Margaret Dawson: The first thing I want to know is about this message on your card: "Taiwan Can Help".

Audrey Tang: That’s the Sustainable Development Goals.

Margaret Dawson: Excellent.

Audrey Tang: I’m in charge of social innovation...

Margaret Dawson: In addition to your day job?

Audrey Tang: No, I’m the digital minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth empowerment. All of this is guided by...

Margaret Dawson: By the digital minister.

Audrey Tang: ...by the Sustainable Goals.

Margaret Dawson: How interesting. You’re the first digital minister, aren’t you?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Margaret Dawson: It’s a new ministry and everything?

Audrey Tang: It’s a new post.

Margaret Dawson: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a new ministry though. We have eight horizontal ministers and 32 vertical ministers. I’m one of the horizontal ones that coordinates all the ministries. My office is one person from each ministry, maximum. Theoretically, I have 34 staff. Now it’s 22, but you get the idea.

Margaret Dawson: [laughs] It should be.

Audrey Tang: It’s a cross-silo design.

Margaret Dawson: I understand perfectly. I have a similar type of job. I work across all of our product business units. My job is portfolio and architecture as opposed to a single product.

Audrey Tang: Horizontal power.

Margaret Dawson: Yours is a little bit bigger.

Margaret Dawson: It’s the power of horizontal, that’s right.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, and you’re going to bring this into a bigger culture as well.

Margaret Dawson: I’m trying to, yes.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: It will be an interesting exercise, definitely. I was really excited to read more about your work. I had read a little bit about you, so it’s very interesting.

Audrey Tang: Is there anything in particular you will like to talk about for this meeting?

Richard Koh: No.

Audrey Tang: No?

Audrey Tang: I can talk for hours, but...

Margaret Dawson: You can start talking about your scrum board out front.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Margaret Dawson: We were excited to see that.

Audrey Tang: I just met the global VP and the greater China CEO, Wing Kin Cheung, from IBM yesterday.

Margaret Dawson: Fantastic.

Audrey Tang: He’s new I think also to that post as of two months ago or three months ago. He’s in charge of hybrid cloud...

Margaret Dawson: That’s right. That’s our world.

Audrey Tang: ...which will be your world. [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: I stressed the point that when Microsoft acquired GitHub, they sent the right person. There is a real conversation on "Hacker News," Reddit, and all the forums. They made it very clear it is part of the Hit Refresh Plan, so that GitHub will guide their value instead of the other way around.

Margaret Dawson: It’s so interesting that you say that. I was meeting with the gentleman who is now going to be the CEO of GitHub. I was telling my team that the analogy is very similar. Microsoft specifically has said, "They are an independent company. We need them to be independent. Their developer credibility is so important."

Margaret Dawson: He was saying it was true. They really are hands-off. He’s reporting to Satya. It’s almost the same structure as what IBM is talking about.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Margaret Dawson: It is important because, as you know, most of the open source code repositories of the world are sitting in GitHub right now. It’s in their interest to do that. Microsoft, as you know, has become a huge open source fan.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. They joined the Open Innovation Network, which is a concrete action.

Margaret Dawson: Are you still contributing to the open source communities?

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Margaret Dawson: Good.

Audrey Tang: I like to say that on GitHub or similar communities, we move at the speed of trust. Without the goodwill and trust, the so-called huge network of people doesn’t mean anything because people will just migrate to GitLab or something overnight. [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: I’m curious, in addition to your mandate with the Digital Ministry, are you also taking that open source culture and trying to instill more of that transparency?

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Margaret Dawson: The thing I find most interesting in talking to governments all over the world is, and I know you do, too, their attempt to try to become more transparent in the open source way when it is almost the opposite of how government functions, which is much more hierarchical, command and control.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, the old power.

Margaret Dawson: What’s been your experience with that so far?

Audrey Tang: It’s very easy because I had a public ask me anything negotiation for one month before actually getting into the digital minister’s post.

Margaret Dawson: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: My job description is crowd-sourced so to speak. There’s three compact that the collective intelligence channeled [laughs] through this process. The premier, it’s like, "Take it or leave it, but this is my compact." Very simply put, the three is radical transparency, voluntary association, and location independence.

Audrey Tang: Concretely speaking, radical transparency means every single meeting that I chair and every single visit from any...

Margaret Dawson: Vendor or whatever.

Audrey Tang: ...lobbyist, vendor, media, journalism, or anything, we make a full transcript, published 10 days after each meeting and 10 working days after each internal meeting. People get to understand the why, the context of policy making instead of just the what. This is, I think, one of the most important thing.

Audrey Tang: In our Freedom of Information Act, it says, in the drafting stage, conversation is not to be published, which is the same as everywhere in the world, but there was a exception clause. If it serves the public interests, it may be released, at the judgment of the minister of course. As my working condition, everything I see is of public interest to publish.

Audrey Tang: This is my working condition.

Margaret Dawson: Whether they want to listen to it or not.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I published more than 200. There’s more transcripts now. It’s almost like investigative journalist inside the government.

Margaret Dawson: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, of course, I cannot touch state secret. If they run a military drill, I just take a day off. I still don’t know where the bunkers are. That’s my first condition.

Margaret Dawson: That’s good to know. We’re on our own if something happens while we’re here.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is voluntary association, meaning that I don’t take orders and I don’t give orders. I give requests for comments. I take requests for comments. Because of this, all the different teammates joining my team, actually their ministry is still paying their salary.

Audrey Tang: They rank themselves. We learn to work out loud using free software like Sandstorm Wekan, Rocket.Chat, and so on, so that they can bring the culture back. We have a team of participation officer in every ministry that replicates this work style.

Margaret Dawson: You’re going to have to come back to this and talk about what those people are finding, their experience. I want to hear more.

Audrey Tang: Because they don’t take any orders from me, they basically collaborate exactly the same way as we do in the open source community. We make sure that the innovations that we roll out are Pareto improvements. They’re not sacrificing any ministries.

Margaret Dawson: I think we can learn from this.

Margaret Dawson: Maybe that’s a model we can borrow, almost have people come and then take it back. That’s brilliant.

Audrey Tang: This is the second thing. Finally, the last one is location independence, which means that I get to work, like here my usual office.

Margaret Dawson: I like that.

Audrey Tang: This is a more formal meeting, but we had our previous meetings in the Social Innovation Lab. Wherever I am working, I’m working. [laughs] I spend almost half my days overseas. Next week, I’m going to be in Canada for more than a week. I was just returning from New York from the General Assembly, the UN season, and then in many in countries.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, I bring back those innovative social experiment. This one is a self-driving tricycle that’s just running around in my office with the Media Lab in MIT. This is just so that people hear autonomous driving, and they think something that’s smaller than they are. It’s entirely open hardware, open source that they can tinker. Just with any college student, they can change how it expresses emotions.

Audrey Tang: Because this tricycle, it doesn’t hurt anyone if it runs into something, [laughs] so people learn to co-domesticate, instead of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt around trucks or whatever other things.

Audrey Tang: Location independence is very important because I get to tour around Taiwan. I get to have interns all around the world and in Taiwan. As long as they can log in to the Sandstorm platform, they’re considered in work. This serves as a example for the entire public service now to adopt teleworking principles, which was not a thing in Taiwan.

Margaret Dawson: That’s correct.

Audrey Tang: Teleworking, in turn, enables full accountability. If you’re remote piloting a truck, the entire transcript of recording is part of the flow, but if you have to install IoT sensors in every truck, that’s not going to happen. Teleworking by itself enables accountability. That’s my compact. So far, it’s gone really, really well.

Margaret Dawson: Are you involved at all in any initiatives to also increase the number of women getting into coding and to STEM?

Audrey Tang: Diversity, yes, of course. This Social Innovation Lab itself has hosted the R-Ladies.

Audrey Tang: There’s many other, like Rails Girls, PyLadies, and so on. Long as they can say which sustainable goal that they’re working towards, like gender equality, equality for all, or quality education, that’s the two easy one. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: As long as they can declare, "We’re working on #SDG4 and #SDG5 and #SDG10," they get free access to the venue, free access to all the equipment, and things like that. All we ask is that they declare which SDGs they’re working toward.

Margaret Dawson: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Margaret Dawson: What do you know of Red Hat? How are we working together with the ministry now?

Audrey Tang: The first thing I did as the digital minister is to recompile the Fedora kernel...

Margaret Dawson: Nice.

Audrey Tang: ...for our internal cloud.

Margaret Dawson: Excellent. I love it.

Audrey Tang: The old kernel doesn’t support Linux Container and cgroups. I want to set up the Sandstorm cluster, the Docker orchestration and Kubernetes, and things like that. The old kernel just doesn’t cut it, and so I’ve just recompiled the kernel, which is very symbolic. [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: Yes, it is. I caught that symbol as well.

Margaret Dawson: It’s awesome.

Audrey Tang: It’s saying, "We’re not really subverting the old power, but we’re creating a new kernel and gradually, like Buckminster Fuller said, make the old model obsolete." That’s the first one. After that, we look at our baseline for our government’s operating systems. RHEL and Windows 7+ are the two ones...

Margaret Dawson: Standards.

Audrey Tang: ...that people are allowed to use. I started to look into the initiatives that RH is working on. I found a few Linux Foundation initiatives, for example, the Open API standard is part of your API First strategy. We just hijacked it [laughs] before it’s even published.

Audrey Tang: Open API 3.0, when it’s in beta, we translated that and adopt it as the national standard. Fortunately, the final version is very minor difference. [laughs] We’re now Open API by default, and it’s part of our GDSP, Government Digital Service Principle.

Audrey Tang: There’s another initiative that you are working which is called SPDX, which is a declaration of all the open source component in a vendor, so that system integrators are not held liable for things that they should not be held liable. Incompatible licenses are discovered early in the process instead of very late in the process, which creates a huge job opportunity for lawyers I’m sure...

Audrey Tang: ...but a mess for everybody else. We also adopted the manifest as our procurement standard. Now, if any vendor working on any project says, "We can only produce something that’s human-readable, but not open API," or if they say, "We would like to use some proprietary software because AGPL or GPO is antithetical to our procurement strategy," and so on.

Audrey Tang: The procuring agency, actually, we have specific wording that says they’re now disqualified because they’re not being professional. At zero or very little cost, implement Open API and declare the open source manifest is considered as part of professionalism criteria in procurement.

Margaret Dawson: That’s amazing.

Audrey Tang: That’s the extent [laughs] of my work towards...In education, of course, we’re promoting open source by default. If they graduate and choose to join proprietary software, that’s their choice, but in basic education, essentially, if people learn something and the vendor goes away are they change their mind, it is, of course, not a good idea for anybody.

Audrey Tang: We roll out TensorFlow, Raspberry Pi, or whatever equipments instead of proprietary solutions. We task each school to develop their own what we call the digital awareness and media literacy education materials based on free software ideas.

Audrey Tang: I use free software because the Freedom Zero, the freedom to use for any purpose, is free from surveillance and so on, is equally important to the open source, which is the next three freedoms. That’s it.

Margaret Dawson: That’s interesting. Is there collaboration a lot with Taiwan’s tech industry with the stuff you’re doing in the universities?

Audrey Tang: Very much so. We have a program called University Social Responsibility, called USR. Very simply put, it’s the university working with the community. It could be a open street map community. It could be a Wikipedia community. It could be any community.

Audrey Tang: As part of their undergrad course, for two years, the student has just to join the community, pick a social or environmental issue and work towards sustainability. It’s going to count as their capstone project. If they "fail," it’s not a problem, because it’s part of their learning process.

Audrey Tang: If they succeed in some way, they get to publish and they get credit just by participating in the community and solving a real social problem. We allocate a lot of budget in that because it’s the first time the university think itself as a hub for communities instead of just people in higher education.

Audrey Tang: Usually, they propose a two-year plan. If that works out, we give them money for another three years. Instead of quarterly KPIs or something, it’s entirely co-created agenda-setting. It’s been running for two or three years now to very good effort.

Audrey Tang: We’re now additionally starting next year to SDG index all their work so the USR people, if the students graduate, they can talk with the CSR people or the impact investment people, the venture philanthropy people, and just carry the project into social entrepreneurship.

Margaret Dawson: That’s interesting. Your title and role, I’m finding it all over the world that a lot of governments are building an open source cloud platform for developers, either citizen developers or other government agencies. Is that something that...

Audrey Tang: The Sandstorm platform.

Margaret Dawson: That’s Sandstorm? That’s the same thing? Is that for agencies as well as citizens? Anyone can use that platform?

Audrey Tang: Anyone can use the platform. Anyone with a g0v.tw email address can upload their own apps for everybody to use.

Margaret Dawson: It’s almost a marketplace as well.

Audrey Tang: Sandstorm stands for sandbox, right? [laughs] We asked our top-notch cybersecurity white hats -- they’re second place at Defcon or something -- to attack this entirely open source, container-based system. For half a year, they filed three minor CBEs. That’s like medals for them. The presidents meet them, and they’re paid very well.

Audrey Tang: In any case, they declared that this is the most secure container-based platform that they found so far. After that, we allow all the public service to write apps. There’s apps that order lunch box together or something. That’s also a very [laughs] simple thing, but because of the sandbox thing, the single sign-on, and things, they can just upload to the thing and just run it.

Audrey Tang: If there’s something in the community that we think are really good...These are staples like Rocket.Chat...ownCloud and Wekan.

Margaret Dawson: Task and project management.

Audrey Tang: Actually, I personally maintain the spreadsheet part.

Audrey Tang: It’s called EtherCalc.

Margaret Dawson: That’s your evening job.

Audrey Tang: That’s my evening job. If we see a new open source innovation that’s really good, like there’s a Taiwanese start-up called HackMD that does a WYSIWYG markdown editor that’s collaborative and that supports UML, Gant charts, and all sort of nice interactive features.

Audrey Tang: We think it’s better than Etherpad, and so we work with them and incorporate that into the Sandstorm platform so that we don’t have to maintain two branches going forward. We’re doing this in a way...

Margaret Dawson: Is everything in English on Sandstorm?

Audrey Tang: It’s also translated over to French and...

Margaret Dawson: OK, so there’s...

Richard Koh: Are they sharing the costs with each other?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, they are. We’re working with the Digital Nations too. Canada, in particular, is...

Margaret Dawson: I was just going to ask you if you’re working...I met with the digital minister in British Columbia and we had a really interesting conversation.

Audrey Tang: I met, virtually, [laughs] Derek Alton, who is planning this. I’m going to Canada this weekend to meet them in person.

Margaret Dawson: I think they’re actually ahead. I think their digital initiatives are ahead of a lot of countries. The BC gov cloud platform is becoming a life of its own. We worked with them really closely on that. I think it’s really interesting to see the dynamic.

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Audrey Tang: The name of our office is Public Digital Innovation Space, PDIS. When I visited the UK, I met half of us, the Public Digital, [laughs] the original GDS people. They’re also advising the Canada folks.

Margaret Dawson: The UK is doing some really interesting things, as well.

Audrey Tang: In the Ministry of Fun, DCMS, we met with the D, C and M. Not sport yet.

Margaret Dawson: That’s great.

Audrey Tang: One of our service designer and consultant used to work for Policy Lab UK, and so we have a lot of common connections together.

Margaret Dawson: The UK cloud is also really growing quickly.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Margaret Dawson: That’s really interesting.

David Worthington: That is wonderful. I’ve been really interested to understand this. How is the fast-paced work that you’re doing sitting the rest of the public service, in the more traditional departments?

Audrey Tang: The participation officers network, the PO network, which really is at the core of this plan, the idea is that they can also then spread this horizontal working idea to their agencies, like a fractal. Truth to be told, out of 32 agencies or so, maybe only 6 or 7 is now adopting this horizontal working methods.

Audrey Tang: Because I’m by voluntary association, I don’t go to the Minister of Defense and say, "Tomorrow, you’re going to be radically transparent." [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: That would be an interesting conversation...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it would be a very interesting conversation.

Margaret Dawson: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: No, we don’t have people from Defense in our office yet.

Audrey Tang: But we have people from Foreign Affairs, people from Interior, Culture, and so on. These more people-facing, more diplomatic ministries, they’re all very enthusiastic to adopt this collaborative approach.

Audrey Tang: Out of the six municipalities which all signed the Open Data Charter, they are also looking into something like this. Tainan City just adopted the same participation officer network, which is great. We have some comics to show it, so maybe we can give you a skit -- it’s in six languages -- about the collaboration, innovation, and design thinking process.

Audrey Tang: It’s our educational material in all the six languages.

Margaret Dawson: That would be very interesting.

Audrey Tang: Other municipalities would depend on how well-equipped their CIOs are. Taipei City is in a very good position because they have a CIO and a PMO, a project management office. I think Taoyuan City is also moving along really nicely.

Margaret Dawson: I would think so since they have so much IT there.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Kaohsiung City also is working with smart city PMO stuff. That leaves New Taipei and Taichung. Taichung actually has the fastest plan, but the city council has been blocking it forever. We expect that will change after the elections.

Audrey Tang: After the election, if things go well, Xinbei and Taichung will follow, and then we’ll have a really good six-municipality network to implement this plan.

Margaret Dawson: Interesting.

Jason Peng: Sorry. How do you define the success of your organization? What’s the definition of success for you?

Audrey Tang: What’s our metrics, right?

Jason Peng: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Our main metric, our core value is trust, trust between the people caring about the economy, environment, and society, as well as the trust a public administration place on the people. That is to say, the government has to trust people first.

Audrey Tang: If there’s 5,000 people on the street e-petitioning and so on, we have metrics that measures how willing is the public service and how confident is the public service to engage them directly and invite people who complain to the kitchen, so to speak, to co-create. That’s our main measurement metric.

Audrey Tang: Our e-participation platform, join.gov.tw, which combine participatory budgeting, regulatory pre-announcement, e-petition, you name it, is 5 million active users out of 23 million Taiwanese people...

Margaret Dawson: Wow.

Audrey Tang: ...like one quarter of the population. That’s a really good indicator.

Audrey Tang: We’re looking to doubling that in the next few years.

Margaret Dawson: That’s on gov.tw that there’s kind of a membership thing?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, join.gov.tw. Another metric that we use is the accountability measure of policy making. How many policies or long-term projects of each ministry has a full accountable record of spending, procurement, research, allows for public commenting? How often does the career public service respond directly? That’s another key metric.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like the consumer confident index, but "citizen" confidence index.

Audrey Tang: That’s another key metric that we’re measuring. At the moment, I think 1,300 projects have an accountability trail, which is, I think, a majority now, but still not everything. Things that are, of course, state secrets and so on, [laughs] emergency stuff, or things that are pure research are not yet fully accounted for.

Audrey Tang: All the mid to long-term projects, that is to say, that has more than one year of execution period and that has at least quarterly report, including the spending, is on the report.

Margaret Dawson: Who in government is looking at that confidence index? Is that something that you’re reporting to the higher levels of government?

Audrey Tang: Well, I’m in charge of open government so [laughs] I’m looking at it.

Margaret Dawson: I was thinking beyond you, who really is looking at it?

Audrey Tang: Beyond me is the Premier, who very much care for open government. When he ran for the Tainan City government in 2014, open government is his main pillar, main campaign platform, actually. He was elected because of his insistence. It’s public record anyway. After he became the mayor, he refused to go to the city council for quite some time because the chief councilor is involved in a bribery case.

Margaret Dawson: Corruption case.

Audrey Tang: For quite a while, what he did was he just went into every single precinct in Tainan City and have town hall meetings directly with people, fully accountable, and have all the bureaus respond immediately, in two weeks after each town hall meeting. Basically, a portable city council that talks directly to people. It’s direct democracy, right? [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: Right.

Audrey Tang: After he became the premier, he took that and actually went to all the different counties in Taiwan in a tour of industrial innovation. I’m doing, personally, a tour on social innovation. That become the norm here. The premier really loves all these open data, open governance, open participation stuff.

Audrey Tang: The real accountability mechanism is implemented in the National Development Council, in the NDC. The chief commissioner of the NDC was the chief commissioner of the RDEC of Tainan City when Lai Ching-te the mayor, so she was the one who accompanied him to the tour.

Margaret Dawson: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: It’s the same Tainan team, lifted to a national level. We’re very fortunate to have Chen Mei-ling as our chief commissioner.

David Worthington: These liaison people that you’ve borrowed from these departments, when they go back to a department with an idea, do they have a team of people within their...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s at the core team, like 22 people.

Audrey Tang: In 34 ministries, each ministry has a team of participation offiers. It’s a satellite network.

David Worthington: What sort of methods or approaches do they use? I know it’s voluntary association, so you’re not going in there and telling them to do it. What methods do they use within their departments? Are they standardized or all they all...?

Audrey Tang: It’s almost standardized. Basically, it’s called the Open Policy Making Toolkit. UK has, I think, one of the most advanced one, but nowadays Google, Mozilla, Red Hat, [laughs] everybody has a open innovation toolkit, by any other name, but it’s the same methodologies anyway.

Audrey Tang: It’s Agile, design thinking, stakeholder mapping, user journey, the usual suspects. We have a toolkit of 20 or so general processes. Then we combine them to form due processes based on how early is the context of policy making. How many stakeholders are involved? How many ministries are involved? There’s a methodology, and we’re also publishing.

Audrey Tang: It’s almost like a real lab here to basically look at incoming cases. It could be e-petition. It could be emergent issues. It could be sandbox issues. We’re very big on sandbox, like breaking the law for a year and see what happens. If everything happens that was good, we take the patch and merge that into our law. This is how we innovate with the society in policy making, including laws, regulations and interpretations. Each one requires a due process of co-creation, and that is semi-standardized. We don’t have a standardized way to combine them, but we have a standard toolkit, and people learn to combine them according to the stage, the time, and the budget limitations.

Margaret Dawson: I don’t think we’re even doing that in the United States. I think it would be fascinating.

Audrey Tang: We met with the NYC Civic Service Design team.

Margaret Dawson: I could see that. I’m surprised San Francisco doesn’t have that or some of that. That’s interesting.

David Worthington: I can’t imagine Australia is doing much of this either.

Margaret Dawson: Actually, that’s not true. There’s some open government initiatives in Australia.

David Worthington: Is it? I’ve been away for a long time.

Margaret Dawson: Yeah. I don’t remember what it was exactly.

Audrey Tang: An acquaintance, Pia Andrews just went back to Australia after serving with the New Zealand innovation team. I’m sure that she will bring the New Zealand stuff, the Wellington toolkit [laughs] back to Australia.

Margaret Dawson: Interesting.

David Worthington: I’ll look out for that.

Margaret Dawson: That’s really interesting.

David Worthington: I think one thing that we can share with you is Red Hat Innovation Labs, open innovation labs. We basically work with clients, small teams of clients to help drive change within the organization. More than just the Red Hat products but also all the other open source and commercial products that you need in a successful development ecosystem.

David Worthington: All of our practices are also open source. If you have a look, there’s something called the open practice library.

Audrey Tang: I’m aware of that.

David Worthington: Everything that we do in labs, at Red Hat, so that open source is more than code, it’s culture. All of the practices that we use in labs, we open source as well. I’ll go and have a look at your open policy...

Audrey Tang: I’m making a toolkit. Yeah, I said that as much to that IBM VP yesterday. I said that in their communication, they’re "preserving the Red Hat legacy" which could be worded more constructively.

Margaret Dawson: That’s right.

Margaret Dawson: That is ironic actually.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. You should have said that you want to open innovation culture to drive the change within IBM and how IBM relates to people. They said they would look into it, so there’s some hope.

Margaret Dawson: That’s funny. I had actually caught that irony of the language that they used. That’s a good catch.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because they’re the legacy. [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: I think they see the open source future though. Everyone knows that the biggest disruption in innovation is being driven by open source, honestly. I think everyone will get there, just different speeds.

Audrey Tang: I know. I worked with Apple for six years, four of which was before they open sourced Swift and things. We just need to have patience.

Margaret Dawson: I would like to see them open source more things.

Audrey Tang: I know, I know.

Audrey Tang: I am no longer with Apple.

Margaret Dawson: Someone asked me why I don’t have an iPhone and I said as soon as they open source everything, then I will consider doing that. [laughs]

Jason Peng: Audrey, I’m thinking you have a vision of success. Since all of us are here, where do you see Red Hat can play a role contributing to your vision?

Audrey Tang: The whole idea of open innovation is that we enable the people. Not just young people but intergenerational and across all the fields to have the right tools to innovate at zero or negative cost because of the network effect. Just getting the message across that you can put something together, innovate and without a lot of cost, either in time or in money.

Audrey Tang: That is a very important message because in Taiwan, when people think entrepreneur, people don’t think a serial entrepreneur or anything like that because the older generation, they all work with things that are, frankly speaking, pretty capital intensive. If you start something capital intensive and fail, it’s a big deal for the whole family.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, with open innovation and service-oriented innovation, you can pay exactly a smudge as your customers are. You can even crowdfund and have all your customers be your punters. Zero cost innovation is really a thing. Not just zero marginal cost but zero initial cost. I think this is...

Margaret Dawson: It’s a very different business model.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very different experience from the older generation’s more industrial age model. Anything that you can do to spread this message. It could be, I don’t know, comics, films or whatever.

Audrey Tang: It is a good idea because, not only in Linkou, our in social innovation lab, we’re having all those university social responsibility programs. They’re all asking, how do they convince their parents to let them fail a few times before really hitting a fit to the market?

Margaret Dawson: That’s interesting because I lived in Taiwan in the 1990s. I, actually, was telling these guys earlier that the thing I loved about it was that failure wasn’t seen in the same way as I think it even was in Western culture or American culture.

Margaret Dawson: You were encouraged to experiment more, so it’s funny that you’re saying that that’s not translated. I’m wondering if there was a period where it went away?

Audrey Tang: If you were around in the late ’90s, that’s where everybody is experimenting because the first presidential election is 1996. That’s where everybody gets democracy.

Margaret Dawson: It became more experimental then.

Audrey Tang: It became more experimental. There was a huge occupy in the early ’90s. There’s the Wild Lily and things like that. There’s a period of maybe five years or seven years that...

Margaret Dawson: That’s when I was here. I think it was a period. Everything was fresh, post-martial law.

Audrey Tang: Of course, after the Millennium, I think people generally start to think that maybe, after the dot-com burst, actually, people start to think, if you put too much investment into software, it may not pay off, so all the software oriented or service-oriented VCs changed their strategy. Software became an addition to hardware. That is to say, it iterates on half-year cycles instead of half-week cycles.

Margaret Dawson: That’s more the traditional industry here also, so it went back to its roots.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Margaret Dawson: That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: There’s a fold back of the software mentality back to a hardware mentality. That happened around 2005, 2004, or so. It’s just now in the past couple of years, we’re restarting this service and software-oriented view with AI labs and all those international companies choosing Taiwan as the main AI innovation center.

Audrey Tang: Now, this time around, we discovered that you don’t have to make a software/hardware split because you can start with design, user need and things like that. This design-oriented thinking, Taipei being a business capital and things like that in the past, I think three or four years, it’s restarted as a thing.

Audrey Tang: Of course, Sunflower in 2014 also plays a role because after a huge occupy, just like Wild Lily, people feel that expressing their outrage about social injustice or whatever is a hip thing to do. Whereas, before the Sunflower, occupy is seen as something very strange.

Audrey Tang: Young people don’t often talk about gender inequality or social injustice or animal rights but after the occupy, it’s now a very hip thing up to today because of referendums and things like that. In the past four years, we’re seeing a revitalization that’s kind of like around 1996.

Margaret Dawson: That’s interesting. We do a lot with universities around open source and innovation. I don’t know if we’ve done anything in Taiwan, specifically, but we should actually look at it because they have some of the best universities in the world.

David Worthington: I’m not sure if the Red Hat Academy is here.

Margaret Dawson: I’ll go check with Hugh Brock on that and see if we have anything.

David Worthington: Red Hat Academy is where we provide the Red Hat tools to universities free of charge to allow them to incorporate that into their curriculum.

Audrey Tang: IBM has P-TECH. They work with three universities. I’m sure you can piggyback off of that.

Audrey Tang: Is there a Traditional Chinese version of your curriculum?

Margaret Dawson: I don’t know. I’ll follow up with that. I’ll talk to the gentleman who’s running that program. We’re really starting to scale that now. It’s funny you say that because someone sent me a translation of something this morning and it was simplified characters. I said, I can’t really use that here and thank you very much. I can’t believe we’re still having this conversation about simplified versus traditional. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: There’s automated tools for that... I wrote one myself.

Margaret Dawson: I’ll let them know.

Audrey Tang: To do a proper lexicon-based subsitution through e.g. OpenCC, it doesn’t cost you a dime to translate to traditional Chinese. You can start with the corporate home page... That technology, it’s open source, by the way.

Margaret Dawson: I will pass that on. Thank you. I will take that feedback.

Audrey Tang: That would, of course, help. I wrote a tool early on, HanConvert, that converts between the scripts, which you are free to use as well.

Margaret Dawson: That’s funny. When did you write that?

Audrey Tang: I think it’s year 2000. I started to get a lot of grateful, thank-you emails from the likes of BBC and so on. [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: I’m sure. Right. I will definitely take that as an action item to follow up on that. It’d be interesting.

David Worthington: Very good.

Audrey Tang: Our procurement people said they have to really convince their bosses that the red here doesn’t mean PRC. [laughs]

Margaret Dawson: Yeah, it’s not that red hat. Maybe we need to send them a fedora, so they understand it’s a completely different style of red hat as well.

Audrey Tang: I know, but a Simplified Chinese website doesn’t help.

Margaret Dawson: I have taken this feedback. Got it.

Jason Peng: Of course, the Red Hat salesforce in Taiwan works in a way that we engage with the enterprise instead of small companies or individuals in the society. Still, I think that in Taiwan’s market, we see it changed a lot in the last couple of years in terms of innovation, how people see innovation, likes encouraging their people to do more innovation.

Jason Peng: Also, the open source, the way that enterprise sees open source has changed a lot as well. Today, to many enterprise, the default choice of technology should be open source softwares...

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Jason Peng: ...instead of the proprietary solutions.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we made that very clear in our procurement rules. If they can use PostgreSQL, they will use it. If they’re still stuck with, I don’t know, DB2, at least they can turn it into microservices and put it on a more open orchestration platform. At least the API should be open and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s really a thing in the last two years. Starting this year, the government, digital service principal spells that out. Then, after a year, it will be not beta but just procurement strategy.

Richard Koh: I think from our perspective, we have two parts of the company. One is more on the community or the engineering. We can definitely do a better job of engaging the community here in Taiwan and enrolling their help to contribute to open source projects.

Richard Koh: The other part, which Jason spoke about, is the enterprise part of our business. Is not just about them using open source. When you start to adopt open source tools, you need to have the right mindset because a large part of open source is about iteration and experimentation. You would try if it works and improve from there.

Richard Koh: Whether does it fit your needs? If it’s not, then you continue to evolve and try different things. That’s where innovation will spark, right? Very often, when people think about innovation, it’s about the big idea of some life-changing things but most of the time, innovation starts as small little items that continue to improve and become better.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a flash mob, right? You just have three people. Then, it draws a crowd, which draws a larger crowd.

Richard Koh: To the extent, and unfortunately, for a lot of enterprises or even parents. I think that the fear of the failure is a result of success that was experienced in the past. You know I come from Singapore, right? Over the past 30, 40 years, we have been growing very well. So much so that we are fixated. We must only move upwards and not side ward, or even downwards.

Richard Koh: Sometimes, you can take a few steps down but after that, you propel yourself up a lot more if you experiment. I think this kind of mindset, we need to actually propagate with all the communities as well as enterprises.

Audrey Tang: I would also stress that, of course, we’ve been saying open innovation in policy making for a very long time, but I think it really caught on this time because we changed the wording to say social innovation. The basic idea is really the same but social innovation involves the whole society. Not just the civil tech people or the tech people.

Audrey Tang: It puts the emphasis on bringing power to the people closer to the pain, to empower instead of colonize the people. It’s less solution thinking. It’s more co-creation thinking. Using social innovation as the branding and the sustainable goals as the concrete like 169 targets.

Audrey Tang: It puts the emphasis on the digital as a way for communities to connect rather than digital as a way for people to "deliver solutions."

Margaret Dawson: The Digital Experience as opposed to the technology.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. While open innovation is a pursuit, the thing that we’re doing. It does have a kind of connotation, a copyright, or a patent, or the intellectual property truths that is happening between the major vendors and so on, which is rightly so.

Audrey Tang: We started open source movement as a marketing campaign for free software for these people. Obviously, then, it carries the more economic instead of environmental or social undertone. When we say social innovation, it’s equally social, environmental, and economic. That is the branding we’re using. Of course, we’ll still do open innovation.

Margaret Dawson: It’s still powered by technology...

Audrey Tang: Of course. When I go to, for example, during the UN G8, they ask me what does the digital minister do? Then, I say, I work on 17.18, 17.17, and the 17.6.

Audrey Tang: The beauty of the SDGs is that digital is in the 17th, and the 17s is very well placed in a way that is a combining force to all the different sectors. I think it is a more collaborative message.

Margaret Dawson: Interesting. Is there anything else that we could do to help collaborate or drive your mission forward as we’re meeting with all these companies? I think going to you, one of our -- I don’t know if I’d call it a mission -- but a side benefit is that we’re not just selling technology. We’re really evolving culture and the way of doing things.

Margaret Dawson: Open Innovation Labs is a hands-on, how do we move you forward faster approach. A lot of companies want part of their organization to go through that to just kick-start it almost because, as you know, change is hard. I’m just wondering if there’s anything else we should be looking at or thinking about as we’re working here?

Audrey Tang: The comic, which I really should bring now because I would like to read a few pages.

Audrey Tang: Do you read, I don’t know, Hakka or Taigi?

Audrey Tang: That’s all the six languages. The English one, Japanese, and Amis too. I can bring you more English copies.

Margaret Dawson: Case study of the very taxing tax filing system.

Margaret Dawson: Cast of characters.

Jason Peng: Yeah, this was quite the big media issue that I think four or five years before. Last time, when people used the tax system, it caused a lot of problems. People arguing and complain about that.

Audrey Tang: We invite everybody who complains to open innovation.

Richard Koh: Contribute rather than criticize, right?

Audrey Tang: Contribute by criticizing. I think that the main message I want to focus on is page 10. I think that is one of the messages that we can all help to spread, which is bringing the user from the waterfall model, the last touch point to the first touch point. It also touches on how to cross silos, use ICT and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think that this would be the main message to talk to startups and perhaps in your next focus groups. If anything, that is the one message that they already is buying in. They understand if they’re not working with users, they are not going to succeed or survive.

Margaret Dawson: This is the actual story. This is fascinating. This is almost a transcript in a fun way. That’s great. We’ll have to send you our cartoon for containers. Did you bring one of those?

Margaret Dawson: We’ve also used comic books in a lot of education around SELinux, containers and things like that because people will read them. It’s much more enjoyable.

David Worthington: I’ll have to get one to you.

Audrey Tang: We can translate it to traditional Chinese?

David Worthington: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. Maybe just start with them. This cartoon and your cartoon and...

Margaret Dawson: Yeah, we’ll share, share comic books.

David Worthington: People read them, right?

Margaret Dawson: This has been really, really interesting. Thank you for sharing your time. I know you’re very busy. We’ll continue to think about ways we can collaborate, mutually.

Margaret Dawson: Anything else?

Audrey Tang: Feel free to bring comic books. [laughs]

Tracy Hsieh: How about take a picture?

Audrey Tang: Sure, sure, sure. I’ll have to wear this SDGs pin then.