Audrey Tang: Hello.

Clément Mabi: Hello. My name is Clément Mabi.

Audrey Tang: Hi. Very nice to meet you.

Clément Mabi: Nice to meet you, too. I’m a French academic researcher...

Audrey Tang: And we’re going on a g0v summit together on Saturday.

Clément Mabi: Yeah, of course. I come today to introduce myself and to say hello. I’m very pleased to be here, and I want to ask you a few question about how it works here, because my main research subject is about how public actors are working in a open government way and especially for the French case.

Clément Mabi: I would like to share with you some feelings about what I read about Taiwan on some discussions I had since I’ve been here. I heard you interested a lot about...You are very inspired by the Internet governance, like IETF. What is exactly for you a multi stakeholder governance?

Audrey Tang: For example, radical transparency. We are on the record, and we will be editing for 10 days before publishing online, and this is exactly how IETF established its legitimacy, because as we know, IETF and the Internet society in general is the largest and most legitimate, I would say, known multilateral organization.

Audrey Tang: Every other multi stakeholder organization either centers around one specific project, or it is actually a extension of multilateral system that is just doing multi stakeholder constituency consultation. IETF by itself has legitimacy in the Internet society so much so that it can negotiate with ITU, with the US Government, with various other governments, and the reason why it can do so I think is threefold.

Audrey Tang: One is that of course it’s based on radical transparency and accountability so that everybody can see how it reaches its conclusions by rough consensus, it’s the first one.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that because the Internet itself is too important for every other actor, so the price of actually not connecting to the open Internet outweigh the risk of boycotting or not working with the Internet governance module so that there is a real incentive for everybody to play with the Internet protocol rules, instead of by their own domestic protocol or whatever. The second is really economic incentive.

Audrey Tang: I think the third one, which is often overlooked is that it is by itself a inspiration or a call to a governance model that is not ruled by so called domination.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, at its core, when we see requests for comments or IFCs, the very waiting itself or the Tao of the IETF, the document itself, it promotes this idea of non domination. I think this is a very odd hope by most people that’s people can reach something that they can all live with without one party dominating the other.

Audrey Tang: Of course, recently, due to mutual distributed ledgers and other technologies, this kind of idea has gained some more currency. Cryptocurrency, but [laughs] since the very beginning, IETF has heralded this radical idea, almost an anarchistic way of thinking.

Audrey Tang: Of course, it doesn’t always implement that. Many working groups doesn’t completely work like that, but it has this what Immanuel Kant calls this regulative idea that people are nevertheless attracted to. There is the legitimate mechanism, there is the real economic incentive, and there is also a philosophical attraction.

Clément Mabi: You talk about rough consensus?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: What do you mean exactly?

Audrey Tang: A rough consensus basically is something that people can live with that people don’t feel very strongly to object. On the other hand, it’s not a fine consensus in the sense that it is a document 50 pages long, everybody sign on it, everybody will say that this is our position.

Audrey Tang: It is not a common position statement or paper. This is just a general picture of how we’re going forward as a society, but without ruling out the possibility of everybody going in two different directions. It’s just we make sure that these directions doesn’t cancel each other out.

Audrey Tang: This maybe sometimes is called a group consent. There’s many different names for that, but in the Internet governance, we call it rough consensus.

Clément Mabi: For you, it’s very different from deliberation. Rough consensus is different from deliberation?

Audrey Tang: Deliberation is a activity. Deliberation can result in rough consensus, but you can also start a deliberation with a goal of a very fine consensus or you can start a deliberation with a goal just sharing feelings and sharing the facts without reaching any kind of consensus.

Audrey Tang: Every deliberation has its own framing and the framing may or may not contain rough consensus.

Clément Mabi: In current life, for example, regulation of Uber, how can you make a rough consensus? Because you can see some cities, they are very different from each other. How do you make a rough consensus for some subjects when you have to make a choice?

Audrey Tang: I think the idea very simply put is that we establish common values instead of common decisions. By values, for example, what we mean is that we get people’s feelings about how they feel about one particular fact.

Audrey Tang: For example, in 2015, UberX uses people without professional license to drive passengers and charging them for it. This statement is a fact, because it’s happening, and around this fact people can have very different feelings.

Audrey Tang: Around these feelings, there are nevertheless feelings that are common to people, that resonate with people, that people hear other people’s feelings and think, "Oh, I feel the same way." Also, there are feelings that are polarizing in a sense that when you hear that, you would think, "Oh, that’s, you know, not my kind of people," right?

Audrey Tang: With the right design of interaction and space, you can make sure that people agree to disagree on certain statements, but focus much more of their energy on the resonating statements that reflects a common feeling. What I’m saying is not that this stage by itself makes a decision.

Audrey Tang: Rather this stage informs the ideation phase, because then we know the good ideas are the one that take cue of these feelings, and then those ideas inform decisions. What we are saying in this kind of conversation is just on the facts and the feelings stage.

Audrey Tang: On the idea and decision stage, that’s a separate matter altogether, and in design thinking methodology the first diamond is what we’re talking about. The second diamond is something else altogether.

Clément Mabi: Design thinking, but in this kind of methodology information is very important, so the frame of information is important, too. How do you build this frame to be sure that every stakeholder got the same information?

Audrey Tang: Yes, and also it means the same thing.

Clément Mabi: How can you say in concrete that every stakeholder got them the same power to interact?

Audrey Tang: Right. It is impossible to do this perfectly, but what we have done so far is making sure that there is sufficient amount of reliable data before we start a discussion like this. We do this by not only open government data, but also open data from the civil society.

Audrey Tang: One very interesting thing about Taiwan is that the citizens sites is at times even more active than the government based sites. For air quality or for many other areas, we have the citizen contributed data, even more legitimate than the government data in some cases, because people participate in it.

Audrey Tang: Given this social atmosphere, when we talk about common evidence or data, we’re not just talking about the government translating our data to what the stakeholders can understand and can agree with, but rather the stakeholders providing their own data in a kind of puzzle making way to make sure that, first, everybody knows everybody else is publishing this data.

Audrey Tang: Second, through a series of pre meetings we agree on a neutral frame. For example, the very fact that I talk about people without professional driver’s license taking passengers and charging them for it, it took us three months to arrive to this sentence, because this frame is agreed by Uber, by taxi unions, by all the different ministries as something that they can feel that it doesn’t presuppose a decision.

Audrey Tang: It is both by a data that is collaborative and also by a framing device that is done by multi stakeholder meetings as very large amount of pre meetings, weekly, on the vTaiwan meetings before even starting to make it public.

Clément Mabi: In the different stakeholders you have some institutions?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: Some experts?

Audrey Tang: Yes, and orientate decisions, passengers.

Clément Mabi: Yeah, you put some passengers in decisions?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: How are they chosen?

Audrey Tang: They choose themselves. It’s just like IETF. If you feel you’re a stakeholder, you send a email to a special interest group, and then you become a stakeholder.

Clément Mabi: How do you take the concern of representativity? In France, when we make some public consultations, we have a very important issue about who you are representing. People used to say that it’s not enough to speak about the opposition. How do you take this question of representativity of citizens?

Audrey Tang: First, we ask a few profiling questions. Because our online questionnaire, even the question itself is crowd sourced. People just reflect on each other’s feelings. If you, for example, want to know, "Did you work for Uber or not?" you just propose that as a question for other people to answer. This is a collective profile. This is not a government oriented profile. That’s a different thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that, for example, when we did Airbnb, they sent an email to all their members to go to this platform [laughs] and support the Airbnb position. There’s mobilization, but because this space encourages people to reason out each other’s feelings instead of a few yes or no questions, only one third of them actually supported the Airbnb position.

Audrey Tang: The other two third have more nuanced, more interesting ideas for other to share. I don’t think representation here means what you just described what it means. If all these people say, "OK, I represent a Airbnb member, and Airbnb calls me here to express my opinion," that works, for example, if it’s a binary choice.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, because they are all individuals and they’re given the freedom to propose their own feelings, I think this re presentation of their own feelings is even more important than whether they are mobilized by Airbnb or not. They’re, after all, individuals.

Audrey Tang: I do agree that this legitimacy only works because, just like repress for comments, everything is just recommendations. If you see a few Internet RFCs, even though they’re on the standards track, if you don’t implement it, if you see "must" and don’t implement, you see "must not" and implement it, there’s no enforcement [laughs] agency.

Audrey Tang: There’s no Internet police that will make sure you implement this way. The only punishment is that your browser will not be able to see other websites. Because of this, it is not purely binding in a decisional way. It is only a resonating rough consensus way.

Audrey Tang: Because we restrict ourself into the first diamond, representation doesn’t matter that much. I’m not saying it doesn’t matter at all. I’m saying it doesn’t matter as, for example, a referendum matters.

Clément Mabi: If I take the example of IETF, between the stakeholder and IETF, you have some innovative between American engineers and south countries, engineers who are not speaking good English.

Audrey Tang: Every working group has a different composition, yes.

Clément Mabi: Are there some mechanism to put more regulations between stakeholders?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: In France, what I can see in my field is that, to make sure that citizen can express themself, you have to take care of what they are saying. You have to give them more than time than experts.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Clément Mabi: They can’t share a ground...

Audrey Tang: I will also point out that every expert in a domain that they are not expert with is also just a ordinary citizen. If you start talking about medical profession with me, I don’t know anything about it, even though I’m an IT expert. I become an ordinary citizen if we are going to talk about telemedicine.

Audrey Tang: In really difficult cases, for example the data protection standard, there is law, there is economy, there is technology, there is social sciences, there is philosophy, and there is no way that one person can be expert in all these different fields. Basically, a multi stakeholder mechanism need to take into account that even the so called experts are ordinary citizens in many fields.

Audrey Tang: What we have designed is basically go to the people instead of asking the people to come to meetings. For example, here, every Wednesday, everybody can come and meet me, but that is mostly people in Taipei and people who live close to the high speed rail station. We admit that this is a limitation.

Audrey Tang: Every other Tuesday or so, I tour around Taiwan, to Hualien, Taitung, and so on. While I do this, the 12 ministries, the different stakeholder groups within the public service, they’re still here in the Social Innovation Lab.

Audrey Tang: They see through telepresence what I see locally in rural or in indigenous places. People don’t have to travel four hours to Taipei or to learn to type with something that they are not very versed with. They just, in their natural habitat, talk about their local issues, talk about what they feel about their sharing economy or whatever they want to talk about.

Audrey Tang: For the experts, that is to say the public servants here, to hear what they have to say, and if they have any clarifications or any real questions for public servants, they must answer immediately or at least within two weeks after a meeting, in writing.

Audrey Tang: By this kind of bidirectional communication, it’s not just the Ministry of Health and Welfare and a local people working on elderly care, but the other 11 ministries, they also are here. They hear that this is to be handled in this kind of way. If there’s synergy with the Minister of Interior or Minister of Agriculture, they can also chime in.

Audrey Tang: Previously, what we call about experts or silos is because each ministry employ people who are experts in that field. In this kind of setting, people get a feeling that, "Oh, when we talk about agriculture, these Health and Welfare ministries, public service, has the same feeling as citizens," since we don’t know what you’re talking about."

Audrey Tang: They’re first to use more layperson’s wordings, and also make it much easier for other people to understand, not just their colleagues, but also people in the local population.

Clément Mabi: The citizens have the agenda setting?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: They can choose what they want to talk about?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: Are you ever see that the other ministers can be a bit afraid by citizen because sometimes they ask to do some things that they are not used to do?

Audrey Tang: Do you have an example?

Clément Mabi: For example, when we ask for open data in France, like from EGN, with the mapping data, some of this data was sold by the state. The administration were running the mapping, doesn’t want to ask the citizens about some mapping.

Clément Mabi: Citizen can ask, but the ministry is not following them, the administration is not following them. Have you ever seen this kind of reserve in the administration?

Audrey Tang: Of course. In the vTaiwan conversation, there is one that talks explicitly about, if the data processing and procurement is very expensive and the government agency is currently selling this data, do we have a guideline above which it requires a discussion with multi stakeholder panel and below which you just need to publish as open data?

Audrey Tang: We, I think, established something like a €1 million over the past three years as a demarcation. For example, the National Palace Museum, they, of course, put a lot of effort into digitizing the national treasures. Obviously, that exceeds this number.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, for meteorological data or some mapping data, as you just talk about, if it’s below this number, then there’s a national regulation that says, "Unless you can prove that you spend more than this amount of money over the past three years, then it’s just open data by default."

Audrey Tang: By the way, the National Palace Museum eventually agreed to open 300 dpi data as open data, at least Creative Commons data. It is a way for educational...or for people remix, to make art, or whatever. If you really want to have a high replica of those national treasure that is beyond 300 dpi, then maybe you still go back and buy that digital scan from them.

Audrey Tang: It is not incompatible to have a business model around high quality and high cost data. You essentially use the open data as an advertisement.

Clément Mabi: In France, we can see that open data policy is led by generalization and from some data which have some political power. The administration doesn’t want to take the risk. They put on open data all the inoffensive data that have. They keep the more sensible data because of their fear of the reaction of politicians.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have the same. For example, in Taiwan we have this organ called the Corrective Yuan, which is a different branch of government.

Clément Mabi: Corrective Yuan?

Audrey Tang: It keeps the campaign donation record of all the people who run for public election. Obviously, this is political.

Clément Mabi: Of course.

Audrey Tang: Previously, the Sunshine laws allows you to go to Corrective Yuan to look at the data, but you cannot download it with a USB stick. All you can do is to print it out, and it’s watermarked. Basically, you can only print this many numbers every day, and that’s it.

Audrey Tang: Basically, only the Corrective Yuan gets to do the auditing. The citizens can only go there to check their numbers are correct, but the citizen cannot do their own analysis. All they have is those A4 printed papers.

Clément Mabi: Just the results.

Audrey Tang: Right. Basically, the Parliament, about three years ago, four years ago, already received the pressure to open this data, but it is not to every legislator’s benefit...

Audrey Tang: ...if this is published, so they kind of resisted. The g0v community, they organized a citizen science project by asking people to go there, to print/copy, to scan, to use Open CV, to separate into CAPTCHA, and then asked people to play a game and to type those OCRs it’s like crowd OCR through this effort, making sure that all the major elections have their campaign donation record opened.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the government says you cannot be 100 percent sure that these numbers are correct, because it’s crowdsourced. The answer from the community is, "Yeah, if you wanted it to be 100 percent sure, then...

Clément Mabi: Open it.

Audrey Tang: "...pass the legislation and open it."

Clément Mabi: Of course.

Audrey Tang: That really took effect, so this year we passed the new law that opens the legislators campaign donation data as detailed, open data. Whatever you can see on paper, you can also see online. If not for this citizen science kind of civil disobedience activity to mount the political pressure, I think it would take even more time for the legislation to cave in.

Audrey Tang: This creates a situation where there is data to be analyzed, and nobody knows whether it’s correct or not, so it creates a pressure for the government to open it for real.

Clément Mabi: That’s very interesting. That shows there is some power in the open government situation. We can have the imaginary, the representation of the very fluidity of the network, but I’m sure that there is some point of control.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: Some part of the network is more strong than others.

Audrey Tang: If it threatens the representative democracy, then, of course, representative democracy is going to push back.

Clément Mabi: Of course. You say everything is recorded.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Clément Mabi: You put everything online.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Clément Mabi: Is this kind of data got some public...?

Audrey Tang: It’s structured data. It’s in XML, it’s Akoma Ntoso. We also see that people use it for scholarly analysis and for training of AI acoustic models, [laughs] so that people can use it. For example, in Mozilla, they have a project called Common Voice, where they can take these transcripts and ask other people to read it in small segments.

Audrey Tang: Then, they crowdsource this into the deep speech engine so that they can recognize the language as is spoken in Taiwan instead of forcing, like in Siri, everybody to speak a perfect Mandarin in order for the machine learning to recognize. I think this is also very creative.

Audrey Tang: The Mozilla people, because they use CC0, so eventually this will also feedback to Siri, to Cortana, to Alexa, to whatever, but for public good, because then you will recognize the people as they’re really spoken the language instead of one or two voice actors that they hire.

Clément Mabi: In France we had an experience of crowdsourcing led by an association, an NGO called Citizen Look, Regards Citoyens. We ask, citizens asks for the declaration of parliamentaries about transparency, about what the function and everything. They release only paper versions, so we put the PDF online, the association asks people to contribute.

Audrey Tang: It’s very similar.

Clément Mabi: Yeah. That thing very interesting and the parliamentary’s crowdsourcing is not very reliable.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s not very accurate.

Clément Mabi: Yeah. After this beta test, we put a second one, and this second version across the crowdsourcing to be valid. Every information have to be texted by two or three citizens.

Audrey Tang: Yes. Indonesia I think it’s three citizens.

Clément Mabi: Three citizens, OK. What we can see that for the first campaign we got a lot of people, but with the other campaign there is less people mobilized. How can you explain that the g0v community stay mobilized?

Audrey Tang: Because there’s novelty. People, when they think of a new campaign, they don’t use the old assets. People mostly get mobilized because it’s fun, and for many people the fun is in the novelty. For example, today if I ask you to participate in the ice bucket challenge, you will not agree because it’s not fun anymore. Everybody knows what ice bucket challenge is. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Back in the day it’s new for everybody so it’s fun. I think part of g0v’s mobilization strategy is to make sure everybody can use the label g0v. Next month, in Italy they’re going to launch the budget.g0v.it, the Italy budget visualization of .g0v.

Audrey Tang: It is not a chapter in the usual sense, because it’s not trademarked. Nobody really ask anyone [laughs] to use this meme, so g0v, in many senses, it is not a mobilization membership organization. It is just a meme that says, if you see a government thing that you don’t like, you can change a O to a zero and get into the shadow government.

Audrey Tang: This meme itself can spread, and so new ways are found in Italy, in Toronto, in New York, DC, and so on. That, of course, is new to these people. They will also discover new ideas and new memes for people in Taiwan to understand and then to reuse.

Audrey Tang: I think it is on the nature of international and cross sectoral collaboration that we constantly find new, fun memes for people to engage with, instead of reusing the old memes that’s one year old. A meme that’s one year old is not viral anymore. Everybody developed a immunity to it.

Clément Mabi: The fund for mobilization, in France, we use to say no issue, no public. People come in this kind of mobilization because they can feel a larger political issue. We can see that sometimes it’s very difficult to transform the issue in a public problem.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: All the time, it’s the same citizens who are coming, very few citizens.

Audrey Tang: One of the mobilization campaign in g0v is the iTaigi project. It’s like urban dictionary for Taiwanese Hoklo, Tâi-gí. That is one of the Taiwanese languages. In iTaigi, they launch a campaign, for example, by asking people to contribute new and innovative translation to all the Pokémon characters. It’s a lot of fun, and nobody knows how to translate it, anyway, so there’s a lot of competition.

Audrey Tang: What I mean is that they don’t have to mobilize by appealing to, "Oh, there’s less people speaking Tâi-gí now. The young people are losing their language," or whatever other social issue framing, because that’s not a lot of fun. Instead, they can associate with Pokémon, with jokes, or with other popular comedy.

Audrey Tang: Basically, let people participate because it’s enjoyable instead of appealing to social mission. I’m not saying social mission is not important, but that initial appeal is not social mission.

Clément Mabi: When you were speaking about this dictionary, I can see that you are mixing social innovation and civic innovation.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: It sounds very interesting. In France, it’s very different. We have some siloes between social innovation -- this is for digital technologies -- and civic innovation. The incentives in the civic field are often led by start ups and in a kind of concurrence between civic hacking and start ups.

Clément Mabi: I think that’s one of the main issues for the civic tech and civic hacking scene in France. The institution are working with startups because of public market, they give some them some function to make them public consultation. This is very hard for the civic hacking field to build something strong. Do you have the same issue here?

Audrey Tang: In many cases, people worry that the civic tech get absorbed into GovTech, or the civic tech becomes a subsidiary of GovTech, or the social innovation field becomes disenfranchised with the civic hackers, which is all the issues you pointed about.

Audrey Tang: I think, personally, in Taiwan, this is less of a problem. The civil society’s legitimacy is higher than that of the government. There’s many people in Taiwan who don’t think the current administration, which call itself the Republic of China, is very legitimate.

Audrey Tang: There’s many people calling for constitutional changes that at least allows people who are 18 years old to have a voting right. It’s constitutionally written that people has to be 20 year old to vote, and that is not seen as legitimate. That is seen as something of a bug in the Constitution.

Audrey Tang: It’s just very difficult to change the Constitution. I use only one example, but there’s many other examples. What I’m saying is that the constitutional legitimacy in Taiwan, because we’re just 30 years since the lifting of the martial law, is still being established.

Audrey Tang: The larger social innovations, the large co ops, the large non profits, the environmental groups or whatever, they started even before lifting of the martial law, and they have more legitimacy than the current administration itself.

Audrey Tang: In this situation, you can see the civic hackers aligning with the part that has more legitimacy, that is, the social innovators. [laughs] The government basically says, "OK, if we cannot beat them, we join them, [laughs] and we compliment the civic hackers." I think this is a very particular thing.

Audrey Tang: You also see that in Iceland after the financial crisis. You also see it in Spain right after the 15 M. Basically, right after a large scale re imagination, you always see that the civil society has more legitimacy, and they will align with the social sector more than the public sector.

Clément Mabi: You take the example of Iceland, and I can say the same for Internet governance, there was one time, if you take a long term, it can be open one time, but the institutionalization makes things that the states are taking power back.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: Look in Iceland. They make deliberative processes, they vote, and at the end...

Audrey Tang: They get absorbed back into the Parliament. We can take Better Reykjavik, which is pretty good as online consultation go. On the other hand, people also say, "Maybe it is not purely ruled by a anarchist politician."

Clément Mabi: And the constitution was rejected.

Audrey Tang: It was not yet validated.

Clément Mabi: OK.

Audrey Tang: You see, a politically correct term.

Audrey Tang: Yes, I do agree. There are constitutional moments like that, where people get to question the very foundation of democracy. There are incremental moments, like Better Reykjavik, basically get their legitimacy through comedic power. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In these two, which all happen in Iceland, we see people have a lot of expectation, but they have to settle for a compromise. This is true, and Taiwan has seen the same thing. In Sunflower, at the end of Occupy, people called for a constitutional national forum. What they got is a economic reform forum, which is still binding. It’s still national, but its scope is limited.

Audrey Tang: People, of course, then, in the forum, proposed that we have the joint platform, radical transparency for all the regulations, all the budgets, the e petition system, and they all get integrated back. It’s not like it doesn’t make any impact, but the original demand of the Occupy has been institutionalized in a way that can fit within the representative democracy system. So, exactly the same thing has happened in Taiwan in 2014 and ’15.

Clément Mabi: I think that’s one of the main difference with France. We haven’t the same kind of political crisis to start.

Audrey Tang: You have Nuit debout.

Clément Mabi: I don’t say there is nothing, but not so deep that all the students and the civil society can have some legitimacy to say, "OK, re build a new system."

Audrey Tang: I think the difference between the Nuit debout and the Sunflower is that, over the course of the Sunflower Occupy, the core people, the NGOs and the civic tech people, they reinforce each other’s legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: In Nuit debout, the core people, the leftists and so on, and the people who did the performances and citizen assembly, and the civic tech people, who mostly played a media role, they don’t seem to be completely focused on reinforcing each other’s legitimacy. I think that is the main difference.

Clément Mabi: I think for Nuit debout, one of the main next step is La France Insoumise, because all these militants translate their engagement in a political party.

Audrey Tang: I think that is the main difference. In Taiwan, we still see, for example, the New Power Party, but very few people here will say that the New Power Party represents the whole Occupy Movement. We will say it’s one of the off shots of the Occupy Movement.

Clément Mabi: I think that’s a very important difference. In France, our representative culture is very strongly [claps] .

Audrey Tang: I know you invented it, right?

Audrey Tang: For us, it’s very new. It’s like 30 years old.

Clément Mabi: I think that it’s one of the most important difference. That’s why people are totally right that the government is not as open as it can. On some subjects, they say, "OK, do what you want. I think you are doing well." You know what I mean?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Before I become digital minister, in the 12 months before, I spend five of which in Paris, [laughs] so I understand that the legitimacy flows toward the city government.

Clément Mabi: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: It is very easy for the city government to basically hire the right people from the social innovation and the civic sector, and basically have the legitimacy be not a two way, but a one way street.

Clément Mabi: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: It is true.

Clément Mabi: I think that’s one of the main constant that we can make in France. It is plain why the civic tech movement stay very weak in France.

Clément Mabi: My last question is about the funding of civic tech movements. I can see that, in the US, you have some foundation, crowdfunding.

Audrey Tang: Or media.

Clément Mabi: The Knight Foundation.

Audrey Tang: Bill Gates and Melinda, Knight Foundation, yeah.

Clément Mabi: In France, we haven’t this kind of foundation. I remember a collective called Open Democracy. We tried to promote open government in France. We are discussing about how to fund. Can we rise some fund for civic tech projects?

Audrey Tang: You do have a crowdfunding culture, no?

Clément Mabi: Yeah, but not so strong.

Audrey Tang: Not so strong?

Clément Mabi: No, not enough to give some independence and some autonomies to the projects. How does it work here? You have some foundations?

Audrey Tang: Back in ’14 and ’15, crowdfunding was very strong in Taiwan. There’s a lot of very large movement that just support itself through crowdfunding alone. I’ll also be honest and say, since ’16, people gradually switched to a subscription based crowdfunding. People think that is more sustainable. It gives a more recurring income.

Audrey Tang: Subscription based crowdfunding depends on a almost personal trust between the people and the creator or the person who gets supported by the crowd. First, it’s not for everyone. Also, it encouraged I use it in a neutral way a more populist framing of the message.

Audrey Tang: If you are going to encourage people to donate to you every month, every creation, every video, or whatever, you have to appeal to more people. You cannot just appeal to people who care about one particular social or environmental issue. You have to basically make a brand out of yourself.

Audrey Tang: We see some of that, like popular YouTubers, that are also social innovators, and try to raise awareness about marriage equality or whatever else. That is one track, and that is still crowd supported. I wouldn’t say it is as strong as the issue supported crowdfunding, back in the ’14 and the ’15. That is one track.

Audrey Tang: G0v runs its own grant crowd program called the g0v Grant. They always make sure that they don’t take government funding, or anything related to government in those grant funding so that they can fund civil society project that threatens or challenges government’s legitimacy. They were pretty capable in raising funds for these grants.

Audrey Tang: These are what we call early angel amount. These are not series A or Series B amount. For series A, we have what we call the social impact investment, and there’s a few there. Our current challenge is to basically make civic tech products or services, into something that the series A investors will think that can create triple bottom line feedback.

Audrey Tang: It’s not venture philanthropy. Taiwan doesn’t have a very strong culture of venture based philanthropy. Basically, it’s still investment or investment that considers social impact.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, our current challenge is to make sure that there are viable business models that grows out of these social innovations that has a lot of people rooting for it, but not necessarily delivering a capital return that can qualify for social investment. That is another track.

Audrey Tang: Finally, Taiwan has many very large charities, like Tzu Chi is huge. In many disaster relief scenario, they act faster than the government. They have more people than a government. They have more international credibility than the government.

Audrey Tang: They are also thinking about engaging the younger population. Mostly their population, because they’re a religious group, they mostly engage with more senior people. It’s not just Tzu Chi. There’s, for example, the Children Are Us Foundation.

Audrey Tang: Those large foundations, they all face the same issue, in that their constituency is aging and they need to engage the social innovators. Now the civic tech people can act a bridge that care about the same environmental or social thing they care about, but they still speak the language of the younger social entrepreneurs.

Audrey Tang: Here, what we’re doing, is essentially building these bridges. We’re still in the early stages, but we are already seeing some funding mechanisms that is resulting because of this collaboration.

Audrey Tang: We make sure whenever that happens, it gets prominent display space on a screen there, which shows my schedule. We have one real estate on the screen, that specifically shows this collaboration between older more established charities, or CSR, and the younger social innovators.

Audrey Tang: Whenever they have this effort, we make press releases. I deliver a speech, I make sure it’s featured prominently because that’s something we’re actively building here.

Clément Mabi: Of course. In France, one of the main issues is that the only business model which seems to be available for civic tech is data selling.

Audrey Tang: That data analytics, visualization, and so on.

Clément Mabi: And personal data selling. We have real issue of trust. Those startups who works, who can develop the activity, people start to distrust them.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Clément Mabi: Each time as you take...

Audrey Tang: I think it’s like selling your chickens before selling the eggs. [laughs] It’s not very sustainable.

Clément Mabi: I would say that.

Clément Mabi: That one is of our main concerned. Each time as you take, want something, it makes their distrust higher. People can see that they are selling data. If they are not collaborating with the institution, they are selling data. People say, tsk.

Audrey Tang: I really think the alliance of the younger civic tech people and the older charities, or nonprofits, or coops that have legitimacy, that is very important.

Clément Mabi: Coalitions.

Audrey Tang: Coalitions is very important.

Clément Mabi: Thank you. I will note that. Perhaps the last question about this kind of open office?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: Where did the idea come from? Why do you start to...?

Audrey Tang: You mean office hour?

Clément Mabi: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Because in this space, the Social Innovation Lab, when we’re building it, people don’t have the same imagination of what it should do. Some people think it should be a co working space. Some people think it’s just for events. Some people say it should be a display.

Audrey Tang: Everybody has different ideas, and we have hundreds of social innovators. If we talk to them one by one, we will get nowhere. We use open space consultation technologies. Basically, at the time business are ruined, back in the time. The basement still have floods, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We just make sure that there’s one large meeting room, and we just meet in that meeting room. We met, I think, five times, and everything is radically transparent. Every time we show a different blueprint. In a co creation way, people show what’s there important.

Audrey Tang: At the end of it, we have people who did that voting collection of what people’s idea is, so we iterate by the week. People can travel all the way from Taichung, or Hualien, or so on, to voice what they think is useful to them.

Audrey Tang: Which is why we have, for example, those remote region social innovation goods that you can scan with the QR code, and buy to deliver to your home. This is not just for people in Taipei. Whenever they make a wish, we make sure that it is recorded. If it’s not in contradiction with any other wish, we make it happen.

Audrey Tang: People wished for that this place is open until 11:00 PM every day because they want to chat after dinner. They want to have a kitchen and a chef, so we have a kitchen chef. If you stay for this evening, the chef is making I think some rice products.

Clément Mabi: I will come back to try.

Audrey Tang: I hold this discussion every week. They think it’s very useful. One of the wish is that I just go back every week. This is because of those co creation meetings, that they think this is useful to them. I don’t question their motivation. I just come here every Wednesday, because that’s one of the consensus, of the rough consensus, during the cocreation meetings.

Clément Mabi: When you were speaking about coalition of NGO and civic tech, in France, one of the problems is...

Audrey Tang: Coalitions.

Clément Mabi: Of coalitions. The NGO feel incoherent with this new actors and say, "OK. You are new. You are young, but you haven’t the experience of institutional discussion and institutional process."

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Of negotiating with the government, with international, with the UN.

Clément Mabi: Exactly. They are trying to block the social initiatives on civic tech movement. They are not funding civic tech. They try to put them on the side. We have a very strong political issue about NGO which are thinking they’re representative.

Audrey Tang: Even if they’re not affiliated with political parties, they act like political parties, is what you’re saying?

Clément Mabi: Yes. Of course. They think we are the civic society, which doesn’t want to share this representative power, and the representative situation, and the capability to interact directly with the government. We didn’t want to share this power, so they block.

Audrey Tang: I understand that in France, the association, they are a fabric of local governance. It is actually arguably a part of the government’s system. I totally understand if they act somewhat like politicians because they’re de facto politicians in many cases.

Audrey Tang: As what we here see in the civic tech sector, this is not a weak or young generation asking for funding or incubation This is a fair trade. One side can provide legitimacy, visibility, representative, how everything as you’ve said, but the other side can make it relevant to younger generation.

Audrey Tang: They can make the message more international, and it can also make the message fun. This we have proven once and again. If you don’t have a fun message, you become even less relevant, even for senior constituencies. Everybody now has more distractions than previously.

Audrey Tang: Before the mobile, web, it is a lot of fun to go to your local association meetings. Now, everybody just use their mobile phone for entertainment, even for older people, [laughs] so they need to stay relevant. I think this is one of the thing the civic tech people can offer.

Clément Mabi: Thank you for this very experienced reflection.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Clément Mabi: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much, and see you on Saturday.

Clément Mabi: Saturday.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Clément Mabi: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Cheers. Thank you.