Audrey Tang: Let’s make it more conversational. Just ask me random questions, and I’ll just start.

Interviewer: OK, cool. Can you tell us a bit about the digital government movement in Taiwan, and some of the ideas behind that?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I am Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation and open government. In Taiwan, the civic tech people on one side and social entrepreneurs on the other side are mingling together.

Audrey Tang: Because of our commitment to open government, we see older generation of people working with disadvantaged groups, indigenous people, and people like that being digitally enabled by the civic tech people.

Audrey Tang: Civic tech people really learn how to work sustainably with the environment, with the indigenous, with the social fabric from those people.

Audrey Tang: It’s mentoring both ways around, and my role as the Digital Minister is to make sure that it happens in a fair way, without any exploitation or any power asymmetry.

Interviewer: What’s the change that you’re hoping to see?

Audrey Tang: The change is that from the enterprise side, people learn to become better corporate citizens, become B corps, become part of the benefit corporation movement. We just changed our company act to enable that kind of structure, where it can have a charity association controlling a subsidiary corporation for the social good.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, we want the existing not-for-profits find ways to capitalize on the massive amount of goodwill that people have in a way that sustains their mission, without them having to do all the work alone. They can learn to trust strangers, to crowdsource, to trust the social innovation ecosystem.

Interviewer: Why does this work really matter? If you were explaining it to someone you just met in the street, what’s important to know?

Audrey Tang: Social innovation is important because as a government, we can really only change our direction once every year, because of budget cycles.

Audrey Tang: There’s just so many emergent issues nowadays, especially around digital issues, so that the people on the field are actually the best people to bring about social innovation solutions.

Audrey Tang: Previously, the national regulations and city level regulations were often blocking people from realizing the true value of their common potential.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, we’re now adopting a sandbox model, where if you see any regulations that you don’t like that’s blocking the sustainable development goals, you can ask for experiment for one year to relax that rule or regulation, and then see if it works better for everybody involved.

Interviewer: If someone were very stressed out and worried, what are the kind of problems that you hope this would solve, or why is it the most important thing for us to focus on?

Audrey Tang: The most important thing is to lower everybody’s fear, uncertainty, and doubt about emerging digital trends. In Taiwan, we make sure that everybody has broadband access. Broadband is a human right. We make sure that AI and education is embedded in the K-12 level.

Audrey Tang: We make sure media literacy, critical thinking is taught within the basic education. We make sure the universities also share their social responsibilities by working on capstone projects that attain one or more sustainable development goals.

Audrey Tang: Taken together, it means that everybody knows digital in a way that is like people know their human rights, their access to justice, and things like that. They don’t become afraid of new technologies, like AI and distributed ledgers.

Audrey Tang: Like personal computing, it feels personal, and it’s something personal that they can also tweak and change.

Interviewer: What might you say to a civil servant in another country, like Canada, about their work, and how it fits into your experiment?

Audrey Tang: First, Taiwan can help. We’re a part of this open innovation system, on the public Internet, where it’s a lot of existing government and civic technologies that’s all open source for you to use. There’s also a strong network of public service people who use the same tools to lower the risk, to absorb the work, redundant work, and to share the credit all around.

Audrey Tang: If you work in public service, we, the digital people, are the public servants of the public service. We’re here to help you to get your work done, your message out. In a way that makes everybody share the credit, instead of having only one or two ministers absorb all the credit.

Audrey Tang: The way that we work in Taiwan, through this open innovation system, is to make sure that everybody has equal access to the digital world, without putting it on one ministry or the other ministry.

Audrey Tang: It has to take the entire government’s civil service to realize the potential of the digital, and how it can automate all the chores, so the public service can focus on people, understand people’s feelings, and listening to people.

Interviewer: You’ve heard a little bit about the unit, the digital enablement unit of the government of Canada. Can you talk a little bit about how, why the work of the digital enablement unit might be important?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Capacity building, as I said, is fundamentally about relieving everybody of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around digital technologies. If the digital technology is something that you procure, you buy or something, you feel a sense of detachment from the technology.

Audrey Tang: If it’s something that’s in the flow of work, that everybody gets into the habit of working out loud in an internal chat room, and things like that, it becomes so much more natural when you collaborate across silos on shared documents, shared spreadsheets, and things like that that really massively simplifies the workflow of the public service.

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to use fax or other outdated technologies. They just go up the chain and down the chain again. You can be naturally collaborative, while still have a full, accountable record of everything people does in the flow of work.

Interviewer: What do you think are some things that we might be able to do together in the next six months? What are the smaller things that you hope for in the short term?

Audrey Tang: In six months, Canada will host the Open Government Partnership Summit. We look forward to bringing our municipal level participation officers, the people responsible to talking to people who are very upset online or on the street, and invite them as co-creators.

Audrey Tang: We have this art of engaging with people that turn them into co-designers. If you are willing to work with dynamic facilitation, with design thinking, with the transformational methodologies, we can start very small projects together, just like a co-creation workshop, online, on Slack channels.

Audrey Tang: The UK people have set up #OneTeamGov. There’s Design in Gov, Gov Design, Gov Tech, and things like that. If you join one of those channels, we’re very happy to collaborate, to share the case studies that we made.

Audrey Tang: Also, share in a Crowd Law Catalog and other catalogs of ready-made solutions that you can reach out to people on the same level, be it municipal, provincial, city or township level, and collaborate on the tools itself.

Audrey Tang: We discovered the tools itself are the easiest to spread. Of course, policy, processes, and politics, that differs country by country. The simple quick wins and the tools that really saves you time, that we can share immediately.

Interviewer: What are some of the things that you’ve seen in the government of Canada that connect to your work? Could you comment a little bit, maybe, on the digital enablement unit specifically, as well as anything else that comes to mind?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Digital enablement, to me, is fundamentally about a way to work across silos. This requires people to be acquainted with the digital tools, but in a shared workspace, not in separate workspaces.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we use the tool called Sandstorm, sandstorm.io, that enables people in every level -- provincial, township, or municipality -- to go into the same platform, to write some apps, and to share those apps in the open with everybody else in the public service, while not worrying about single sign-on or cyber security.

Audrey Tang: As I understand, the Digital Academy and the digital enablement work in Canada is looking also to look at existing tools, processes, and small apps from the gov tech and the civic tech communities, and bring them together into a catalog of sorts.

Audrey Tang: We look forward to work with your digital enablement unit, both on the shared tools and processes, but also, just on the code level, to simplify data analytics, to simplify the way that people analyze the data, visualize the data, and work on the data in a responsible and ethical way.

Interviewer: If there were people who saw social innovation and digital government as two different movements, if those groups weren’t connected, what might you have to say to some of those people?

Audrey Tang: Previously, before the sustainable development goals and the idea triple bottom line, people also think that economy, social, and environment are three different goals, and sometimes are at odds with each other.

Audrey Tang: With the idea of partnership of the goals -- after the UNDP crowd-sourced a million voices, and made 169 goals -- we made sure that whichever goal you are working on, you are actually reinforcing every other sustainable development goal.

Audrey Tang: It represents a new way of thinking. We’re no longer thinking of developed nations, developing nations, the economic sector, the social, the environmental sector. We’re thinking partnership for the goals together.

Audrey Tang: We use the language and the business models of the economic sector to enable sustainability in the environmental and the social sectors. This cross-sectoral view really is at the core of the SDGs. I welcome you to join SDG indexing movement, where we use the SDGs to index our work.

Audrey Tang: For example, if you work in education, you can put down #SDG4, in your GitHub, or in your website communications. If, as I do, you work in open government, it could be #SDG16. If you work on cross-sectoral work, it’s SDG17.

Audrey Tang: For these kind of work, it’s all automatically reinforcing each other if we put it on the map, and we index our work in a way that reinforce each other. There’s no separate sectors in this partnership for the goals.

Interviewer: Adding on to that, can you talk about how people that might see digital government and social innovation, instead of just automating the processes and automating the same steps, how you’re forced to reevaluate the question and make sure that you’re actually answering and innovating in new ways?

Interviewer: Rather than just automating processes that already exist, making things happen in a different way, in an innovative way. Taking new approaches to old problems.

Audrey Tang: Automating away the chores is always the first step, because otherwise, we don’t have room in our mind, in our time, in our schedule to really listen to people. I like the saying that people closest to the pain should be closest to the power.

Audrey Tang: If people have already automated away the chores, then we become human beings who can move around. I tour around Taiwan, to the rural, indigenous, and far away islands, and so on to listen to people, really, and live with people, be in their community, and discover the sheer values that they co-create together.

Audrey Tang: The digital comes as a realization of these shared wishes and shared values. It is not tech that colonizes these people. We are not changing these people’s lives for the better. We are not using that rhetoric. We’re saying, there’s something that people collectively value, and it’s currently being blocked by old processes, top-down hierarchies, things like that.

Audrey Tang: How can we just change the regulation and policy a little bit better, experiment for a year, and see whether it makes everybody feel better in their lives? So far, it’s been really working. We’ve been introducing autonomous vehicles that solves the last-mile transportations.

Audrey Tang: We’re using AI in banking systems to give credits to people who don’t have a credit history. We are seeing a lot of platform economy services owned by the co-ops and the people of local region, instead of global multinationals.

Audrey Tang: All these local social innovations can really benefit from an attentive public service that has already automated away the chores, and become an apparatus for listening at scale.

Interviewer: Last question for you. Can you talk a little bit about why it might be important for open government and social innovation movements to work together across jurisdictions and what that might look like?

Audrey Tang: Yes, as the public service, we move at the speed of trust. If the government doesn’t trust the people, we will have no mandate, no will from the people, to move us forward democratically as a polity.

Audrey Tang: This is the same for all the democratic countries and jurisdictions around the world. If the government, through open government, can trust the people radically, people will eventually trust back, and bring their views, their designs, their insights, their wisdom, into the governance system.

Audrey Tang: If, on the other hand, the government doesn’t trust the people, and expect people to blindly put their data, put their records and things, into the governmental system, then, of course, people will feel closer to each other on social media and far more distant with the government.

Audrey Tang: In that way the government will lose its speed to move in an agile way. If you want to innovate in an agile way, really, there’s no other choice than radically trust the citizens. We can move faster together in the speed of trust.

Interviewer: Specifically, how do you think different countries, provinces, or cities can work together across their jurisdictions?

Audrey Tang: I love this idea of working out loud. That is, saying if you have any part of code, data, design, or process, blog about it. Share it on GitHub. Share it on all those international channels that I mentioned.

Audrey Tang: Once you do, tag and label it according to the mission that you are having to the world, you will find spontaneous connections. People can form support groups and units that share the same mission internationally.

Audrey Tang: By just sharing case studies on, for example, the crowd log catalog, we get a worldwide view of people in different municipalities doing the processes that are talking to the people in, roughly speaking, the same way, which is why I tour around the globe, really, running two-day workshops, sharing the Taiwan experience of policy co-creation.

Audrey Tang: We truly believe, by sending fellows from one jurisdiction to another, and sharing the civic tech inventions with the gov tech inventions, we’re co-creating a world in which the line between the government technology and digital, and the civic technology and digital and social innovation, is being blurred.

Audrey Tang: We can have people in one jurisdiction learning about some methodology and cross-pollinate that into different jurisdictions. For example, right now, one of the leaders in civic tech Toronto, @patcon, Patrick Connolly, is in Taiwan for a multi-month study on the g0v community and of our methodology, just as we’re visiting Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver.

Audrey Tang: Just by bringing people, literally, in the same room together, sharing food, and feelings and building rapport, we build the foundation of online support groups in a much more real, authentic, and humane way.

Interviewer: Thank you. Is there anything else that you wanted to say at this time?

Audrey Tang: 12 years ago, when I visited Canada, and to build a new computer language -- also called Raku now, it was called Perl 6 at that time -- I had this slogan. It’s called, "Optimizing for fun." I think this is a very good message for the public service also.

Audrey Tang: Digital enables people to participate in policymaking in a way that feels empowered. When people feels empowered, there is fun. There is space for playing with possibilities in the place of ideas.

Audrey Tang: The government doesn’t have to be always boring. If you participate in digital spaces and engage authentically with social innovators and the civic tech people, you will discover also the joy in sharing your work and your mission with the citizens who will also treasure your professional input into the public welfare for all.

Interviewer: That was wonderful, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.