 Fantastic, turning to Audrey Tang, thank you, thanks so much for making time. I'm really excited to chat with you, I have a lot of questions. So it's now been five years since the sunflower movement and could you tell me what was most significant about that moment from your perspective and what you think the legacy of that moment has been? So from my perspective, sunflower movement is the first time that people have seen with their own eyes was half a million people on the street and many more online, that it is possible actually for the 20 or so NGOs to converge over time in the occupied environment rather than diverge as many other occupiers did. So a focused conversation is possible. I think that is a kind of existential proof that collectively raised the imagination of democracy emerges as a citizen assembly or people have to say, but rather we can actually converge on something actionable with professional facilitating and civic technology. So I think that's the main thing. And the main legacy is of course that in Taiwan many people now expect to participate in democratic affairs between elections. People's imagination has been open, so all the mayors for example following the sunflower movement who did not have an open government plan lose their platforms and people who do have an open government plan or who participate in the Occupy found themselves mayors sometimes without expecting it. So there was this very fervent moment, this sort of fertile moment of disruption you know after the 2008 crisis around Occupy movement and then in places like Spain with Podemos, but so many of those moments peated out and they lost their energy. How do you has the sunflower movement and its legacy maintained the engagement and energy around participation? I think that is because in Taiwan we're relatively new to democracy. You see it to a lesser degree in Spain and to you know many like Estonia who found it after the internet. So for people who don't have a legacy system there's less in Russia right because there's no like 500 years, 200 years of republican tradition to honor and so we're literally the first generation that can actually do democracy because it was kind of illegal in our parents age and so because of that I think there's a lot more room to innovate. There's a lot less in Russia to fight and the public service generally see internet and digital technology as something that can potentially take away the risks and improve their efficiency and share the credit whereas if you have a very you know system that is just on across generations like five generations then it's actually very difficult to challenge as we're building a new system to be complementary because then it will already have a kind of well understood norm in the society but we don't have that norm. It's interesting that you say that because you know another one of my questions was how you're asking you how you've ensured that the bureaucracy and establishment are supportive of rather than oppositional to the idea of you know forking the government. How have they because that is something that people you know even in my own experience there is a resistance to new forms of input because systems are the way they are governments designed to counter against risk the very risk averse. How have you been able to communicate to the public service that public participation actually do risks the proposition? Right so basically the idea is that we offer a net reduction of risk and so there's three main motivations as far as bureaucracy is concerned. One is as you said management and reduction of risk. One of course is still very important is the efficiency and indeed certainty of service that is also very important and the third thing of course is due credit right if a public servant innovates then they want to be recognized not having the minister taking all the credit and only absorbing the blame when things go wrong right. So all these three credit attribution efficiency that is to say you know effective allocation of resources and risk reduction these three they are not fungible meaning that too much forking the government ideals somehow trade one for the other but these are not fungible all our offices improvements in projects are Pareto improvements in the sense that we don't try it one for another we make some advance a little bit on one of the three but without actually causing more trouble on the other two and because my office is literally horizontal like one person poached from each ministry and so because I don't give them orders I don't take orders from them I just ask people to work out loud that's the only ask that I have and because of that any project I rose out of my office is kind of by definition a reconciliation of many different values across ministries and that is how we make sure that a bureaucracy is okay with it because our office is over 50 percent just bureaucracy it's just we don't have one dominant ministry and neither one dominant value it is a cross cutting cross silo organization I find that really interesting because one of the ways that we've seen the public service treated traditionally is as an anonymous entity where people didn't get individual recognition or credit for their contributions and that seems to be counter to the way that you're approaching and where you're empowering public servants just for and honoring them as heroes basically yeah that's great I noticed that Taiwanese public servants are using a political the platform how has that been useful in your observation well a few things right they they share our story and help us discover people doing more or less the same work we also engage with many other platforms like the government graph lab in NYU they also have the crowd law platform the data collaborative platform and things like that because we we're given a lot of autonomy to freely join our international counterparts that one team got from the UK another great example and all these great examples are just people as you said highlighting their individual contributions in a way that is not afraid for the public to learn from the stakes as well and so anything that is kind of culturally similar to ours where we naturally found that very useful in the sense of building a platform for solidarity and reminding us that we're not in this alone and rather we're part of this global movement it's interesting because what you say also really accords with you know the economist Mariana Masucato recently been talking about elevating and celebrating the public service and the way that public service has been hollowed out over years and de-skilled and so much of their work and skill base has been moved to the private sector is that something that you're trying to counter in Taiwan certainly so I think in Taiwan we have excellent public service like a single payer very reasonable top-notch healthcare system and our we just started our tax filing season and tomorrow is the first tax filing day and again this is all like cross-platform very useful like a full user journey designed by people who petitioned to make it better and things like that co-created tax filing experience and so a lot of things that in other jurisdictions would be private sector quote unquote competitions in Taiwan are just quote unquote co-creations from the citizens and so it has long been a part of Tony's public sector culture to make sure that if there are services that the citizens just cannot opt out healthcare and tax filing being two prime examples then actually we should approach it as a co-creative process rather than a private sector competition because in normal service design in normal private sector the client can always say no and switch to a competitor but the fact is that you cannot say no and refuse to file tax or refuse to to apply to Medicare where you can but it won't get you very far but in these circumstances it makes far more sense to just absorb the creative energy rather than just to disperse them into the private sector so I have to pick something up just 20 seconds thank you that's some drinks I've been talking to a lot of people who are working on deliberative democracy and participatory budgeting and more distributed forms of engagement so people in Iceland in Brazil in Belgium and hopefully soon Spain once their elections are over the challenges I see one of the big challenges that's the hardest to overcome I think is communicating how much how much time it needs to take for citizens to have a participatory and ongoing relationship with their politics rather than a sort of set and forget vote once delegation approach how have you overcome that in Taiwan and what motivates people to have a more participatory role in the democracy right I think first of all Taiwan is really having a couple unfair advantages one is that we offer broadband as a human right because of a geography right so anywhere in Taiwan you mean remote islands if you don't have 10 megabits per second it's personally my fault you can talk to me and if anyone want unlimited 4G access plan to deliver such broadband it is less than 20 us dollars per month from all like major telecom operators and so this is really unfair right because of that because of that when we build a participatory platforms we don't have to limit ourselves as in other jurisdictions like some of them use participatory budgeting but they are afraid that people won't have to bond with so they have to use automated telemachines in order to collect votes and display things like that that was actually considered in Portugal and I mean that's very creative but it is actually very limiting because if you want to go to PPB you first have to know about this and then you have to walk to a nearby bank and then you have to operate this ATM which really isn't designed as a voting machine and things like that right but that's like the last mile solution that they have but now with like more social media accounts than citizen population and free of broadband not really free but almost free broadband access as a human right I think that enables us to basically provide the full context of policymaking so that anyone who want to know any bit of the budget can just drill down to the budget item and have a real-time conversation with public service on that particular budget item for all thousands of our national budgets for example and so I think that is this context map pain thing that makes it more attractive because people usually are just curious right how how is my neighborhood doing anything and things like that and so it is just an informative piece just like Google map that people would like to explore and if something occurred to them at that time then of course they they just leave it on the platform or they start a petition or things like that but it's all part of the flow they don't have to specifically go to a town hall in the specific Sunday to do something specific it's all kind of an ongoing process just part of the exploration and so there's also another kind of motto that we're following is that we bring the technology to the space of people rather than asking the people to come to the space of technology so once there are a petition with 5000 counter signatures for example then we make sure that if it's a local matter all the relevant ministries are summoned into that locality and to have a real face-to-face conversation that is still amplified through 360 live streaming and so on and so because of that for everybody all the stakeholders involved they can minimize the personal cost to them to participate in this process and they're always met with at least a equal kind of contextualizing benefit that makes sure that if they're putting one hour of time it can save right at least one hour of reading because people are contextualizing for each other and so I think just making it a learning experience rather than something like a jury duty convinces a lot more people because it's it's more fun really that's fantastic let me just jump on that one point you've talked about optimizing for fun before can you explain what that means in an open democracy and particularly in a youth participation context why so right so a few things right it's instant gratification so just making sure that if people put in just five seconds to get a rush thinking that they're they're contributing meaningfully to the democracy so it can just be one upload or one download or it could just be one post-it note in a user journey and things like that but always just provide a real-time feedback of how their single action method and I think that is very important and the second part is that once there is really a a binding power to the consultative or creative process always make sure that if they're willing to spend more than five minutes of time if they want to spend 40 minutes of time for example then they can just like you did email me and book my 40 minutes of my time on the record and and because it's on the record then it also saves everybody else's time because then you you read my previous interviews right so it's like people build on each other and so just being part of something larger is also part of the fun so instant gratification a way to just convert a small commitment into larger commitments is some way to make the larger commitment to transcend individuals I think these three together makes this optimus for a five-minute optimum yeah absolutely um tell me about your when you have those consulting hours and very long hours by the way 12 hours sitting and waiting and anyone can book in to see you what do people bring to you what typically happens when you're at the social innovation lab well quite a few things I mean just let me look at tomorrow's schedule because tomorrow appears to be a Wednesday right um it's Labor Day but in Taiwan public service is still working on Labor Day so let's see my first booking is from the B Lab they're making a let's be the change together business for good social innovation competition and they're asking me if I can maybe hold a starting ceremony or be one of the judges and indeed connect that to our AAPSIPA Asia Pacific social innovation partnership award which is our way to promote SDGs the sustainable development goals so that's one thing the next meeting is from Crossroads which is a local organization intending to making foreign people understand Taiwan more and also making sure that at Taiwan's uniqueness like our work in human rights our work in democracy and innovation and things like that is also translated into a foreign context because too much of these information is still just in a Mandarin Chinese and they really want to make sure that they're you know bi-lingually sound and then afterwards there's also a mix like innovation design for social change annual summit I think I'm going to connect social innovation to fintech I think working on fintech inclusion that's the main topic to talk and there's then a team using AI to analyze you know biometrics to make sure that long for long-term care circumstances the elderly can kind of automatically notify their clinics and their doctors if they have something that is kind of a accident waiting to happen and so they probably want some support in the new telemedicine and telediagnosis law and if the regulations doesn't fit them maybe they'll ask for a one-year sandbox in which that we agree to not find them for violating the regulation in exchange for urban innovation and so on and I can go on but you get the basic idea of my other sounds yeah it sounds like when you're in in your office and having those consulting hours you're acting as a connector between these these different parts of government and different and civil society commercial government entities or individuals and then linking efforts to broader missions whether it's a sustainable development goals or you know taiwan's focus on expanding its you know cultural diversity or what recognize diversity so would you define your role then as a connector yeah or really a catalyst right because a connector has something to connect to but rather I just facilitates their contextualizing process and pose our conversation publicly to the internet as creative commons zero transcripts and our youtube videos and because of that I don't really know who i'm connecting them with right it's usually people who discover those transcripts people who look at the taiwan social innovation platform who discover this year common goals and energies they don't even name me right they can just form synergies naturally together and sometimes just by occurring in the social innovation lab they were waiting for my office there but they see a nearby event because any event that has one or more global goals as focused can freely use the social innovation lab so a lot of just um spontaneous connections happen and so I'm more of a catalyst of course sometime my intentional connect but that's maybe one in three cases I'd love to ask you about the v taiwan process I read your paper and found the the four steps fascinating and the way that you're using existing technology it's not needing to build anything new really it's all off the shelf all off the shelf and the success that you had through that process in reframing the debate about ride sharing are there any other examples that you can share that show that method in practice sure of course so there's 26 cases and they're all on v taiwan W and I think there's quite a few cases that's really shines because they couldn't be done in the other ways of consultation of course people talk about ride sharing and airbnb because that's something that internationally everybody is facing a similar concern but truth to be told they could also be handled by regular consultation because there are unions and associations after all right so I think where this really shines is that for example when we're talking about teleworking there really is no union of teleworkers because we're all in different industries or when we're talking about how to move Taiwan companies who register from Cayman Islands back into being registered Taiwan by introducing special voting stocks and closely held corporations maybe company with English names and maybe company with a purpose driven like benefit corporations and so on again there there are no clear cuts existing associations of all the Taiwanese company that register in Cayman Islands because it's just a tax device or a governance device and so in cases in which there are no obvious top-down hierarchical organizations that's where the v taiwan approach really shines because it enables people who don't have a voice because they don't have a organized presence that has a protocol dealing with the government it enabled them to discover each other form a kind of ad hoc stakeholder coalition and even maintain their relationship afterwards and so I think v taiwan has generated like the fintech sandbox like the self-driving vehicle sandbox indeed the platform economy sandbox all those sandboxes are basically ways for people who engage in open innovation to discover their own coalition and so v taiwan is not just a consultation process is a is a meta process that generates more consultative processes uh yes I I think that's really interesting um is this that process and I understand it's was it the the the bonded coalition model I haven't that quite right me a little um the volunteer coherent blended volition model um so this idea that it's the people who weren't a coalition before but find themselves exactly values if you if I mean I think it's incredibly um appealing um if you are providing advice on how you know a city might take up structure or a method like this what advice would you provide well I'll just repeat what the co-creators of social innovation lab um has prioritized their consensus um so the first thing is to have a kitchen and a cafe and a resident chef excellent food the second thing is for the place to be open until at least 11 uh every night because the v taiwan weekly meetup is from 7 to 11 um like every Wednesday evening um and then I usually just stay until 10 and um then the third thing is to make sure that anyone who participates um records fully either through um telepresence or just regular um you know google docs or hack md as we use uh like making sure that people can discover what what people are working on in front of far um I think with these three elements that is to say excellent food um a relaxed atmosphere with no deadlines and timing and a recurrent record keeping culture um anything can happen and I think that are really the kind of offline ingredient of the online vitamin process that people often overlook and I really am very grateful to like Tom Adley who really discovered this and wrote it in excellent blogs that's interesting I think we become so seduced by the idea of um tech tools that we don't realize the importance of people being in a space well these are also social technologies yeah could you I don't think it was immediately clear to me what the relationship was between gov zero um and your role in the social innovation lab can you explain to me how sure yeah gov zero is just a meme really so uh the meme says whenever you see any government service or website and think why is nobody making this improvement uh just omitting that nobody and do the same service but with the O replaced to a zero so it's just a meme the g0v.it is from Italy and they show also the Italian budget and with all the you know drill down just like in augural g0v.tw uh topic but they don't ask for a license or a patent or authorization or anything it is literally just a meme um and so people who are in the gov zero community roughly speaking agrees to work out in the open using open source and creative common licenses for the public good and in a radically participative way because it's kind of implied by the license right um it allows people who are even not of the same nationality to contribute because there's no domestic open source right um and so basically it's participation from everybody to the benefit of the public service um and not just public servants but to the public service and I think um this creates a culture of people just pressuring really the government without any anything negative so that's what fork means fork doesn't mean destroy what's there right it means taking what's there bringing into a different direction with the hope that someday the main lab emerges back or the main line disappears and you become the main law right um and so that is the fork in the government's meme and I think I just cultivate this meme I consider myself a g0v zero contributed nothing more nothing less um and the social innovation lab is one of the physical places that we're experimenting with open space technology with focused conversation methodologies to make sure that the zero culture um kind of seeps out from a uh digital sphere and into a more day to day like all the other sustainable development goals not just go 16 and 17 uh that that's interesting so so just to clarify does that mean that actually this process practice um yen in Italy the practice of of um I guess forking or that's right that's right um yeah and there's a reddit now a subreddit just two days ago uh called give zero and again it's just randomly started by somebody and people just co-lead around it there really is no um any formal connection recognition or any um numbering uh system that controls who can use to zero video who cannot all the important brandings and trademarks and so on are all open source licenses anyway so anyone who thinks that they fit with the zero badge gets to use the zero badge it's interesting because it's become so into identified with Taiwan well it starts from Taiwan right uh it really became internationally known after the sunflower movement so that's already more than two years after its inception and so of course it's associated with Taiwan because most gov zero people learn in front of Taiwan but on the other hand there's also many Taiwanese people all over the world like gov zero in uh Washington DC or gov zero in um UK and Europe and so on um and they also participate in the main gov zero slack channel which is also a television channel and an rc channel uh and they they report from you know over the world trying to do pretty much the same thing but they identify as gov zero contributor and less like Taiwanese um and so I think there's a kind of overlapping identity I've read in in your interviews before that you've you know said that your introduction to democracy and and politics and social organizing was online for years before you got right to vote um uh interestingly the the citizens foundation in Iceland also talk about upgrade upgrading democracy um new operating system um what are the characteristics or principles of the digital world that most need to be put in this reboot of democracy well I think the idea of forking is is really core um and even for software programmers like the original domain in which fork is used is not until the the invention of decentralized version control systems um and with it the conflict free resolution data types um that it makes merging really almost effortless it used to be um the case when I first participate in the free software community that forking is taken very seriously because it's very difficult to merge things back and so if you fork something that's forked for good but the now um with you know git and all the different equivalents of git in for example co-creation of documents co-creation of spreadsheets all those collaborative editors and so on suddenly becomes very easy to to fork anything and still with the pretty good help of merging it back and I think that is a really great metaphor of governance this is what we intentionally incorporate as I said as the sandbox regulations a lot of sandboxes just fork regulations for a year and merge it back or as presidential hackathon where people take a proof of concept and delivering a public service in a different way and every year we pick five cases and the president say okay so by next year all those five winning cases will become public policy so it's all encouragement of a little bit of deviation a little bit of forking but with the promise or at least with the high chance of it being merged back on the president's hackathon are there core participants or civil servants? no we insist on building a trilingual team every year so every year we select and indeed curate 20 teams and by trilingual we mean that each team have to have at least one technical experts our data or AI and so on one domain expert whatever social issue they're trying to solve and very importantly one expert on public service on regulation on rec tech essentially and that is more often a public servant and so almost by definition it is cross sectoral and we found that it makes no sense for each teams if they don't have one of the three of the or two of the three trilingual roles to form these collisions before they actually try to develop the first prototype that makes a lot of sense I want to talk about your super ministry again and how that functions in practice I read that you know you had too many volunteers and now you've got at least a representative you know the goal is to have one representative from each ministry how does that function in practice in terms of achieving outcomes do they come to the are they self-selecting in that they have an agenda or an issue a burning issue when they come to you do are there set political issues that are introduced or from civil society how do they determine what they want to act on it differs from each ministry so the ministry of foreign affairs of course have an agenda of pushing the idea of Taiwan can help on all the global goals so that that is just the value of our foreign ministry and then of course they're dispatched to our office reconcile the work we're doing within the framework of SDG and making sure that we approach foreign ministries or foreign organizations or foreign CSAs in a appropriate platform that is conformant to the UN SDG so that's what they bring to the table and there's many other examples the people from the ministry of culture for example cares about youth engagement a lot and takes care of engaging with our youth counselors to make sure that they all have agenda setting power not just on things people young people care about but really across all the different ministries and with a very accountable way of showing how each youth counselor have achieved not just in its agenda setting power but actually in the delivery because they are almost always co-creators of some kind of public service and so build a report between the young people and the ministry that's what the artist patch from the minister of culture bring to table so each one when they join our office what I look for is that they bring a complementary skill or value set and then they're more of a giver than a taker and that's really the only two hiring condition that I make and other than that it is just pure horizontalism people just chat about themselves to find interesting thing to do and you've actually answered another question but maybe you can clarify I've noticed you using the hashtag Taiwan can help is that something that that is it is that a directive from Taiwan the idea that Taiwan can help on the sdg specifically or is that where that comes from yes so it starts I think from not not all the sdgs I think it starts from our bits to the world health organization because of political reasons Taiwan was denied entry to the annual summit of the WHO for quite a few years now and so but Taiwan really is excellent when it comes to all sort of you know just disease prevention and health care good health and well-being and so on and so just for sdg three I think as part of the ministry of foreign affairs and ministry of health and welfare wha bit they just developed this how it can help hashtag but then we discovered that actually Taiwan can help on pretty much everything in the sustainable development framework and so we gradually just expanded out to include all the sdgs and you know as as others are learning from you who are you learning from at the moment who are you modeling in terms of open government and participation so I think so in open government summit I think that's one of the main venues that the open government community gathers and I think I learned from the cutting-edge thinking of various communities like this year the host country is Canada and Canada has a lot emphasis on indigenous inclusion for example and that is something that Taiwan is also grappling with our president herself part indigenous just formally apologized just for the indigenous nation's different treatments and things like that just a couple years ago and so we're really early on in this truth and reconciliation process and a lot of our e-participation methodologies really is designed with a more a han ethnic norm to for lack of a better term and that makes the indigenous population's participation not as active as other people I mean we did excellent age groups the 65 years out participate as much as our 15 years out so we did that really well in terms of inclusion but not so when it comes to indigenous and so we learn from the Canadians and the way that they approach indigenous honoring the tradition making sure the truth and reconciliation is indigenous driven and we make sure we learn from them so we for example translate our open government manuals and so on into indigenous languages and that's a direct learning from them so I can keep saying a lot like concrete small things but what I mean is that really inclusion there is no end to inclusion and just by making sure of paying attention to what every other culture is doing in terms of intersectionality often reviews of the kind of kind of hidden excluded communities that we nevertheless have not yet considered in our open government process fantastic thank you so much Audrey this has been really really helpful um yes thank you so much for your time and um and yeah this is fascinating work so thank you so much for sharing it thank you and thank you for contributing to the creative commons absolutely and upload it to youtube all right oh great thanks so much Audrey thank you have a great evening you too thank you bye bye