Would you mind first introducing yourself?

Hello, I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement.

That’s great. What does that mean that you do on a day-to-day basis, or what’s your responsibilities in that? Or more like, what do you think the purpose is of what you do?

As a conservative anarchist, I’m working with the government, not for the government. Again, I want the government to trust the people to work with them.

Very concretely speaking, whenever people complain about anything that the government does, we invite the people who complain into the kitchen, which is the social innovation lab co-designed by social entrepreneurs, and figure out solutions together.

That was quite a short little bite there. You want to tell me the story of how that came to be? That sounds amazing. That’s what you were explaining over there with the other lady, wasn’t it?

Mm-hmm.

Just tell me the story of that, if you would.

When I was 15 years old, I dropped out of junior high school to start my education on the World Wide Web, because knowledge was being created there. Then I ran into the fabulous Internet society that runs this crazy idea, what they call rough consensus and collaborative governance, that still powers the Internet until today.

The idea is that we demonstrated this kind of collaborative governance with half a million people on the street by occupying the parliament for 22 days during 2014. That’s called the Sunflower Revolution.

In the Sunflower Revolution, people who took the place of the MPs, the parliament, demonstrated that if you use good civic technology, you can have, over the course of three weeks, a converging consensus, rather than going nowhere, like some other Occupies did.

It’s a real public demonstration. After that, all the mayors who did not support the Occupy gets not re-elected, and the mayors who did support the Occupy found themselves elected, even without preparation of an inauguration speech.

Afterwards, Taiwan’s political climate become open government first and crowdsourcing first, which is why we’re now number one on international open data, e-participation, women’s inclusivity, online participation, and so on.

That was because the civil society did a really large demo of how to do collaboration together that I have this position today to act as a channel.

Thank you. That’s right to the point, and amazing and wonderful. What’s the relationship here with social enterprise?

When I was a child and started learning coding, when I was eight years old, I did that to teach my brother and cousins mathematics. To me, coding was always for social good. It’s always like coding was the logic as the notes and the possibility of interaction as the melodies.

Earlier, when I was 16 or so, I joined the free software movement. There came a pivotal moment in 1998, where the free software movement, part of our people became the open source movement, convincing the largest corporations in Silicon Valley to switch to a collaboratively-producing model.

This model, for example, Netscape becomes Mozilla. Mozilla makes Firefox, but very few people know the Mozilla Corporation is a 100 percent mission-locked subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation. They call themselves a social enterprise right on the front page.

It’s like $500 million in revenue yearly. It’s employing over 1,000 people, and it’s one of the pinnacles of this open source movement, that we can find sustainable entrepreneurship models for the large corporations who see collaboration as an inherent good, not just something that they do in CSR.

I think the social enterprise movement is somewhat like open source movement 10 years ago. We’re going from a movement into a generally accepted practice. Maybe not a best practice, but certainly better practice.

That is how I connect my work in the open source and free culture movement to the social enterprise and social innovation movements.

How is that government changed so radically in Taiwan in such a short period? How is that example possible in a world where there’s massive disruption? In Australia, there’s political chaos. I’m sure you’ve heard about that. What’s the hope here for us in that context, that you seem to have an example of?

Mostly, I think democracy for us is a very new thing. I still remember the martial law. That was 30 years ago, when we had our first presidential election. We don’t have hundreds of years of representative democracy as the tradition.

For us, Internet and democracy comes on the same year. It’s natural for people to experiment and combine the two together. We see that in newer countries as well. In Estonia, for sure, but also in Madrid, after their transitional period from a dictatorship.

I think those newer democracies, because they were born with the Internet, has more of this rough consensus, collaborative nature in mind. Then that only means that we get to pioneer and pilot, even when it’s very expensive.

Any models that we experiment out -- for example, the Participation Officer Network, for example, the vTaiwan method, and so -- we all publish publicly on open access journals. We are now working closely with mostly municipalities, because we think that’s mostly where the innovation happens.

That’s where people have the same lived-in experience to solve common social problems. We don’t know how to do national or federal level yet, but there’s quite a few cities that are in an alliance. For example, the D-CENT Project, now the DECODE Project, and so on, that works on this kind of collaborative governance in a city-to-city basis.

This is good. This is really good. This is quite inspiring.

Thank you.

I don’t expect someone like you, as a minister in government, because of my stereotypes, because my ideas. How do you feel about that, when you meet somebody, and you know you can recognize when somebody’s like, "What? You’re a government minister?"

Just speak to that for a moment, and then why you might feel at home here in the social enterprise house, if you will.

As a government minister, I’m well aware that there’s many expectations that’s usually associated with hierarchical power. The value of the Internet, really, is to make sure that people who experience hierarchical power can feel that it’s being complemented, but not reinforced, by what we call the new power, or the peer-to-peer power.

For me, I act as a bridge between the generations. When I go into the government, I don’t have a contract. I have a compact, or a covenant, from the civil society and the government side, with me in the middle.

The covenant has three points:

First, it’s radical transparency. Everything I see, I get to publish for the common good, and I don’t know any state secret.

The second thing is that I don’t give command, nor take command. It’s all by voluntary association.

The third thing, and the most important, is location independence. Wherever I am on Earth, I am working in the capacity as the digital minister. I get to tour around Taiwan, around Asia Pacific, around the globe, meeting people who are experiencing social injustice, experiencing environment issues, and so on, and tell them that #TaiwanCanHelp — and connect back to the social entrepreneurs in Taiwan.

Indeed, to the 12 different ministries associated with social innovation, so that they see through my eyes, through live streaming, through 360 live streaming, through virtual reality, the stories, the ethnographic descriptions of what people feel like in the field, and how their policies result in good or bad of the community development.

Again, I’m acting as a channel to make the strengths of the community and the strengths of existing career public service connect together, absorbing the risk, and make sure that the credit goes where credit is due.

I want to ask you so many questions, but I’m going to just check my list. I don’t want to do all of them, but I want to make sure we have a few things that fit within this narrative that we’ve defined, which you’re blowing apart, anyway. [laughs] In a good way, don’t worry.

I’ve heard a lot about the government thing here and social enterprise. Now, what would your message be for governments around the world looking at the social enterprise space?

The social enterprise people know how to do public governance, facing a particular issue, a social injustice, an environmental problem, inequality, and so on. For any minister, my message is that whatever your ministry does that corresponds to sustainable development goals, there exist social entrepreneurs that can do this job at a community level better than you.

You better collaborate and make them partners. Not just contractors, not just vendors, not just grant receivers, but truly partners, and include them in the policymaking. The process determines the content of the policy.

If you engage social entrepreneurs at the very beginning of ideation of policy, then the policy will not get wrong. If you look again and again, like for me, every week it’s my office hour from 10 AM to 10 PM.

Anyone can just come to me -- rough sleepers, people working on social work, and things like that -- as long as they agree to the transcription to be published on the Internet. I encourage fellow ministries to do the same.

Maybe not one day every week, but certainly, one day every month or every quarter, to review, to renew the compact with the civil society, and especially the social sector.

How did you discover this purpose of doing this in this very unique way, of bringing so much to the government part of it? You could have gone anywhere, but why government?

Because democracy is recessing around the world. Taiwan has one of -- actually, the most -- open civil society, the most thriving civil society, according to the CIVICUS Monitor. The freedom of assembly, of speech, of association, if you click "Asia" and then "fully open", you only see Taiwan.

This is not saying our Australian or New Zealand partners, or our Nordic partners are not doing better than us, but especially in Asia, we’re the one with the freest civil society.

But with that, we have another statistics that says, the more free the civil society is, the less trust they have on institutions. It’s the paradox of our times, because the social media, the Internet, with disinformation, it encourage outrage, but it doesn’t encourage consensus.

I think as Taiwan is the region’s leader in terms of civil society freedom, we must develop civic technology to prove that you can invite the people with dissent, and make them into co-chefs in the kitchen.

Otherwise, other countries in our region are tempted to go authoritarian, or go back to dictatorship. I think this freedom, the torch of freedom, if you will, in the region is one of the reasons why Taiwan exist, and how Taiwan can help.

How do you feel being here in Scotland?

It’s awesome. It’s my second time here.

Any comment on social enterprise from what you’ve seen here?

Yeah. I think this year, after a decade, we see the narratives being very mature, like this sector is ready to engage other sectors on an equal basis.

I think we’re really finding our identity here, and also spreading the identity to places like Ethiopia, to places where the traditional development programs have not exactly overachieved, and spread this new message of social entrepreneurship and value co-creation.

How can we help you share this broader story of a radically different way of governing?

There’s people writing books about the Taiwan experience. There is "New Power." There is "Death of the Gods." There’s multiple academic papers, some of which we publish ourselves. You can follow me on Twitter.

It’s @audreyt, T as in Tang. Also, you can just follow the idea of g0v, which is G-0-V. That is the movement where people get to fork the government, to look at a government service, do something better as an alternative, relinquish the copyright.

In the next procurement cycle, the government just merges it back. g0v and the Taiwan government, I think, are a perfect example of the civil society talking with the public sector as equals, and not as its subject.

Very good. Oh, my...

You’d like to share that haven’t talked about? The container for this is the closing film of Social Enterprise World Forum.

I know. Can you share the whole video with me? I know you are just going to use a fragment.

Yeah, exactly. I’d be more than happy to.

You have my email, right?

I give you my promise to do that, OK?

Sure, of course.

I understand that that would be useful for you, and that’s how you operate.

That’s right.

It’s an agreement. Was there anything else you wanted to say?

Yes. I would like to say that the sustainable development goals is a really useful index for us to identify the work that we do. For example, most of my work is in #SDG17 — including open data, international collaboration, cross-sectoral evidence-based collaboration, and so on.

I would encourage people who work on social entrepreneurship to index themselves with SDGs, because if they do so, we can discover each other much easily, and Taiwan can help in each and every of those sustainable goals.

Good idea. I like that.

Hmm. Anything you want to say to the hosts?

Thank you. Let’s meet again in Ethiopia. Also, next May in Taiwan, we’re going to co-host an event with SEWF. Fingers crossed.

Oh, I see. There’s the little plug, and stuff like that.

That’s right.

OK, all right.