You were in New Zealand, I hear?
Ah, we missed each other.
We were at Christchurch at the same time... Yeah, we missed each other.
(laughter)
Ah, why did no one tell me you were there?
There was this UN event...
UNESCO, yes.
That’s a Minister-level meeting. I was told that they would give me visa, but my participation is essentially as a NGO...
(laughter)
OK, I get it.
...and so I had to miss those sessions.
It’s a shame.
I did facilitate one of the participation sessions though.
Good. Did you enjoy the conference?
Yeah, very much so, very much so. I loved how they used Sli.do and Apps. A year ago, David LePage came visiting here, and we talked a lot about how to use electronic apps to improve the experience. I’m very happy that the Ākina Foundation actually implemented those ideas.
It was all Taiwan’s idea? [laughs]
Well no, I don’t think it’s all Taiwan’s idea...
(laughter)
But some part of it, like the use of Sli.do and so on, I shared some of our experiences during the session I facilitated.
You have a wide portfolio without portfolio. You’ve got social enterprise, you’ve got digital...
...and now, Youth Affairs.
Tell me a bit about the different objectives that you’ve got in those different areas. What are the challenges?
It’s the same objective. It’s basically reducing the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, inside the public administration, of the career public servants when they hear the words "civic participation," "social innovation," "youth engagement."
It used to be that these are very trendy ideas for elected officials, appointed politicians, but it actually means a lot more work for the career public servants. I’m kind of flipping this around.
I’m adopting a radically transparent way of doing policy-making, publishing all the transcripts and stuff like that. We do that for internal meetings, too.
The point here is that I’m a blame-seeking, credit-avoiding minister.
(laughter)
If things go wrong, it’s all this anarchist minister’s fault.
(laughter)
But if things go right, people go and check the accountability trail and find out, "Oh, it’s the Director General. Oh, this is the entry-level officer who proposed this idea in the same place."
Once they know that, first, it reduces the risk and there’s very little risk in involving our collaboration meetings, they’re very willingly collaborate and basically convince people both up and down their ranks.
A way we do this is by having a dedicated participation office, a team in each and every ministry, so like 32 ministries. They basically serve as this extended network, and we’re online collaborating the whole time ourselves. The idea is that when people do e-petitions, or any other ways to do that, they absorb the risk and distribute the risk, and manage to find some common ground that people can live with.
It’s actually beneficial for everybody? It’s not a winner or a loser situation?
Right. It doesn’t actually take a political will. It’s now seen as a fabric in the public servant’s way of doing things. We use a lot of, of course, civic technology, social innovation, and things like that. Especially the people who would do petitions and collaboration meetings, they’re pretty young in average, so that’s why those three things are broadly the same thing.
How easy is it to get the general public to be civic? One of the things that we discussed in social enterprise is it’s great, but you need more social entrepreneurs in the future. How strong is the desire to be civically engaged in Taiwan? Or, is part of your job also pushing the demand for civic engagement?
The demand in the civil society, ever since the Occupy, far exceeds [laughs] whatever we can...
(laughter)
That’s not an issue? You don’t need to push for it?
That’s not an issue. Of the 23 million people, at least four million, I think, individuals are on our online platform for e-engagement, so it’s a huge ratio. They essentially subscribe to the newsletters.
Whenever the policy they care about changes, and so on, there’s a reach directly to their email address. They don’t have to go through the intermediaries, and so on.
I don’t think engagement ratio is the issue. We do want to deepen the engagement though. To sign a petition or subscribe to a newsletter is like three minutes, but once we have their three minute’s time, I think we can also make much better use of their time if we present or translate all the policy networks in ways that...
[surprised sound] [laughs]
Yes. [laughs]
For example, there’s also the different petitions. Once we have a petition case, every month the participation offices votes on the cases that they want to collaborate on. For each of those collaboration cases, we make a policy map that maps all the stakeholders and use that as a basis for this discussion.
Case in point, for example, there’s a petition about 8,000 people from Hengchun, the south-most part of Taiwan, who petitioned for a station of the Minister of Interior’s helicopters there to serve as ambulance. The distance from that point at the popular tourist destination, enclosed this large hospital, it’s like 90 minutes, so they petitioned for it.
What we did is we got pretty much everybody involved. This was on the local government level and national government level. Whereas before, they would have to explain, individually, to the MPs, to the press, and none of them satisfactorily, because it’s only partially their business.
We also gathered the local stakeholders, and then we all go to Hengchun and have those five-hour meetings, where we hand everybody these Post-It notes, and then collaborate on the blue ones, the facts, the problem statements, and so on.
We basically understood that there’s multiple possible solutions. Of course, helicopter is one, a faster road is one, building a large hospital there is one, and, of course, we can also make the airport much more functional. Then we explore on these ideas until all the stakeholders...
There were like 40 people in one room deliberating. I was in the other room of about 200 people’s room, a large hall, just translating, like an ESPN anchor, to the local media of what this move means. Everybody was on the same page, until we arrived to an insight of, "OK, how do we actually retain the local talents, surgeons, and how do we make them possible so that they stay there?"
Every Friday, we make this kind of mind map and ideas on solutions. The coming Monday, I present this case to the prime minister and the other ministers with a portfolio. In this case, they agree it’s a good idea.
A few weeks after that, the prime minister visited Hengchun to actually take a look at the hospital and allocated around 5 million GBP, which is quite a few resources, into improving the local medical resource, knowing that it is actually a feasible solution that’s going to be accepted by all the stakeholders involved.
It’s some form of online lobbying? You get the communities so they can lobby online?
Exactly.
Then you get very fast results?
Yeah, sixty days and it’s done.
That’s it, "Here’s your funding." That’s fantastic.
How difficult are the barriers? I’m going to be devil’s advocate...
Sure, that’s fine.
How much does this play to people or groups of people who already have good lobbying skills? How much does it reach new people who maybe have never really participated strongly in government or policy before?
These people, I would say, already have pretty good lobbying skills. The problem is that because they jump straight, usually when lobbying, to the solution stage, and skipping the fact-finding and feeling-finding stages...
Without the facts and common feelings, of course there’s a lot of controversies when there’s one half-baked solution against another. People spend years basically talking past each other. By going back to the fact-finding and the feeling-finding stage...
You actually come with a better solution and that works out.
This is like an internal consultancy [laughs] for the stakeholders involved.
The other point is that, although it’s 5,000 people, they don’t necessarily all mean the same thing. For example, when there’s really controversial issues, like this one, which is about putting into the...this is the gay marriage and in the education stuff.
This is what we call dissent as data, because we actually get pretty good arguments on both sides. Also, because they cannot reply to each other, the only way to put a better counterargument is actually by putting out a better argument on the other side, and then vote it up.
Because this is not about voting, this is about a diversity of opinions. By the time we do this multi-stakeholder meeting, we have a pretty good idea of what the stakeholders are like.
The different views and...
Right, exactly. That’s the diversity part.
It’s an amazing idea. Where did the idea come from?
From you?
(laughter)
To be perfectly honest, the methodology, including the RealtimeBoard, the Idea Development, the toolkitall came from the UK.
It actually began with the Policy Lab methodology, straight from The Cabinet office. The facilitator who introduced this to us actually served in the Policy Lab in the UK. She’s from Taiwan, she just studied service design there in the RCA.
We did make two contributions on top of the Policy Lab methodology, one is that we position it as a general device to lower fear, doubt, and uncertainty. This is for the public sector not to reflect what the appointed minister want to talk about, but what the people want to talk about.
In the UK, the Policy Lab is not directly linked to the petition system; the petition system was only linked to the Parliament. This is the first thing.
The second thing is that, by working with the local council, by working with the MPs, it was seen from the representative democracy system as something that helps their work, to collect more feelings and ideas. Whereas, in UK, as in other places, it was seen as a somewhat contesting thing between the administration and the representative powers.
It’s very nice that you’ve made it into a very collaborative process, rather than a negotiation process.
That’s exactly right.
It’s great to see.
How long has been going on?
It’s been exactly a year since I became the digital minister. I think next week we’re ratifying this into a regulation. It was like a pilot so far. Now we know this really works, so now we’re signing it into regulation.
This is going to become...OK.
A year is a relatively short time in government. Are there any examples yet of where something’s gone from consultation, through, into legislation?
There’s plenty, actually. I’ve been working on this since late 2014.
It’s been going for longer than a year?
Right, it’s longer than a year. One of the flagship cases is, of course, the Uber consultation.
(laughter)
Very interesting.
This was at the end of 2014, and Uber was...the red ones are the ones that having controversies. The green ones are the ones that have some sort of consultation going, and the pink ones are unresolved. Taiwan was in the pink at the time.
If you look at it like this, it’s like an epidemic of sorts. It spreads from country to country, and the virus of the mind, the meme. This idea is that algorithm dispatches better than laws for cars, so we should ignore the laws since no one is dead.
It has an interesting model called "sharing economy," which means many, many different things. If a driver gets infected by this meme, they tend to spread it to their passengers, and from the passenger to other drivers. After driving for a few weeks, maybe they decide it’s not a good idea, but it’s just like flu. It’s already spread.
(laughter)
It’s too late.
It’s spread all over the place. It did cause some explosive protests all around the world during that time. It was like late 2014. We understand that a lot of it is because the facts were not...the definition of sharing economy, how exactly is the issue, or whatever, is actually not sure by the people.
There’s a lot of PR, of propaganda, but very little actual focused conversation.
Or the facts...
Right. Because during the Occupy, the people were using this methodology to deliberate, involving half a million people on the street and thousands of people speaking at the street.
Instead of diverging, as other Occupieds tend to become, because we do the full transcript, we do the synthetic document, and with the help of professional facilitators, we leave unresolved issues that day, and the next day we deliberate on the same unresolved issues.
By the end of the Occupy, there’s actually a very strong consensus, which the head of Parliament then agreed with, so it was a victory. So we’re like, "OK, if this can work with half a million people, then naturally thousands of people is a scaling down, right?" [laughs]
So we knew that deliberation is an inoculation of the virus of the mind, meaning that if you really have listened to each other, then you become immune to propaganda. As I said, we always work on the facts, first.
Then, from the facts, how do people feel about those facts? One may feel angry, another feels happy. It’s all OK. Once we find the feelings that resonates with everybody, then we go to the ideas stage.
Now there is a metric. The best idea is the one that takes care of the most people’s feelings. Then we ratify it.
The issue we need so solve, technically, is the translation issue. Because these people speak professional language when they’re doing policy-making because of one government -- before, the government resolved its internal lobbying with the professional lobbyists, with academics, scholars -- they tend to say nothing.
It doesn’t mean people on the street doesn’t talk about this. They talk about this in a very different reality.
(laughter)
A parallel reality.
A parallel reality in a parallel universe. In that fact and feelings absence, the ideas, by itself, grows into ideologies. Once you’re infected with ideology, then one becomes blind to new facts and other people’s feelings. It’s like, "We’re always right," and, "The sharing economy’s great," or whatever.
What we do is that, through open data and through a collaborative triaging of facts - the one like RealtimeBoard, as you just saw -- we first get everybody’s facts together. Then we use a machine learning platform, an AI platform, to ask, "What do you feel about those common facts?"
For three weeks, anyone with a mobile phone -- and it’s all over Taiwan, it’s not just in urban areas -- they just go online and see one sentiment about the UberX case, and they can click yes or no. If they click yes or no, their avatar moves on this two-dimensional map to other people who have similar feelings.
At the beginning, people were clustered at the edges. You can literally see the divide.
People were polarized, right?
Right. But this way of doing things, rather than, say, Facebook, has two advantages. First, you can see people on all the different corners are actually your Twitter and Facebook friends. They’re not nameless, faceless enemies. You just didn’t talk about Uber over dinner.
(laughter)
The other thing is that it lets people see that positions can change. After voting for a few times, you can also write in your own feelings, and then those feelings become the things that other people vote on. People actually compete for more nuanced feelings that resonate with other people.
We say, we bound ourself to difficult crowdsource agenda setting. If anyone’s feeling resonates with the supermajority of people, 80 percent of people, they manage to convince people across the aisle, we promise to use it as the term that we negotiate with Uber.
It’s because of this, over the three weeks, we literally see people coming together toward the center.
How important is that aspect to driving consensus? Do you...?
It’s critical because, otherwise, usually there’s only the loudest people, the people with the most controversial views.
To the sides, right?
Right. But because of a peculiar design of this online space, the display of...Just a second. We did many cases, so let me very quickly find the Uber one. It’s here.
Because of the peculiar design in this interface, when people see these groups, you actually first see the majority opinions, where everybody managed to agree on. Then you can click into group A, B, C, and D who all have very polarized ideas, like A views it’s very risky, if it’s not illegal. But B disagree and says it’s transparent enough, and if I’m not in a rush, even though I see taxis rushing by, I will still call an Uber.
(laughter)
You can see these other different people, but they do manage to agree on the insurance, on the professional driver’s license, and on taxation which is the eight, now seven, but it was eight points that we did use to negotiate, with not just Uber but pretty much everybody who has a stake.
The reason they show up, and they don’t often show up, is that anyone who doesn’t show up will be seen as villains in this story.
(laughter)
Some of the main taxi companies?
Right. Now because they all show up, they’re now seen as heroes. Because everybody when we go through this consensus, they’re like, "Yes, we’re committed to it." Now because it’s live stream and it’s kept as a transcript, they can’t take back those words.
They don’t want to be left out either. They want to be part of it.
Exactly. Now we’re like, "OK, you all agree on this. Let’s translate it to legalese." Then it was ratified. When MOTC ratify it, they did it knowing that Uber will abide by these rules, and they did.
They changed the legislation?
Does the digital aspect of the process favor more digital natives? Is it giving voice to particularly younger people who might be more digitally able? How are older parts of the population, the less digitally able...
That’s a great question. We already lower to it to a degree where it’s just pressing yes and no, yes and no. Any elderly people who can use LINE...Actually we make sure that all the...like there was a labor union, the Association of Taxi Drivers. We made sure that their LINE group get the same URL to this.
LINE usage in Taiwan is really high.
Yeah, sky high.
Now, when people want to contribute in ways that’s more face to face, we also bring this whole apparatus to them...
Like next month, we’re going to Penghu, the islands, because the fishers people there, they will want to talk in their natural habitat. That’s why we bring apparatus there.
The idea is what we call assistive civic technology. It’s there for people to speak freely instead of trying to take it arbitrarily that you have to go on this website. The website is still important because it’s accountability trail of everything that has ever, ever happened.
It sounds wonderful.
(laughter)
I’m trying to think of all the challenges. What’s the danger that...a governance have to do a lot of things. They have to legislate about a lot of things that maybe aren’t...
I’m trying to think of an example, but I can’t. Things that maybe there isn’t widespread public opinion on but, for whatever reason, they’ve got to get through, let’s say, some international treaty or MOU or whatever it is they need to do. It’s not something that’s going to engage large...
It’s not such a hot topic, right?
Yeah...large parts of the population. What’s the risk that, because government wants to be seen to be responding to popular will, all of those things come under pressure for being sidelined because they want to get more things that have gone through this type of process through the statute bits?
Yeah, but for things like this, this is actually already semi-diplomatic with a semi-sovereign entity. It’s not just Uber.
More and more, we see cases like this one, which is about that’s a lot of automated chatbots on Facebook, their purpose to sell some goods but it’s actually counterfeit advertisement that when shipped to the door, it turned out to be a brick.
(laughter)
The seller goes missing on the delivery slip, and Facebook has this advanced algorithm that led them to locate the most gullible people and so on. This is a very complicated issues like original spam wars.
If we don’t tackle this in a way that’s collaborative, the government will be seen as just sitting on its own and not doing things. By going through this process, they actually get much more time on their own to handle the cases that actually pertains to them instead of explaining the problems, saying, "This is not our idea."
This is like the Minister of Transport now, and it becomes very high like this. Saying, "We really enforce this transportation idea."
Also the consensus of that particular meeting is that Association of E-commerce who comes need to enlist FB to join their ranks, and then to go through a association multi-stakeholder system, to make sure that everybody knows how to flag those advertisement, with our education.
This is somewhat related to your question because then this is diplomatic in nature. This is basically backing up a action from a civil society actor, a private sector actor, to the FB.
When I visit the FB, I describe this to their VP. They’re like, "Why not? We’re happy to join." Last week, they did join the local e-commerce Association, here, and then worked directly with the people, the stakeholders.
What I’m saying is that it’s not necessarily about specific trade agreements, but about a political and policy context that leads to those agreements, just as during the Occupy. The main thing was not about whether the cross-trade service trade agreement is a good agreement or not. It’s about the due process, like it should have an effective public commentary period, and so on.
It’s about the process. That’s the basic idea. Once we get people into the habit of paying attention, I think there’s no extra pressure for the career public servants, because it beats them having to explain to angry people on the street.
Rather than have to persuade people, you’re actually bringing them along on the journey?
Right. Exactly.
They’re part of the process.
I can’t think of any others, but has there been any criticism of it? Is there a backlash against the process anywhere?
Not at all... We deliberately designed the process so those cases are voted by the participation officers. If some cases are not a good idea for collaboration, they just don’t vote on it. [laughs] We progressively get more challenging cases, but always with them knowing fully what’s at stake.
Now we’re working on some really interesting cases such as the labor unions wanting seven more public holidays. It’s one of those traditional zero-sum games.
Whether in the Marine National Park in Penghu, do we ban fishing and encourage tourism or do we allow fishing but somewhat the tourism suffers? So, the environmentalism versus livelihood.
Those are traditionally zero-sum games, but the very fact that we were entrusted to collaborate on this actually speaks volumes. If there’s any backlash, they wouldn’t trust it to us, but now they’re trusting these cases to us.
Very interesting.
Right.
I saw this word "civic hacker." Is this civic hacking?
It is certainly civic hacking. I mean hacking in its original sense, immersing oneself in the system, find the shortcomings. But instead of a black hat that exploit it or white hat that fixes it, we just build a parallel system and say, "Hey, just use this."
"Come in to one system."
Right, "Come to our system, and use this if you think it’s good for you."
Only that you can now mainstream it to make it available...
Right, because for the public servants, it’s not something on the whim of the ministry. It’s just something that happens every other Friday.
Do you see this embrace of sort of popular will and popular opinion harnessing popular will and popular opinion? Do you see that only being channeled into legislative decisions or do you also see this as...Does the process have to end with a legislation change?
No, not at all.
Can it end with a movement?
Yes. Like this Facebook case, there’s no legislative component in it really. It’s about the enforcement of existing regulations on all the different ministries, but most importantly, it’s about multi-stakeholder relationship, so that Facebook can explain not over and over to individual people angry at them, but on a system.
Actually, it’s very rare that it ends to the Parliament. Mostly it’s in the regulations space of each ministries. About half the time, it’s not even about regulations. It’s about the norms.
And it’s about, kind of maybe, bringing the different stakeholders together to have that kind of discussion...
Right, because if you just look at popular media, it’s as if they’re sworn enemies. But actually they agree on 80 percent of things. It’s just it’s not seen on the popular media.
What about as a process to encourage community action? There might be an issue in a particular community that actually the solution is not regulation or legislation, but actually it’s just about a community deciding how they’re going to work together to tackle a problem. There are examples of where it’s been used.
Certainly. The Facebook one is actually a good example, but I will see other examples. This one is very interesting because it’s politically controversial, but it requires some local context.
(laughter)
The petition title is called to have those traditional ceremony materials such as the golden paper that’s burned, and incense that’s burned, to list as heritage assets.
But it’s on the background of the environmental protection agency trying to reduce the burning of incenses and also the importing of cheap incense from other countries, and thereby having those traditional masters losing in the social respect kind of sense, and they can’t really find apprentices that’s willing to learn this incense making art.
It’s like a tea-making art. It was really popular in Taiwan, but nowadays it’s...
It’s all imported now.
Right, and not seen as a very important craft anymore. Of course they jumped into a regulatory solution very quickly, saying the Ministry of Culture should just talk to UNESCO, or whatever.
(laughter)
Very easy.
Right? As we can very clearly see, actually it’s not the whole solution. The problem definition here is mostly about the lack of the culture and appreciation of the art. I think it begins by recognizing that this is really a very Taiwan-specific art form.
Then everybody started chiming in, with the people studying religion, studying local museums, and so on, actually committing. Maybe they have already committed, but they didn’t know that each other was committing on this.
We just get everybody’s commitments. Not only did the old masters feel much more respected after this, it actually promotes people who already works on this, on social enterprise, to come forward and declare that, actually, we’re already doing something like this part of the urban, the renovation and culture-building stuff.
That’s very encouraging, mostly first, because the minister doesn’t have to actually pass any regulation.
(laughter)
It’s actually already happening.
Also that is something that’s already happening. As you can see, we already committed quite a few exhibitions, programs, and whatever. The Minister of Culture can now work on this in a very focused way without caring about the religious underpinnings, or the social repercussions about pollution, and whatever, because it’s unrelated now. It’s entirely a cultural social enterprise business.
The Minister of Culture is really happy with the outcome, because it lets them focus on their work, and also is seen as something that helps the civil society instead of controlling them.
Nice example, very clear. Wow.
I see you’ve got a great interest in social enterprise, the SEWF, and etc. How do you see social enterprise being part of that harnessing of community willpower, and how well advanced is the environment in Taiwan for encouraging social enterprises? Are there big challenges?
I actually come from a co-op, like solidarity economy background. My mom participated in the founding of Homemaker United Foundation. It’s very old, it started when I was six or something.
It’s now 30 years old, and from that movement began the Homemakers Union Consumer Co-Op. They are one of the first co-ops that’s a consumer co-op, that works directly with the farmers, negotiate fair trading, and also have a collaborative education and stuff like that. It’s been running for almost 30 years.
They’re pretty sizable, self-sustainable, and so on. There’s not so much publicity, per se, but there is a very solid community. In my other background, of course, from the free software world, we’re used to the idea of social enterprise.
For example, there’s a browser called Firefox. It’s from the Mozilla Corporation, and its annual revenue is like 250 million GBP. It’s huge. All of this income, it just donates to the Mozilla Foundation, promoting Internet right and human rights, Internet privacy, and things like that.
I think when I think about social enterprise, I don’t only think about new entities, about small-sized rural area, although those are very important, too. I think fundamentally, it is about challenging the models of a for-profit only or a government supported-only models, I see it as a third alternative.
Just tomorrow, we will open a Social Innovation Lab at TAF, the Taiwan Air Force Park. It’s dedicated for social enterprises. It’s open 24 hours. It’s quite a few resources there, and also I do open policymaking there.
Every Wednesday, I am there, full time, my office hour. Anyone, who, as much as having anything to say or ask about social enterprise, gets to meet me in person. I have a radically transparent record of doing this.
We are also visiting all the different areas in Taiwan through the regional offices, and meet with the social enterprise there, too. We do collaborative policymaking this way. In Taiwan, we really need to do that, because as far as social enterprise is concerned, it’s almost half the ministry’s business.
We have the Minister of Labor, and Ministry of Economy Affairs, driving the NGO and the company styled Social Enterprises respectively. We also have the Minister of Health and Welfare doing the long-term care partnerships through social enterprises.
We also have the Minister of Education working on startups, and we also have the Council of Agriculture working on urban, rural, or farmland renovation through social enterprises.
Also investment at the NDC and the FSC, [laughs] and also now the Minister of Interior is working to revitalize the co-ops.
It’s very, very widespread.
Yes. The idea is that through these collaborative meetings, we actually go and look at the solutions, the social enterprises, that does perhaps better than the government, and also the problems they face.
Because of the radical transparency, we go back every two months to the same place saying that OK, this ministry now resolve your problem A, that ministry, problem B. In the government, it’s really just a peer-to-peer model, where we’re not seeing this as bottom-up or top-down.
We’re just solving the problems that the problem solvers face. That’s the basic idea. I think, really we’re trying to do a regional SCWF-like conference, maybe June next year. When we do that, again, we make sure the agenda setting is entirely done by nongovernmental entities...
You plan to host that in Taiwan?
In Taiwan, certainly. We talked with SEWF about that. They’re like, "You know, if it’s not too close to September..." [laughs]
That’s fine. [laughs]
It’s maybe like TEDx. They’re pretty open to do something like that together. Just two days ago, I had a TED talk that talks about the social enterprise policy. I will just take two minutes to quickly walk through to it.
At the moment, one very concrete thing is that we’re amending the company law. A few weeks after that, after today, we will send a version to the Parliament that specifically has the constituency clause that says in addition to making a profit, a company may declare that it’s also working on the double or triple bottom line, CSR, or whatever that they want.
One of the MPs, Karen Yu in the MP. Karen is proposing that if they meet certain standards, they also qualify for more ecosystem help from the government.
Another MP, Jason Hsu, is also proposing a benefit corporation. I think this part, we already do, actually, in the existing company law amendment clause, where if a company declare its social purpose in its company charter, we’re now working on a way so that they can flag it publicly on the Minister of Economy’s website.
Now, everybody who has a Google search capability can see for real that it’s part of their company charter, instead of just something they claim on the website. There is much less chance of brainwashing this way, and of course, considering stakeholders.
Now, about the benefit corporation reports, this is Jason’s addition. If all three passes, of course, we’ll have a very strong regulatory framework on which to grow social enterprise. Even if just the basic company law and the social purpose passes, we’ll still have a pretty good foundation on which to grow social enterprises.
I think very concretely, I see each SE really is a different way of connecting between the society and the enterprise sectors.
It’s not like one size fits all. We have SEs that mobilizes the handicapped people, the people in a wheelchair. Instead of seeing them as people in need, they actually train them into designers, and then inform the cities to do city planning.
We also have entire villages destroyed by a hurricane 10 years ago -- actually taking care of their rebuild, it’s like Christchurch -- where they build social enterprises around that.
Of course, we see the co-ops directly working with farmers, and we also see crowdfunding solar panel installation company that promise to amplify your donation to local charity by threefold, by buying solar panels, and LEDs, like saving schemes, and there.
Of course, on paper, all these are social enterprises, but they are completely unlike each other. There’s nothing that really describes them uniformly. We say, as long as you try to fulfill your social mission and declare yourself, you’re a social enterprise.
It’s best if we are keep being surprised by new innovation models instead of dictating. The challenge we’re facing now is, of course, almost 80 percent of people agree with this great idea.
If we just look at the degree of...if you take people, a random person on the street, and say, "OK, just describe one social innovation model to me," only 19 percent of people can actually do that. They all think it’s a good idea, but it’s not actually reaching.
Easy to build.
But not very common.
Right, which is why the civil society and social enterprises are now working on those collaborative gift packs. If you buy one, you actually get 12 stories or 20 stories. This is a great way to raise awareness.
If any government ministry entities or government-owned corporations buy over MP $1 million of these things or services from a social enterprise over a year, then the minister without portfolio in charge of social enterprise will come and give an award. That’s me.
(laughter)
That’s what we call Buying Power award.
(laughter)
I think you saw the video at the end of SEWF. Scotland has done a very, very good job in educating very, very young kids...
Very much so.
...about just having them understanding social enterprises. Is that something that’s happening in Taiwan as well?
How much is it reaching through into education?
We see a lot of K-12 level schools, seeking of this kind of community integration, mostly because for the new curriculum. We have a new basic education curriculum that’s coming in a year and a half. Before I joined The Cabinet, I was actually in the development committee for that.
The main point being that we are moving from an examination skill capacity-based education model to a character, literacy, autonomy-based education model. Once we do that, we actually make the senior high school something like universities, where people pick their own curriculums, APs, and whatever.
We also tell the primary school and the junior high school-level people that they have to work with their local community to design their own school’s curriculum. Every school will end up being very different from each other.
Now, many people actually working in the primary school level doesn’t actually have much of experience doing that.
That’s a big challenge...
It is a big challenge, but there’s like two years to meet that challenge. Some people, of course, work with the STEM community, with maker movement and so on. Some school now position themselves to be teaching philosophy, or whatever. [laughs]
There’s a lot of interest, especially outside of the six metropolis, to actually get the education experiencing their local industries. If it’s a farming community, then it’s integrating with the social enterprise on that community.
If it’s a industry, making community, then there’s also social innovations happens around there, if it’s touristy, and so. It’s going to be much more integrated, and I see a lot of social enterprises now, because of the demand of the primary schoolers, they actually join these kind of programs and basically they augment the teachers through curriculum design this way.
There’s a social enterprise working with the Khan Academy internationally, and produced a locally translated version, and basically teach them the way that basically having those students dictate their own pace, and have the teacher basically be co-learners. They’ve done really, really well as a social enterprise and also as the innovator.
Social enterprises, so how do the parents feel about that very, very, that you’re basically breaking down the entire education ethos and rebuilding it again from scratch? That’s quite a big leap for parents who feel very safe in a system where they can see standardized results and kids tested.
This is not specific to Taiwan, but it’s a global issue. How are parents reacting to the idea in Taiwan?
I think it’s good for people entering the primary school level, their parents is actually born after the lifting of the martial law. The people educated under martial law would not adapt that easily to this.
(laughter)
Agreed.
For people who were raised, like they’re 40 years or younger, those people are much more receptive.
New mindset.
Also, they grow up with personal computers, if not the Internet. They know the idea that you can’t really predict the world, how’s it like 12 years down the road? Once you have this mindset, you might become much more open to this kind of social innovation.
Also, because Taiwan is, I think, Asia’s prime example of alternative education, because a few years ago, we had this law of Education Experiments that allows everybody to own their own education. As long as it passes the board of the city level of the education board, anyone can be homeschooled.
Personally, I dropped out at 15, [laughs] but people can now begin at seven and eight, or whatever, and still enjoy the same resources as their counterparts in traditional school, and even go to school a couple days a week.
Because of this, we already have a wealth of information from the alternative schools over the past five years, seven years, or so. To be honest, most of it actually doesn’t quite work...
(laughter)
...but there’s cases that it worked really well. Those ideas spread. Now, we’re taking the best parts into the basic education curriculum.
You start from the basic level up.
Right.
What are the things that make it successful? Are there some very obvious things that you’re trying to encourage people to adopt, or is it very situation-specific?
I think for what we call character-based education, the spirits are, respectfully, autonomy, interaction, and common good. I think what’s good about Taiwan is that although autonomy and interactional communication is fairly new, especially for the teachers trained in the national normal university...
(laughter)
Everybody kind of agreed on the common good part...
(laughter)
...so we emphasize that.
Work on the common ground, right?
Start where there is consensus, and then build.
Exactly, and build around it. It would position this kind of new education reform as a way for students to see each other not as competitors, but as collaborators. To see teachers not as authority to be rebelled against, but a useful collaborator in their course of learning.
Now, the teachers understand that and actually agrees with that. Nobody wants an antagonistic relationship with their students. The same goes for the parents. That’s the angle we’re working on.
It’s the same approach to the previous one, kind of the lobbying approach?
Exactly.
It’s a consensus building?
Bring all those different ideas, and build a common ground from there.
We start from the common good. From the common good, we really need to learn to interact with each other. After some interaction, people will become empowered enough so they feel autonomy. The other way around would be like individualist thing, which doesn’t quite work in Taiwan.
Then you have to try and add on the interaction and the common good on top, which is not that good.
Fantastic.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it?
We should meet with the minister more often, right?
(laughter)
Come to you for advice about life, everything.
That’s right.
Feel free to drop by. [laughs]
Very, very, very interesting, very inspiring.
Also, from an organization point of view, there’s some things here that we could do.
Have you got any -- I was going to say Harvard, but I should use a UK example -- any UK business schools coming to you and talking to you about how you could take this concept and apply it in an organization?
Yeah, we did. Actually, before I joined The Cabinet, I was touring all around Europe. There was this Nesta UK that organized quite a few conferences about the experience we had with Uber and things like that.
I think they informed a particular candidate’s platform during that election, Corbyn, who said we need to adopt massive online deliberation and whatever. That was straight from the report. [laughs]
It’s not all from Taiwan, but that particular line, it was informed by the Nesta study. We do work pretty closely with our counterparts around the world.
Great, fantastic.
Audrey, because now you have an official ministerial role, are you finding it harder to go out and be invited? Do you remember that we invited you to go to Hong Kong, and then we had all the problems because of China, and your role a minister?
Are you finding it a bit harder to have this role to speak on international platforms, or is there a way around it? [laughs]
We found a workaround, fortunately. Basically, we just sent my avatar.
(background music)
[admiringly] Ah.
You are virtual.
(laughter)
It’s working really well. This is one of those two-minute films.
(film plays)
It kind of morphs between the two avatar’s bodies. [laughs]
[admiringly] Oh.
I do telepresence through holograms, through like Pepper’s Ghost effects, virtual robotic doubles, and things like that.
I have visited Madrid and Boston. Actually, I just gave a virtual talk in Sichuan, China, of all places, a couple of days ago.
[laughs]
It’s actually really cheap. You can rent it trivially. It’s basically an iPad on wheels. I can walk around and have a 360 view.
It’s pretty smart, it avoids obstacles and things like that. So I’ve been able...There’s no regulation in UN or any multilateral agreemen that says the minister cannot look at a video recording, even though it’s recorded two seconds ago.
(laughter)
So in Paris, in the Open Government Partnerships I met, I actually was in the audience watching my avatar speak on stage with other ministers.
Really?
Yeah, because there was this rule about Taiwan Ministers onstage, but there’s nothing preventing...
...your avatar from being there. That’s really clever.
(laughter)
Building on Susana’s question, in many countries, it’s very easy to be innovator outside of government. There’s a perception that once you’re inside government, it’s harder. Are you finding that?
Not at all. I’m finding it’s exactly the same. I don’t actually give orders. That’s what anarchism means. I only help people when they come to me for facilitation. Because of that, the career public servants, they just call me Audrey. I’m not like a higher rank official. I’m still doing very much the same thing.
Of course, now with much more publicity. It means they’re engagement programs are more successful than before. Otherwise, it’s the same relationship.
That’s positive. [laughs]
Thank you very much.
真的很棒！ [laughs]
That was inspiring.
It is.
I know she’s very busy, so thank you so much.
Again, thank you for your time.
Thank you.
There’s nothing confidential, here? We can publish the whole thing?
(laughter)
We’ve learned so much from you.
(laughter)
If there’s anything we can do to work with you.
So we’ll make a transcript and we can go over it.
All right.
All right, cheers.