Chi Nguyen: Would you like to say your background and your title?

Audrey Tang: My background is very transparent.

Audrey Tang: I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister. I’ve been holding this position for almost two years now, one year and a half.

Chi Nguyen: How did you get into this position? What inspired you to get into this position?

Audrey Tang: I was an understudy for the previous Cyberspace Minister; I’ve been engaged in the public service since late 2014.

Audrey Tang: We did that because we occupied the parliament for 22 days. That’s called the Sunflower Revolution. We did that because the parliament at the time refuses to deliberate a trade-service agreement. We occupied the parliament to demonstrate in a demo-scene kind of way, to demo how to deliberate on all aspects of this agreement.

Audrey Tang: We are aligned with half a million people on the street and many more online. It’s a demonstration of what we call scalable listening technologies. People can see that technology’s not just for broadcasting but actually to listen and to come to rough consensus and come up with things that we can live with .

Audrey Tang: The magical thing is that after 22 days, the head of the parliament actually saw the consensus reached, including calling up a national convention, and agreed on that. It is a triumph of direct democracy.

Audrey Tang: Then all the occupy sympathizers and occupiers themselves won the city level election the end of that year. The central government faced a legitimacy crisis. There was a new premier, and with help of his deputy premier who was a Google director of engineering, they enlisted the civil technology people to come to the cabinet as understudies to solve issues like Uber regulation, and discuss AI, blockchain, and everything together using the same technique we did during the occupy.

Chi Nguyen: That’s interesting. Then now, what is your biggest challenge?

Audrey Tang: Basically, we’re saying in Taiwan as well as many democratic countries the force of the social good and the force of capitalism, the forefront of business, are like this. The public sector we must not break because the society need to still have the empathy to reach out to these positions. All the tension is concentrated in our work. The public sector is like this rope in the middle.

Chi Nguyen: We’re very familiar with that.

Audrey Tang: Really? Have you worked in public service?

Chi Nguyen: Major League Hacking a B corporation. MLH has been a community first, mission driven organization from the beginning. We measure our success by the number of hackers we empower, and we want to keep it that way. That’s why we made it official and became a Certified B Corporation in 2016. B Corps are for-profit enterprises that are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their community, not just their shareholders.

Audrey Tang: What’s your social mission, then?

Chi Nguyen: Empower more hackers, MLH is an engaged and passionate maker community, consisting of the next generation of technology leaders and entrepreneurs. We are constantly figuring out new platforms, resources, tools to enable this community to grow.

Audrey Tang: Wow.

Chi Nguyen: Our mission is to empower all hackers.

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome!

Chi Nguyen: [laughs] It’s very simple.

Audrey Tang: Empower the people that empowers. It’s recursive.

Chi Nguyen: Exactly. We have five main missions we provide.

Chi Nguyen: #1 - We provide the setting so that people can continue to empower more hackers. We empower hackers.

Chi Nguyen: #2 - We also learn, build, share. Anything that we build is very much open source. We encourage the community to put out the resources that they learn in order to build even bigger communities.

Chi Nguyen: #3 - What else do we do? We also take out the trash. You’ll see us randomly picking up trash at events to making sure organizers just have a good support system to believe they can do this! We don’t step away from anything.

Chi Nguyen: #4 - MLH Provides. We leverage our resources and put it out there for anyone to access and take it to the next level. Just like today at VHacks.

Chi Nguyen: #5 - Standard of Excellence. We take pride in the quality of the events we work with. Any official MLH event will be upheld to a high standard of excellence and we will work with these organizers to make sure that happens!

Chi Nguyen: At the end of the day, we’re really trying to empower just the growth of technology and the talent to meet up with the technology. That’s really what we try to do.

Audrey Tang: We’re in the same business as you will very quickly find out, because I’m also the minister in charge of social enterprise and social innovation. Taiwan has this huge growing social enterprise sector with B movement as part of it. We have a publicly listed bank that’s a B corp.

Chi Nguyen: Wow. That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: The whole bank and also law firms. It’s not just the mission-driven companies themselves but the supporting ecosystem are also themselves mission-driven. That creates a mission-driven value chain.

Audrey Tang: The idea is really is just to get people who care for social good and people who care for business profits to see that if you have the right mission, you can combine those two forces just while you work instead of like this.

Chi Nguyen: For sure. It’s a constant pull.

Audrey Tang: Right. This is where social innovation happens because whereas it was scarcity, it was zero sum game, they will live like this. If innovation happens, it could look like this.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there’s ideas of all the various co-ops, charities, companies part of social enterprise. We’re seeing a lot of merging of design companies. Also, different people providing service design and fair trade and all sort of civic tech companies now are merging together with charities and co-ops in a new, more nuanced social enterprise mission.

Chi Nguyen: Is this all internally in Taiwan or are you branching out to other countries?

Audrey Tang: We’re connected to the AVPN which the Asia Venture Network. We’re also working our own national advisory board for impact investment because there’s very similar things that’s happening all around Asia.

Audrey Tang: I think the main challenge as you mentioned...There was this survey we did just a year ago that says when we talk to people whether you think the tech or other process innovations enable people to use business model for social good. Do you think it’s a good thing? Would you invest in it? Would you selectively, preferentially purchase it? Almost four people out of five said yes.

Audrey Tang: When we said, "Can you name one such mission? Can you name one such brand? Can you name one such company?" they’re like, "Nah, not really." That’s our main challenge is just 19 percent of people have engaged with a social enterprise or a mission-driven company before.

Chi Nguyen: That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: That’s the main thing we need to solve. We do this with social innovation labs. Every Wednesday, I work 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM as my office hours, as mentors to these people. We hold hackathons actually every evening.

Chi Nguyen: The hackathons consist of professionals or students?

Audrey Tang: Both. We don’t discriminate. The main idea is just to work in the open.

Audrey Tang: Even in the administration, for all the meetings that I chair, I make a completely public record just like in the Parliament, in the court system. It’s idea of structured data for everyone to analyze. By working in the open, people gradually learn how public service works. Then they can work with it.

Chi Nguyen: It’s the sharing of information.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, it’s just shouting at a distance. That’s just demystifying the public service is the main work. The other thing that we’re doing is this idea of a sandbox. Have you heard of this before?

Chi Nguyen: No.

Audrey Tang: The UK has been pioneer with the fintech sandbox where anyone can file an idea that’s currently illegal. They say, "We want to break regulations for the next 6 months or 12 months." Hence the fiscal, the Ministry of Finance would review it and try it out with a limited scale, limited number of people. The society embrace this as a good idea.

Audrey Tang: If the regulation need to change, so it will change. If it’s a bad idea, at least it doesn’t really affect the whole country. It’s like a sandbox in the software sense.

Audrey Tang: Now we’re doing this in the general-purpose way, not just for fintech which has just passed but also for self-driving vehicles like drones and automated Bose and things like that which really need to develop with the local community before scaling to the whole nation. We’re doing the same handholding, co-creation, thing also. Next will be AI and the other technologies.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that for anyone who has the idea that could potentially combine those different social, environmental, and governance forces, we give them a sandbox to try. If it works pretty well, then we help them to...This is...

Chi Nguyen: To connect with each other.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, people with really, really cheap PM 2.5 air pollution sensors. Then it’s just citizen science. It’s spreading.

Audrey Tang: What we’re doing is essentially nurturing them until they prove their value proposition. Then we help them to go through either SAP, or as a co-op, or it’s charities or a combination of the three structures. The main challenge is to get people to know these branding more and to tell more stories.

Chi Nguyen: Based on some of the teams that you’ve met with, what is your takeaway from this? Also, what is your one word of advice for them?

Audrey Tang: My one-word advice is listen because I really like the dialog in interface dialog or really the theme is just to build social inclusive dialog and to make sure that people engage a real, meaningful, authentic communications.

Audrey Tang: Because in the Silicon Valley, when we say communications, it’s about speaking, not listening. [laughs] Especially here I think is where people of all the different backgrounds really sit down and listen not just to people who are very different, with different face, with different disciplines.

Audrey Tang: But also listen to themselves. Why am I doing this in the first place? What social change are we trying to make?

Audrey Tang: This building I think helps people to reflect. It’s a reflective space. I think it is really good to even just symbolically to get people to in a sense of inner peace where they can slow down a little bit and then listen, truly listen, to each other. I think this is what this Vatican office does differently to other hackathon...

Chi Nguyen: Rather than just coding.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I see a lot of people just intently listening with each other, a lot of mind melding, [laughs] and so on. I think you did a good job at curation.

Chi Nguyen: Awesome. I’m glad you had a chance to speak with Cameron. I’m really glad that you had a chance to view the hackathon space. Thank you for your time.

Audrey Tang: Are you looking to bring this to other...?

Chi Nguyen: I am. Basically what is unique about us is we’re a connector of the technology. We have this hardware palette that moves from event to event. I think there’s so much more that we can do for the communities that are starting up that’s outside of just the hardware and an MLH rep.

Chi Nguyen: Even just having community connections between countries is pretty important. I’m trying to figure out what value can we add to these countries that we can’t physically get to? We do create curriculum called Localhost that is open source that basically anybody can use to run within their community.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like RailsGirls, then?

Chi Nguyen: Yeah. We teach coding with Amazon Alexa. We teach Cockroach DB. We’re just building it as fast as we can so that it’s open source so that all these people can just learn more about these technologies and then go build their own projects.

Chi Nguyen: We’re not trying to make money out of things that are created at these hackathons. We’re really just trying to give these students the tools and then have them figure out the solutions.

Audrey Tang: Has it been translated to different languages or is it mostly in English?

Chi Nguyen: No, our team is quite small. We have 11 people full time. Then we have about 30 people who travel part-time. Normally I’m on the full-time staff. For this particular event, it was a bit more high coverage and I wanted to show up to share our story at MLH to the wider audience.

Chi Nguyen: I oversee basically the entire league, all the 200 member events that we work with, but also try to think about how to expand the league to the rest of the world. Because we have a lot of knowledge and we have a lot of people with knowledge that we just want to make sure everybody on the continent has access to technology.

Chi Nguyen: We haven’t figured that out quite well yet, but we know that we have a lot of open source resources that we could at least share and connections that we share because our network right now is about 65,000 in-person hackathons but a whole lot more digitally.

Audrey Tang: Wow.

Chi Nguyen: Digitally I think we have a much larger user base. People look to our brand to determine whether they’re going to go to a hackathon. That’s the case in Europe and in North America. That’s how it provided legitimacy for VHacks this weekend to a lot of hackers in attendance.

Chi Nguyen: I’ve been trying to work with China a little bit. But it’s hard because I only have so much of myself to meet. I’m trying to figure out a forum that works that still adds value and keeps you all in touch with what’s going on, on our side of the continent.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have a lot of people visiting from China and from Hong Kong. The Chinese-speaking growth coming to our events because Taiwan’s open source community, our annual events are easily 2,000 people or more.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very vibrant community. We’re pretty unique in that we don’t focus on any particular technologies. We focus on community itself so that there is also a toolkit of volunteers and full-time staff and then how they mesh together. I think we’re really recursive in that way.

Chi Nguyen: If you’re ever in New York, [laughs] give us a ring. We’d love to...

Audrey Tang: We’re planning to visit New York this May.

Chi Nguyen: Just tell us and stop by our office. You could meet our team.

Audrey Tang: We’ll be visiting the Civic Hall. Have you heard of them...?

Chi Nguyen: Of course. They do a lot of great things. It’s an incubator basically, co-working space for all the social impact groups starting...

Audrey Tang: We’re holding a lot of facilitator training. I think was made by a friend at BetaNYC and with all these people who are more democratic-minded, the civic tech part of tech.

Audrey Tang: I’d love to visit your team.

Chi Nguyen: That would be great. Cool. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Let’s meet up in New York.

Chi Nguyen: For sure!