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.
In Taiwan, certainly. We talked with SEWF about that. They’re like, "You know, if it’s not too close to September..." [laughs]
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...
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.
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.
Also investment at the NDC and the FSC, [laughs] and also now the Minister of Interior is working to revitalize the co-ops.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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 ...
That’s very encouraging, mostly first, because the minister doesn’t have to actually pass any regulation.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
It’s like a tea-making art. It was really popular in Taiwan, but nowadays it’s...
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, not at all.
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.
Right, "Come to our system, and use this if you think it’s good for you."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Right. Exactly.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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 like the Minister of Transport now, and it becomes very high like this. Saying, "We really enforce this transportation idea."
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 ...
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.
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.
Yeah, but for things like this, this is actually already semi-diplomatic with a semi-sovereign entity. It’s not just Uber.
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.
