Audrey Tang: Welcome to our Social Innovation Lab.

Atsushi Osanai: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: I received the invitation to tell me not to prepare anything. This is the first time that I received a meeting request saying that I should not prepare anything.

Audrey Tang: You are not looking for facts or information, but looking for the experience of thinking together. I think this also captures the idea of social innovation. It is not about just sending brochures to each, but rather on brainstorming together, regardless of which sector we are in.

Audrey Tang: I also am grateful to you to give me this experience, which never happened in the Social Innovation Lab.

Atsushi Osanai: Let me introduce our students. Everyone has a job in the daytime in Tokyo. We have the evening course in our MBA school. They are the MBA candidates, second grade. Next March, maybe they will graduate from our school.

Audrey Tang: Some of them will?

Atsushi Osanai: I don’t know.

Atsushi Osanai: He is working in data communication company in Tokyo. He is an engineer on the Xerox, the photocopy machines.

Atsushi Osanai: He is a Taiwanese bank employee. He is Chow. Chow is just Chow.

Atsushi Osanai: You could say he’s difficult to say, so what he do.

Audrey Tang: He is from Kaohsiung. That I remember.

Atsushi Osanai: OK. He is a business world NPO organization in Tokyo. He invite students in junior high school in Taiwan to Japanese high school.

Audrey Tang: Wow, OK.

Atsushi Osanai: He’s happy he once saw a baseball player. [laughs] Yamazaki-san, she works in an Insurance Company. She is charge of IT section or something. I don’t know the details.

Male Participant: I’m not a student, by the way.

Male Participant: Totally separate.

Atsushi Osanai: Tanaka-san is working at a German machinery company in Tokyo. Ashizawa-san is a battery manufacturing company employee. He is an corporate planning managers. He somehow need to make a new business, factories in Indonesia, in Vietnam, or something in Southeast Asia.

Atsushi Osanai: Shima-san work for the Microsoft. He is a sales manager.

Male Participant: Yes.

Atsushi Osanai: Aichi-san, now living in Taiwan. She is working in Japanese companye.

Audrey Tang: How should we proceed?

Atsushi Osanai: As we discussed about Taiwan and activity with Minister Tang in Tokyo this month. Today, we’d like to discuss transparency of the government in Taiwan with you guys in IT technology. All of us…Not all of us.

Atsushi Osanai: Almost all of us studying about technology management or innovation management, we are interested in utilizing technology to create a new innovation. Especially, we utilized it in utilizing IT technology to government or the other social activities.

Atsushi Osanai: This is the reason why we would like to listen to your talking. This is a major issue, I think.

Audrey Tang: Use ICT for the government…

Atsushi Osanai: Yeah, the social…

Audrey Tang: …to encourage social innovation?

Atsushi Osanai: Yes. Of course, they are working in private company in Japan, so they want to improve the job or task, with thinking of innovation, or utilizing technology, or something. We like to study about your way of thinking to utilizing the technology or innovation.

Atsushi Osanai: I think also, before in 20th century, the Japanese manufacturers focused on hardware business, so now situation is not so good. Especially, there are many Japanese manufacturer afraid, because they bringing technology too much.

Atsushi Osanai: They have no strategy, only have that technology. They want to solve any kind of problem by only technology, not a strategy, or the other thinking of innovation. Sometimes, Japanese have misunderstanding, innovation is just a technological issue.

Atsushi Osanai: Innovation is not only technological issue. We would like to understand the right way to define innovation, so we would like to learn from you. What is that area of innovation? What is main criteria to create that innovation with economic profit?

Atsushi Osanai: Now, we are exploring that, so many things. Not only the manufacturer, the manufacturing. We want to discuss with you to understand the new way to think about innovation.

Audrey Tang: All right. Let me just check my understanding, given my background in using ICT for the government to form partnerships with not just the business sector, but also the social and the environmental sectors.

Audrey Tang: You would like to know, aside from the traditional Industrial Age way innovation, which is the input of hardware as well as energy into the industrialization process that then trickles down to the society and to the environment, sometime negatively, sometime positively, you would like to explore a different way of innovation that starts with the environment or the social purposes, and lead, or guide, at least, the industrialization and innovation process?

Atsushi Osanai: Yeah. It is my opinion. Some Japanese say, from hardware to software, that is important. It is not the major point of the changing our strategy. We have to think about how to make a strategy where logic, to create a new innovation.

Atsushi Osanai: Many Japanese depends on the technology itself, so we are good at creating technology. The technology is not just the products. A customer never purchase the technology itself. They purchase the product or services, but in 20th century, technological improvement is equal with the product values improvement.

Atsushi Osanai: Nowadays, it is not so simple what’s…We have to think about a more complex and difficult relationship between the technology or ICT and number of services, products, or something output to improve the society.

Atsushi Osanai: We have to think about just changing the business to software or services. We have the other chance to, success in the product business or manufacturing business, but we need the other answer to solve the problem without utilizing just technology.

Atsushi Osanai: Let our question, or just starting point as the Japanese.

Audrey Tang: I will just check my understanding. You just said that everybody sees that what used to take a hardware to make or an appliance to make can now be what we call software-defined. That is an industry-wide change, by changing from a product model to a software model.

Audrey Tang: Your idea is that this, which is usually called digital transformation, is not just a simple transformation from selling product to selling services. In your idea, the strategy or the design should also incorporate the common good, because service is relationship. Product is about transactions.

Audrey Tang: How to build a relationship that sees the customers not as consumers, but as partners in the common good, is something that is opened up by the possibility of a service-based economy. However, this maximizes the public value, while this still optimizing the shareholder value.

Audrey Tang: Those two values may sometimes conflict, and that creates attention that did not exist in the previous product-based era. Is that understanding correct?

Atsushi Osanai: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Anyone would like to add something?

Atsushi Osanai: Please…

Audrey Tang: Feel free to speak in Japanese, and she will translate.

Male Participant: I am in charge of developing the product for the hardware. My interest is, yes, the software is important, but hardware is also important enough. Software is easy to change, so it became business easier. My interest is the mix of hardware and the software, is important. How should we adapt to the business?

Audrey Tang: Excellent point. Anyone else?

Male Participant: Our services has got to make it to business sometimes. We didn’t make that situation where it’s easy, but to make that practical, that situation, is sometimes difficult.

Audrey Tang: Service is something that everybody wants a little bit differently, so it scales deeply, but not widely. Hardware is easy to scale widely, but maybe not that easy to scale deeply. These two much complement each other and mix, instead of just using one to dominate the other.

Audrey Tang: This, I totally agree. Thank you for the point. Anyone else?

Tomoyuki Ashizawa: He want to say that it’s easy to understand the value of the products for customers, users, but sometimes, in new services, it’s very difficult to understand the core values, service. I think it’s more important to communicate with customers in many ways. I don’t how to how to…

Tomoyuki Ashizawa: I think that’s sometimes a weak point of Japanese companies. We have to find a new way to communicate to customers.

Audrey Tang: The value to the people participating in the service. That’s great. Anyone else, before?

Male Participant: I think it is very difficult for me to keeping balance between economy and the society. I work for a NPO, and I think our marketing is very difficult. It’s very good, but I think Taiwan’s company, more are caring about society.

Audrey Tang: You think that, if the company or the management of that organization concentrates on profitability, sometime, the social values suffer. Maybe you can promise not to hurt the society, but that is the maximum [laughs] one can do if you are focused only on profit-making.

Audrey Tang: The other way around, too, so it seems like a zero-sum or a tradeoff that one need to make. It’s a tradeoff relationship. This is also an excellent observation. Indeed, many Taiwan people split the organizations into profit organizations, companies, and nonprofit organizations or charities, NPOs.

Audrey Tang: They know nothing about cooperates, [laughs] which is sometime in between. How to make this in between not something that is forced to go one way or the other is our main challenge here as well. Thank you raising this point. Anyone else?

Audrey Tang: Maybe we do this round, and feel free to start thinking next round.

Atsushi Osanai: It’s a very Japanese way that at first they are very polite in the discussion.

Atsushi Osanai: Then we start to start talking.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, also. Everybody start raising hand in the last five minute.

Audrey Tang: Never in the first five minutes.

Audrey Tang: Let me begin by saying that the Sustainable Development Goals, which is the 17 goals listed here, is our common vocabulary.

Audrey Tang: Even though this is in kanji, but even if I’m speaking in Europe, in South America, or whatever, I don’t have to translate this slide, because everyone understand the 17 icons and what they mean. The great thing about digital transformation is something like the Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: By inventing an index that joins peoples’ ideas together, even when people don’t know each other before, before the Internet, people can only cooperate, meaning I know you first, and you know her, and then we start working on something.

Audrey Tang: We must have, in our mind, an image of the other people we are working with. In the digital transformation era, we can collaborate. Meaning I don’t know you, and you don’t know her, but we use the same hashtag.

Audrey Tang: We can say hashtag, I don’t know, MeToo, or #ClimateStrike. With the raise of the SNS, the social networking services, sometimes, people first see the hashtag, and then they start working together, before they meet.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes, they never meet, but they still use crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, reach great things together. That is how the common good can make itself seen in the digital era. Before, the common good can only be seen among people who already know each other somewhat.

Audrey Tang: Now, the common good can be manifested just by looking at trending hashtag on SNS. This is a fundamentally different landscape, compared to pre-social media era. When I’m making introduction of myself to the United Nations during UNGA and so on, I just say, “I’m the digital minister in charge of social innovation.”

Audrey Tang: Digital Minister means 17.18, making sure that everybody’s data is trusted by everybody else, using distributed ledger and other technologies. It means 17.17, by making sure that we all have in our mind the same objective fact.

Audrey Tang: We can discover the common problems and start working together, finally, 17.6. When we invented someone, we can share with anyone for them to change it in the way that fit their society, instead of colonizing them, by forcing their society to change to our technology.

Audrey Tang: This theory of change is not invented by myself. Indeed, it’s not invented by anyone, not even Jeffrey Sachs. What they have done is to ask a million people around the world, “What do you want to see in the year 2030?”

Audrey Tang: Then the million voices became the 169 targets. That then gets sorted to the 17 goals. The greater thing about this participatory design is that, whichever goal you are working on in the 169, it only help the other 168.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t hurt the other 168, which is why I always begin my slides with this one. All the controversial issues, everything that is zero-sum, is taken out during the SDG process. What is left is only things that are complementary to each other.

Audrey Tang: This is the first answer to the idea of digital transformation. It first let people realize their common values by making it very cheap to share facts together. That is the answer to this part. Now, this one is very, very interesting.

Audrey Tang: This says, “OK, now, we have the same facts, but still, we can see each other in this relationship.” We have the same fact. This is a rope. If you want to increase the economy, the GDP, maybe sometime, the environment sustainability suffers.

Audrey Tang: If you want to preserve environment, sometime, the GDP decreases. This is a typical relationship. If we talk about innovation, sometimes, innovation in the industry are disruptive, meaning that it change the way the society works for greater efficiency.

Audrey Tang: These are called disruptive innovation. On the other hand, the social innovators care about social justice, meaning that people must live up to their opportunity, regardless of when and where they are born.

Audrey Tang: Sometime, these two kind of innovation, the industrial disruption and the social equality, also are in the same relationship of having to make tradeoffs. This shape is usually answered in the traditional 20th century public administration theory by the government.

Audrey Tang: The government has different ministries. Ministry of Economy take care of the economical interest. The Ministry of Environment takes care of the environment interest. The Ministry of Science and Technology take care of the destructive innovations, and the Ministry of Interior takes care about the equality and justice.

Audrey Tang: The career public service, including the think tanks and everybody else in the government, the public sector, are invisible. They are hidden. Nobody see them. Everybody only see the ministers, but internally, we are doing this tug-of-war.

Audrey Tang: Finally, after the ministers or the member of the parliament organize the stakeholders together, the career public service fight internally, but nobody knows about it. Then we set an arbitration, meaning that maybe we tax a carbon tax or something like that, to make sure that it is fairly distributed between the two interests.

Audrey Tang: This is classical last-century public administration theory. Unfortunately, the theory doesn’t work now, mostly because of hashtags. #MeToo, #ClimateStrike, or Blockchain, SelfDrivingVehicles, all have no corresponding ministers.

Audrey Tang: Even if we have a minister for every emerging technology, it would not work, because people would not report to the minister. The minister is not working as an organizer anymore. People can organize perfectly on Facebook, on Twitter, on the SNS.

Audrey Tang: They don’t need a minister or a member of the parliament to organize themselves. If we insist on this model, we will become irrelevant, meaning that we will be seen as too far from the people. People are already organizing perfectly well using the collaboration model among themselves already.

Audrey Tang: Right now, we are seeing in Hong Kong, they are singing “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord.” That is their hashtag [laughs] today, and they are organizing on the street using just that hashtag. They don’t need any leader to organize.

Audrey Tang: We must change our way of governance. To answer that question directly, instead of asking what is the organizers and who sets the arbitration, which is impossible to answer now, we ask a different set of questions.

Audrey Tang: We ask, people have different positions, but do they have common values? If we discover the common values, can we innovate to deliver those values, without leaving anybody behind? It is the two-phase question.

Audrey Tang: The first is to find how might we do something that’s important to all of us? In design thinking, this is called HMW, how might we identify our common values? The second is are there any solutions, any ideas, any innovation that can answer about this common value?

Audrey Tang: This, in design thinking, is the second diamond, called development and delivery. This is our new governance model that we’re cultivating here in the Social Innovation Lab. The United Nations has a name for it.

Audrey Tang: It’s called Co Gov. They just write Co Gov, with no dash in it. I am old-fashioned, so I’m still writing a dash. It’s like email. Everybody start writing dash email, but nowadays, we just take the dash out. [laughs] This is called Co Gov.

Audrey Tang: Co Gov means collaborative governance, and it means identifying values before starting to fight. It means identifying solutions that take care of most people’s feelings. I will use one example before returning to your questions.

Audrey Tang: Here is my office. You saw me in my office. That’s downstairs. Everybody can meet me for 40 minutes every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to the night. They can book my time very easily. There is a booking system automatically, so that if you really want to meet me, you can just find a time slot that I have, and you can know who else is meeting me, as well.

Audrey Tang: If you want to meet me, but you don’t have time to make a reservation, you can just show up from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM. That doesn’t need reservation, but sometime, you have to stand in that line to queue a little bit.

Audrey Tang: This is like a self-service system to participate in the social innovation. The only condition that I impose is that I will put recorder here. After 10 days, we will publish everything online for everybody else to see.

Audrey Tang: You can see, after becoming the digital ministers, I have talked with 4,000 people over almost 1,000 meetings, speaking 200,000 sentences. Each of them is not just a summary, but rather something that is entirely quotable.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, the important thing here is that each and every sentence has its own web address. Using this web address, we can share and create hashtags. In this sense, we are as close to the social movement as we are close to the government.

Audrey Tang: I’m on the link, this point, the Lagrange point, between the social movement on one side and the private sector interests on the other side, also, connecting them to the government and to the ecological community.

Audrey Tang: Radical transparency is the first step to build common values, because if we don’t have that, people who come to my office hour will only talk about their own interest. Given radical transparency, they must find something of common interest. Otherwise, it looks very bad to them.

Audrey Tang: They [laughs] have to at least think about the common values when they are meeting me. If their ideas warrant an experimentation, like there were people meeting me saying, “I have those self-driving cars, and I want to drive it here in the Social Innovation Lab. I want Minister Audrey Tang to sit on it to prove to everybody that it is safe.”

Audrey Tang: I’m like, [laughs] “How can I vouch something that is safe?” They are like, “No, these are tricycles. Those are very slow. They are slower than one person running. It’s perfectly safe. If it runs into a wall, nobody gets hurt.” It’s very slow. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What this does is that, when it is running around in the Social Innovation Lab here, they run three hackathons, meaning participatory design sessions, so we can form a norm. Meaning what people expect from this self-driving technology, before we make any law about it.

Audrey Tang: This is another difference. This is about the implementation and delivery part. Previously, the lawmakers have to make a law about things we don’t have any first-time experience. Now, it allows people to have one year of firsthand experience before we think about laws and regulations.

Audrey Tang: People were really trying these out, because they are open hardware and open source. People can change it however they want. Some of them want it to be a shopping cart that follows the shoppers around, so you can put flowers in it.

Audrey Tang: To do this, they must have two eyes that can track, can blink, and can read people’s expressions, so they added those components in. All of this means that it is now used outside of the product designer’s vision.

Audrey Tang: The people who originally put this together in Boston, in MIT Media Lab, never thought that they will be used in this particular way in Taiwan. The community, because they contributed in the design, accept that it is part of the society.

Audrey Tang: This is how we avoid the common tradeoff, as the question asked, between the social values and the industrial values. It’s as simple as making the common good itself be the brainstorming and value-setting, agenda-setting process.

Audrey Tang: Asking the innovators to fulfill the delivery and implementation process, these two, taken together, forms the complete design thinking double diamond that is unified by common values, which is that “how might we” question here. That is my answer to this tug-of-war or this zero-sum thinking.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the question about how do we identify the value communication when we’re developing a service? With product, the capability, and the affordance of the product is its own value communication.

Audrey Tang: If something that makes me see better, I’m convinced that it makes me see better. [laughs] It needs no explanation. For services such as, as I just mentioned, a self-driving vehicle that helps you to shop around in the open farmers market, or a drone that helps you to deliver goods to your home, people don’t care about the drone or the vehicle.

Audrey Tang: People care about having the goods arrive on-time, that the pizza doesn’t get flipped over, [laughs] and the flowers don’t destroyed by this self-moving shopping cart. In a word, they care about their life, not any particular technology that implement these life goals.

Audrey Tang: To communicate this value to the people, usually, we use a way here. I will share our newest…Do you know the National Palace Museum, 故宮博物院?

Atsushi Osanai: Yes.

Audrey Tang: It is one of the largest museums in Taiwan. Also…

Audrey Tang: OK. Also, kind of importantly, it is also a member of the cabinet. This is something that you don’t find in other countries. In cabinet, we have 31 ministries, councils, and a central bank, just like in every other country.

Audrey Tang: The National Palace Museum here, Dr. Wu Mi-cha heading the museum, the main curator, the chief curator, is also a member of our cabinet meeting. It’s an historical curiosity, because it used to be that the National Palace Museum’s head curator represent the Qing Dynasty.

Audrey Tang: This is very long ago. I was not born at the time.

Female Participant: We, too.

Audrey Tang: None of us were around in 1911, but that was promised to the Qing Dynasty, that their interest will be carried over to the ROC government. They are part of the cabinet.

Audrey Tang: Now, because I am the digital minister, and I don’t have a ministry, my team is literally one person from each ministry. Everybody can send one person to my office from each ministry. Here are 32 ministries, and they join my office totally autonomously.

Audrey Tang: They scored themselves. They find project themselves. All I am asking is that they must work out loud, meaning they must make everybody in the world understand the work they are doing. It’s a cross-functional team, a horizontal leadership.

Audrey Tang: Theoretically, I can have 32 colleagues, but in reality, I have 22 colleagues. You know some ministries never send anyone to my office. For example, the Ministry of Defense never send anyone. The military general never send anyone, or the Ministry of Continental China Affairs never send anyone.

Audrey Tang: Maybe they are not ready for radical transparency, but [laughs] all the people-facing ministries, such as the Ministries of Interior, of Culture, of Education, Communication, all these have sent people to my office.

Audrey Tang: This is the people-facing office. When the National Palace Museum has a new head, a new chief curator, he said, “The National Palace Museum, our problem is not that we are not good enough, or our museum is not rich enough, or we are not attractive enough. The main problem is that we’re not user-friendly enough, that people run into a loss of issues when you are visiting.”

Audrey Tang: Maybe you have stood in the queue before. Maybe you used a kiosk, only at the last moment, have it reject your credit card. Maybe you find something that say you can book online, but your are a Taiwanese citizen, so you cannot actually book online. That’s just for foreign people.

Audrey Tang: They have a lot of problems communicating their value to the constituents, especially to the local population. Our international friends have no problem understanding the value of the NPM, but Taiwanese citizens have a lot of problem understanding the value of the NPM.

Audrey Tang: In one word, our work is simply to work with them, not for them. To visit ourselves the National Palace Museum, to interview everybody who attended their tours. Then we invite the public sector, the citizen, the tourists, and also the tourism agencies to the same table.

Audrey Tang: Then we share what it is wrong with our experience together. Then we can make prototype. The way we do is that we first make a handbook that outlines everybody’s challenge statements. Then all the interviews are absorbed into a mind map that puts context.

Audrey Tang: Finally, for people who don’t want to write – some people think in graphics, in drawing – we also ask them to draw their ideal way of interaction directly on the idea development sheet. Because of this, all the brainstorming takes place in a way that actually become genuinely innovative.

Audrey Tang: It is not the old way of innovation, of communicating the value in a top-down fashion, where the citizen may see that there is value, but they don’t understand, or they don’t trust that there is value. Rather, these new innovations are genuinely proposed by the citizens and verified as working, as a consensus by the travel agency and the public service.

Audrey Tang: I will just use one example. Many people, especially young people, want to use their phone to get a QR code, or if they’re younger, their watch to use a QR code. They just beep, and then they enter the NPM. The elderly people resist this for a very long time.

Audrey Tang: For them, a trip to the National Palace Museum is something they can share with their family. Even after they return, they can share that paper ticket to the family. That becomes something they talk about at the dinner table.

Audrey Tang: If you force them to use a QR code, all they have is a QR code. Every QR code look the same. They don’t have any social object to share with their grandchildren anymore. This is important the elderly. Because of this, it’s not important for us to say what is important or not.

Audrey Tang: It’s important for the elderly to say what is important to them. The innovation, very simply put, is that if you go to Family Mart or 7-Eleven, nowadays, you can pay with QR code or NFC very easily, or the easy card.

Audrey Tang: After that, they will give you a small sheet of paper that is like a fax machine paper that is the receipt of your purchase. It is very ugly, and it’s very cheap. Finally, their innovation is that we make the receipt very beautiful, as beautiful as the ticket itself.

Audrey Tang: It is more dynamic, because you can scan it and enter a multimedia experience. The elderly, after they beep with the QR code, they get the receipt that they can share with their family. Their family, if they scan the QR code on there, can also enter a multimedia experience.

Audrey Tang: The elderly says, “This is of tremendous value to us.” This is not for the NPM to decide, but rather, the young and the elderly sit together with the vendors and the travel agency. Everybody agree, “This is a great idea, and this is how we communicate the value.”

Atsushi Osanai: I could expand on my first question. Two months ago, I listened to a presentation of yours. Just a question about the digital department, there are people. How to maintain them? This is the answer.

Atsushi Osanai: I agree that younger people is good at IT technology, IT technology friendly people. Elderly persons may be not be able to utilize such kind of new technologies. To make that system or something to share how to utilize the new technology while keeping inclusivity, using the ticket with the QR code.

Audrey Tang: QR code, yes. This is exactly the one. The elderly visitor says, “If you can give me a QR code receipt as beautiful as this, but also, with the QR code that my grandchildren can scan,” then this is like “Pokémon Go,” right?

Audrey Tang: This is like, “I can share my physical experience, and they can share their virtual experience.” Just like Pokémon Go, you can unite generations, rather than divide them apart.

Atsushi Osanai: I had the other, but similar, question. I think that there is two kind of people. One is very active, so people for society who are early adopters. For example, 20 years ago, I was in charge of TV product in Sony.

Atsushi Osanai: What kind of customer knows what they want to watch on TV? They can search the, just the TV program they want to watch, for example, Netflix. They can choose the very contents they want to watch.

Atsushi Osanai: The other type of customer is a passive customer, just flipping through TV channels, they want to watch something, but they don’t know what is the something. Such kind of a customer cannot look for that correct information, correct knowledge.

Atsushi Osanai: They cannot reach. For example, you showed that record of your discussions. If those kind of active person look for the discussion they want to know…

Audrey Tang: Then find my time and meet me.

Atsushi Osanai: I think the passive people, but they are also the member of society.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Atsushi Osanai: If there is many information, for that passive people, the important information must be hidden in the so many, many information. How do you think about for the passive people to find out the correct information from that huge…?

Audrey Tang: Great question. The question, as I understand it, it’s not about elderly or young people, because there are active elderly people and active young people, passive elderly people and passive young people.

Audrey Tang: It’s about people who are seeking out information and the people who consume whatever information is coming to them. It’s about information consumption patterns. Your question is, we have this great collaborative governance architecture, but how do we make it relevant to the people who are passive, and therefore cannot consume that much information in a structured way?

Audrey Tang: They must see it in a linear way, like swiping the phone, watching the Facebook or line feed, or using TV channels to watch TV series, right? That’s the question. That’s a great question. Any follow-up questions?

Takashi Tanaka: It was very impressed with the example of The National Palace Museum . My question is, during the improvement process, do you disclose what’s there are doing to get the feedback from the public?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Male Participant: Otherwise, when you finish, some people will say, “Why did you do this?” or something like that.

Audrey Tang: Right, yes. We publish everything from the drafting stage to the RFPs. Even after that, the budgets. If you’re interested in the how, like how are we make the full-lifecycle transparent, I can answer that in a few minutes. Any other questions?

Male Participant: Maybe this is a completely spin-off, but what was the purpose of introducing a QR code to get into the museum, anyway?

Audrey Tang: What is the purpose of using a QR code to get into the museum? What problem it solves? It solves the problem of a long queue. For the elderly people, if they stand there for more than 15 minute, they become very uncomfortable. That is the social problem we’re solving.

Audrey Tang: Using paper ticket, you have to have somebody check the ticket. You have to just split it and hand part of it back, or something like that. That process by itself takes maybe 20 seconds. Using a QR code, you can shorten to drastically, maybe two second.

Audrey Tang: That is why the high-speed rails use QR code. It’s the same motivation, to not make the elderly wait too long.

Atsushi Osanai: To make something simple.

Audrey Tang: It’s a comfortness value. For young people, especially young people swiping their phone, even standing in the queue for half an hour, it doesn’t really matter. They are chatting with their friend, anyway. [laughs] For the elderly, it’s uncomfortable.

Male Participant: I can easily see someone saying, “If we were still issuing the paper-based receipt, then you guys are still paper-based, so it’s not real digital transformation.” I can easily see someone say, “Let’s just drop all the paper stuff.”

Audrey Tang: That’s after you enter it already. There’s a lot of room. You can collect your receipt anytime. It doesn’t hurt the queuing process. This is not about digital transformation for its own sake. It is about identifying a social issue and solving it.

Male Participant: That’s nice.

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to get a paper receipt.

Atsushi Osanai: Everyone say, especially I don’t like so long queues, that is very good. But sometimes, I am afraid of too much polarity, in some way. For example, now in Japan, we have conflict with the Korean Government. I watched many news on the smartphone.

Atsushi Osanai: There is many extreme articles. One is right hand and left hand. Our society is more complex, not so simple. We have to think about the detail, the complexity, but Asian society, everyone think society is simple architecture.

Atsushi Osanai: This misunderstanding is so clear to, so miscommunication between human or human, where country and country is something.

Atsushi Osanai: We are, in our university, we discuss about the two kind of knowledge. One is the passive knowledge. The other is expressive knowledge. The expressive knowledge is easy to communicate on the IPA technology, because it is easy to translate to the data, the quantity, or tickets, or something.

Atsushi Osanai: I think the other question mentioned that this is knowledge is very important to understand each other, especially between the different culture or different societies. How to maintain? We call the sickness or divisiveness as you mentioned.

Atsushi Osanai: For example, I live in Tokyo. There are sometimes news about Taiwan. I know that some kind of passive information of Taiwan. Taiwan, it is just a Taiwan-like activity or Taiwan-like thinking way. Now I can understand such kind of passive knowledge, because I’m here.

Atsushi Osanai: Only reading the news or quantitative data, they misunderstand too, completely misunderstanding Taiwan, only in Tokyo. I think it is not a deep knowledge about Taiwan.

Atsushi Osanai: In this case, how to make, to share, or to understand that kind of passive knowledge? I don’t know if the social media sharing can only work with explicit knowledge. This is my opinion. Passive knowledge is needed to share, to utilize that, on so much issues.

Atsushi Osanai: For example, we have video conference between Japan and the US. My department, when I was in an international team, my departments had video conference system. That big department of developing the video conference system, but we discuss by video conference, Tokyo and the US.

Atsushi Osanai: We cannot make consensus via video conference. The actors and the finance solution is just troubling to US. Meeting is maybe important, I think.

Audrey Tang: OK.

Atsushi Osanai: Probably this is another topic, too. This could be related to also there is an earlier comment and a question about how to connect the people passive and the people active. One debate in Japan is about introducing self-service register at stores.

Atsushi Osanai: I think the purpose of introducing the system, anyway, is the cost effective for the store. Maybe for the customer, it’s faster. I know there’s elderly people, say self-service register lacks humane touch. It doesn’t give them satisfaction.

Atsushi Osanai: While the younger people, who is supporting the idea is, “Oh, you elderly people are just too old. Just get used to it.” I don’t see the two sides of the argument is coming together. I don’t think, no one has a good answer and way to connect the two people.

Atsushi Osanai: If you are in Japan, like if you see the…Let’s suppose you see a similar issue in Taiwan, then how do you deal with this to make everyone happy?

Audrey Tang: To make everyone happy? OK.

Audrey Tang: Which is…

Male Participant: …a similar approach to National Palace Museum.

Audrey Tang: Everybody happy, OK. This is a very good way to say the democratic principle. I like that.

Audrey Tang: Anyone else?

Takashi Tanaka: I have a similar question. How do you prioritize the problem to be solved? You cannot solve everything at one time. For some people, that’s important, but for the other people, that’s not. If you have a lot of issues, then how do you prioritize?

Audrey Tang: It’s not just about prioritization, but also framing, how to make it seem relevant to people?

Male Participant: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Prioritize and relevance. Of agenda-setting. Again, using the 17 global goals as the frame work.

Male Participant: You are talking some IT initiatives.

Male Participant: I’m talking about some inventions in IT…

Male Participant: …I think. [laughs] I know that the digital and the analog is a different way, but sometimes, we can prepare both. I think the ticket is very interesting, because the data is printed on paper, and it is one of the mix. Sometimes, it’s used for just easy way, but it became memories.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Male Participant: I am developing that printing machine.

Male Participant: I developed gold-silver toner. It print decorative art. It will be, sometimes, so many gold used for that museum, like…

Audrey Tang: I see that. Nice!

Male Participant: It’s the way you use gold or silver.

Audrey Tang: The same innovation also applies to 3D printing. In 3D printing, you can even hold and feel it in your hand. It amplified the memory part of it. I totally agree that 3D printing and scanning, as well as 2D printing and scanning, is a key to solve the digital-analog transition. I totally agree.

Male Participant: This is my gold toner.

Audrey Tang: Yes. This is very much in the style of National Palace Museum.

Audrey Tang: This is great.

Atsushi Osanai: Every time you use…

Audrey Tang: It’s a perfect fit for that museum.

Atsushi Osanai: He said gold is not color. You can make yellow from the red and green, but gold is not a color of yellow. Correctly, gold and silver is not color.

Male Participant: We make the color by yellows, cyan, and other components.

Audrey Tang: I understand that, which is why I referred to the 3D printing method that cuts silver, that cuts the…Use light to make it melt away, so you end up with jewelry. That’s the same idea.

Male Participant: We can’t expect gold, that same color.

Atsushi Osanai: Excuse me.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a different gamut.

Atsushi Osanai: May I have one more Japanese visitor?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Male Participant: Thank you so much. Tell her thank you.

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Male Participant: Thank you. She is on the first floor.

Audrey Tang: All right. Maybe let’s tackle these questions.

Female Participant: Thank you for letting me join this conversation.

Audrey Tang: It’s OK. I have another chair. Let’s begin with the transparency. That’s SDG 16, social justice. Social justice and public benefit is very difficult to define. In the public administration, there are at least three theories. They’re always continuously operating in the public sector.

Audrey Tang: One is about utility, that utilitarian philosophy. “We must make the max amount of people feel better about their lives.” Another is about justice, is about distribution, and making sure that equal opportunity is preserved.

Audrey Tang: Finally, it’s about the democratic will, which is impossible to define, because it represents a collective preference of the society. I just heart a very good definition, which is, “A decision that makes everybody happy.” [laughs] That is a good footnote to the democratic principle.

Audrey Tang: These three are always at odds with each other. It’s not possible to maximally satisfy any design problem that simultaneously take care with three. You have to make compromise, because philosophically, this means that people’s values are not co-measurable.

Audrey Tang: You cannot trade part of your value for part of my value. Everybody have a different way of understanding the world. Instead of saying, “We keep everybody happy,” which is not possible, other than, I don’t know, maybe drugs.

Audrey Tang: That’s not where Taiwan is going. We say, “Can everybody live with it?” It’s a relaxed.

Male Participant: Is that same as making some compromise?

Audrey Tang: No, this is called, in Co Gov, there’s a name for it. It is called rough consensus. Unlike a compromise, which is something that I agree I must be unhappy in some way to exchange for being happy in some other way, a rough consensus is something that makes me OK, lukewarm.

Audrey Tang: Like, “OK, I can live with it,” and everybody is like, “Yeah, OK. I can live with that, too. It’s not perfect. I can live with it.” This is not about trading your preference with mine. This is about having something that we can all live with.

Audrey Tang: That becomes our common understanding. In Taiwan, we call this 共識, literally, common understanding, or even common sense. That’s another translation. This is different from the English word consensus.

Audrey Tang: Consensus is something that makes everybody happy. Consensus is something you can sign your name on it. If five people reach consensus, that means those five people can each sign their name on it. It’s become a social contract between those five people.

Audrey Tang: That’s impossible for if you have five million people. [laughs] Instead of saying consensus, meaning fine consensus, we’re just reaching rough consensus, meaning we can more or less live with it. That’s much easier to achieve.

Audrey Tang: 共識 is, I think, one of the key terms in Taiwanese politics. It means something that I can live with. I will not kill myself seeing this happen, but I am not neccessarily happy with it. I am just OK with it. This is very important.

Audrey Tang: Politically speaking, how to make a common understanding? We must make the commonalities seen by people. This is a platform called join.g0v.tw, join-government-Taiwan. It has the National Auditing Office, most of the municipalities and some cities, and also, our central administration, each operating a different part of this platform.

Audrey Tang: In this platform in the administration, which I take care of, is three functions. First, it is that e-petition. Anyone can raise any idea. If you get 5,000 signature, we must come and meet you and explain how your idea become public policy.

Audrey Tang: That’s the first one. At this time, there’s more than 100 ideas being proposed and collecting signature. The second one is public consultation. Petition is something initiated by people, but once we agree to make it a policy, we must now talk with people who did not participate in the petition, the passive people.

Audrey Tang: The petitions are always by active people. They care about something very strongly, so they organize 5,000 people. There’s far more people who are passive. They only understand when it’s about to happen.

Audrey Tang: Anything that’s about to happen, any regulation – no exceptions – is published here for two months, for 60 days, and for everybody to debate in public, before we make it a regulation. That’s the debate part.

Audrey Tang: Finally, once it’s passed, we must make a budget for it. We must every quarter report how we are implementing it. This is called supervise. As you can see, 100 ideas may become 200 policies. 200 policies may become 2,000 government projects and contracts.

Audrey Tang: This is a normal way of working in the government, but what makes sense to people is that they can see exactly the part they care about, exactly the ministry they care about, the hashtag or the keyword that they care about.

Audrey Tang: At any given time, we can see the people most care about long-term healthcare. Now, sanitation and clean water, social housing, and so on, all of this has the same structure. If you click into it, you can see every month their report.

Audrey Tang: We do this not because petition, because it’s the president’s promise for this particular one. [laughs] It’s her campaign policy, and there are five endpoint values we’re going to make. In the last quarter, we have done these things.

Audrey Tang: We’ve spent this amount of taxpayer money, and they get a certain amount of KPI, and so on. Everybody can publicly comment on how they feel about this quarter’s execution. The Ministry of Health and Welfare can reply saying…

Audrey Tang: This was their first response. That was in 2017. “For the fourth quarter, we received these questions, we made these changes, and we would like to clarify it to you.” For the next quarter, there’s many people says that it takes too long for long-term healthcare point to receive the reimbursement from the government, so now we have changed the rules, that now you can get your payment much earlier than before.” and so on.

Audrey Tang: This is entirely driven by people’s questions, fears, uncertainties, and doubt, but the public servant don’t have to answer them one by one. Previously, when they get a telephone call or an email, everybody have the same question, but nobody know that there’s already 500 people asking the same question before.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for your questions.