the idea of triple bottom line is that, if you tame the capital motivations toward a interval that looks at...I usually say seven generations. Maybe it’s too long, a couple generations, [laughs] then it actually coincides really well with the social impulse.

Audrey Tang: It’s only when you trade in the millisecond range where it really destroys [laughs] any semblance of social meaning. Patient capital, I think is one of the things that we’re really getting to, not just to see a few cases of BD, but including the whole supply chain and ecosystem building. The capitalists, if they take a multi generational view, I think their judgments usually agree with the local social groups anyway.

Audrey Tang: We just need to re calibrate their sense of time. The same goes for the charities. We can build environmental and social solidarity, and at the same time also pitch using the latest technologies of crowdfunding, of distributive ledgers, and things like —because these technologies are open. Not only industrialists can use them. Anyone can use them.

Audrey Tang: The principle of open innovation says, “We just have to look at an idea, try it out, and prototype.” In the government, we stay agile. If it’s a good idea, we merge it into the public services as soon as possible. We see them as partners, not as vendors. It’s a different relationship. It’s this agenda setting power that is shared.

George Poulakidas: What we’re striving with in terms of that is a little of this discussion in the meetings that we had before with ITRI and all this, whatever people is that it’s about reducing costs in order to being competitive internationally. Right?

Audrey Tang: That’s part of their mission.

George Poulakidas: Right. I’m trying to see how and if it’s possible to do both.

Audrey Tang: That was the original innovation of open source. It’s not sold as a way to increase solidarity of programmers but rather to share the maintenance cost that every company is paying over and over again into a common pool, like Linux.

Audrey Tang: We are now selling these sustainable development goals, not as a way to get arbitrary five star rankings worldwide, but rather as genuine way to identify collaborators so people can share the costs. The cost saving argument always works in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: It’s something of our culture. [laughs] They do see that by identifying as much as Tzu Chis as possible as part of their company mission. One, they naturally find partners that they won’t otherwise find because then they are saying, "OK. Part of our company mission is to improve the local indigenous people’s agency over the aligned."

Audrey Tang: Then they naturally become partner with the council of indigenous people, which will then introduce them to many other resources that they probably will be blocked if they advertise as a capitalist investment on the indigenous lot. Just by making sure the community embrace this kind of public disclosure and public accountability, I think those two are not polar opposite.

Audrey Tang: It relies on a fully transparent, accountable substrata that people can really trust. I think building that trust is really our main link.

George Poulakidas: Right. I have two last questions.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

George Poulakidas: Again, I’m thinking of going internationally. Who do you see as the main partners? Would it be governments? If you had to choose one, government or liberal unions, other organizations, NGOs? What the ideal partner for that?

Audrey Tang: The ideal partner is some organization that is doing the bridging between the multilateral and the multi stakeholder.

Audrey Tang: For example, I spoke at the Internet Governance Forum, the IGF, which is exactly one such bridge between the totally voluntary associative, I’ll just use anarchistic, community of the Internet society on one side, and the UN ITU, which is highly bureaucratic in a good sense, on the other side.

Audrey Tang: The IGF, being a forum, physically takes place in Geneva, but is held on the rule of Internet governance. It is the place where the multi stakeholder and the multilaterals meet. I think the Open Government Partnership in Ottawa, this May, is exactly that shape as well.

Audrey Tang: It has its share of ministers attending, but also held in the same regard as the major groups that shares the...like Transparency International and folks.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan can especially be helpful on those meeting places, because we have a lot of legitimacy building based on cross sectoral partnership to share. It helps to show people that it actually works because there’s many parts of the world where many people don’t believe that this works.

Audrey Tang: Also, digital technology has the property of very easy to transmit, so even if the regional tour isn’t very easy to copy over, but all the different components of it that we develop can easily be carried over to improve just a township, so it’s very easy to disseminate.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s how Taiwan can help mostly is on the, again, on the 17th of the SDGs. That’s where most of our office’s public diplomacy efforts has been focused on.

George Poulakidas: Perfect. Last question just to clarify, again, on the role of government. You mentioned, in my own interpretation, the role of government is changing the norms, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

George Poulakidas: Which is a very, and I like that, a very left, anarchist approach. It could be very right wing, for other things.

Audrey Tang: It wraps around. [laughs]

George Poulakidas: Yeah. Exactly. As I was saying, in political science, is the whole norm of governmentality, right?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

George Poulakidas: I’m trying to see if there’s a nexus, a connection between that and technology. The role of government in shaping social norms for the good in this case, and the use of technologies.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I worked with Apple for six years, and a lot of my thinking came out of that partnership. I’m sure you still remember Napster?

George Poulakidas: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Napster promised a kind of anarchy in terms of music curation, but then there’s also a very polarized, different world that insists on shipping plastic discs and also making sure that there’s draconian laws. Just think iPod, iPod is such an intervention that basically says the old curational format is over.

Audrey Tang: People get to curate their own experience, but it’s not just personal creation. iPod is all about sharing playlists. Everybody becomes a curator to re establish the social norm, and maybe just in a family but also maybe in a community, of the musical enculturation process.

Audrey Tang: The device, I think, harnessed that individuation sense in ourselves that was kept in the reins by the RIAA folks, in a way that is also legitimate and also legal — which is very important.

Audrey Tang: It harnessed the power from both sides into something that is iTunes, and iPhone, and everything, that that becomes a sensation. That is the kind of norm making that I allude to when I talk about interventions that encourage effective partnerships, in a sense that the popular will is already there, is kept in check by a out of date system.

Audrey Tang: Instead of destroying, or protesting, or attacking that old system, a new system is introduced that just makes the old system obsolete. The CDs went obsolete I think in just less than a decade after iPod gets introduced. That kind of phase change, I think, is what I’m looking for.

George Poulakidas: Perfect. This is great.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

George Poulakidas: Thank you so much.

George Poulakidas: I have two capacities. One is a little bit easier to talk about these things, which is the academic. I’m a business student at the University of Toronto, focusing on innovation policy.

George Poulakidas: The other capacity is that I work at the Ontario government, and there it’s much harder to change. The people are not as open to radically different ways. Maybe next time you visit physically...or we could explore them virtual...

Audrey Tang: Yeah. You can summon me anytime.

George Poulakidas: It will be great to see if perhaps you could come even at the ministry and give a talk there. It will be very interesting and honored. Perfect.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Let’s keep in touch.

George Poulakidas: I also have one pen. Let’s see. That’s from the university.

Audrey Tang: Wow. Thank you so much.

George Poulakidas: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.