Audrey Tang On Stimulating Social Innovation In Taiwan & Radically Trusting Citizens

A civic hacker and Taiwan's Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation, Audrey is known for revitalising the computer languages Perl and Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin.

In the public sector, Audrey served on Taiwan national development council's open data committee and K-12 curriculum committee; and led the country's first e-Rulemaking project.

In the private sector, Audrey worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.

In the voluntary sector, Audrey contributed to Taiwan's g0v ("govzero"), a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society, with the call to "fork the government".

Audrey discusses working with the Taiwanese Government as the Digital Minister to foster new age social innovations in the Asia-Pacific region, whilst creating a friendlier and more mature social innovation ecosystem.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Audrey, to kick things off, we would love to hear a little bit about your background, and what led you to your passion in social innovation?

[Audrey Tang] - Like many people today, I believe that bureaucrats are the best pushers and movers of social innovation, that they are the most innovative bunch and they're optimists. This strange condition began when I was 15 years old; that was 1996. I discovered the future of human knowledge is on this new thing called the world wide web, and my textbooks were all out of date.

I told my teachers and my principal that I want to quit school and start my education on the world wide web, and surprisingly, my principal said, "go ahead with it, tomorrow you don't have to go to school anymore and I will cover it for you."

A year later, I founded a start-up working on web technology. I got to join this fabulous open source, at that time still called the free software community, that runs with this crazy idea. It opened multi-stakeholder political systems that still power the internet to this day.

I would argue the world wide web is the first social innovation that I ran into, and also the open source movement.

It's been a fascinating journey. The fact that you were just even able to step out of school and self-educate, it's just not the status quo, right?

That's exactly right. But with the advent of the internet nowadays, up to 10% of Taiwanese students can choose their own curriculum and participate in experimental schooling. After 10 years of this alternative school, starting last year, we actually brought what we call the digital competence throughout the alternative school’s movement into our K-12 curriculum, replacing for example media literacy. Nowadays, everybody is a producer, so we say competence rather than literacy.

It's been a fascinating journey Audrey, and it's led to your work as Digital Minister for the Taiwanese Government. Can you please tell us a little bit about how the Taiwanese Government has been promoting social innovation with a range of really diverse approaches?

Well, I'm a Digital Minister working with the Taiwanese Government, not for the Taiwanese Government. I mean that I'm at this point between the social movements on one side, and the government on the other side, making sure that each side can see although we have different positions, we do have common values after all. This is evidenced by, for example, the Presidential Hackathon, where every year our President Tsai Ing-wen hands five trophies to social innovators across Taiwan and the world actually; there's an international track as well.

Those social innovators, for example, instead of convincing people to reduce the use of plastic bottles, which is very difficult if they already have this habit, they made this Pokémon Go-esque game called Circle Plus, that people can just refill at water refill stations on this map, to complete tasks, to collect coins and redeem these for specialty drinks and social enterprise goods in local stores.

This successfully changed people's habits, and then the partnership with the environmental protection agency was the trophy.

The trophy is a micro projector and it shows you the president promising you whatever innovation you did in the past three months will become national policy in the next 12 months. This is the highest level of cross-sectoral collaboration.

I love your clarification of the working 'with', and it reminds me of this real shift, in that we used to be designing for, to really now designing with and alongside collaboratively.

Audrey, how does your unique role in the public sector then help facilitate and communicate social innovation to the public?

First of all, because I'm working with the government, I'm also part of a vibrant civic technologists’ community such as G0v. G0v is a very simple idea for all the government services in Taiwan through GOV.TW. I'm sure it's the same for your jurisdiction as well. They replaced it systematically with G0V.TW. For example, our national participation portal joined the GOV.TW, which has more than 10 million visitors, half of the country's population.

If we change the O to a 0 [zero] in your browser bar, then you go into this shadow government, where people co-create normal solutions for each, and every digital service people don't like. There's this demonstration, but not in the protest sense, but the demonstration sense. After joining the G0V.TW for example, there was a young person named Howard in Thailand City that saw that when we're rationing out masks, people often get confused which places still have masks and which don't.

He created a map where people can report where there's still masks in stock in every Asian pharmacy. Because I'm also part of that channel, I could bring that idea to the premier, and now every 30 seconds you can see on the real-time map all the different 6,000 or so pharmacies and their mask storages, so that if you swipe your rationed health items to the cart with your NHI card, you can get maybe nine medical masks per every two weeks, if you're an adult or if you're a child.

The person queuing after you can refresh their map or their chat box and actually see the number decreased by nine or ten. If they see a rather large increase, they will call the toll-free line to report that something is wrong with our rationing system.

This is participatory accountability, and that's reverse procurement. A social innovator makes a good idea, gets it disseminated, supplies it to the media and to the society. We work as venders to the civic technologists to fulfil those social innovations resources for clients.

Those are some really innovative approaches there. I'm keen to hear what you believe other governments globally could learn from Taiwan's approach to social innovation and entrepreneurship? We're strong believers here at Impact Boom in place-based approaches to social innovation, but really keen to hear your thoughts on this Audrey…

I think one of the best ways to go about the social innovation space when you are a government agency is to radically trust your citizens.

Make sure that the citizens set the agenda in the here and now, through initiatives like citizens assemblies, sortition, sandbox applications, Presidential Hackathons, E-petitions, I'm probably missing a dozen that we run. It doesn't matter the form that it takes, what matters is that citizens choose the time and space, and the government can serve them as a platform for the stakeholders to meet, to find common values out of different positions and deliver innovations.

The main thing in Taiwan is that we have this mantra called "fast, fair and fun." If the government can keep this mood of fast innovation, that people's ideas get reflected very quickly, a fair distribution to include the people who are closest to the pain and have the least access to decision making powers, people who are disenfranchised for example, as well as make plenty of use of dog memes, cat memes, and things that make social innovation fun, then the government can amplify, without taking over or taking control of social innovation.

What are your observations then of the social enterprise movement more broadly in Taiwan?

In the Taiwan social enterprise movement, we are a fusion of many different movements. There's already a very strong co-op culture in Taiwan, in my parents' generation. More and more they're looking for democracy not just within the co-op, but also engagement with the stakeholders and the wider community through advocacy. Of course, socially purposeful products and services is one of the ways to do that. There's also a very strong B-Corp movement, where the traditional for-profit companies nowadays are required if they're publicly listed to go through the Global Development Goals and things like that.

But for even not public listed companies, there's more than hundreds of them registering to basically treat themselves as publicly listed companies and to have full accountability on their ESG Impacts and their status as well.

Finally, the charities in Taiwan are also looking to work with famous YouTubers. I just filmed the most trending YouTube film in Taiwan, on the social enterprise products [of Taiwan].

We basically introduce and rap as quickly as possible to introduce the social purpose of five social enterprises products. The reason why literally one of the most famous YouTubers in Taiwan wants to promote social enterprise is partly because his younger sister runs a bubble tea drink shop, and the milk that it came from, the supplier, is a social enterprise. They identify strongly with this advocacy, and also because it was crowdfunded making this film also increases their reach.

It's great to hear that there's such strong traction growing there Audrey and good that some of these YouTube videos are going viral, that really put a focus on some of these social enterprises and their products.

There's obviously been a huge change globally this year with the added impacts of COVID-19 around the globe. Where do you see key gaps and opportunities for us to tackle these deep-rooted, social, environmental and cultural problems that have arisen as a result of COVID-19?

My perspective here may not transfer that well, because Taiwan has been officially post-pandemic for months now. We have concerts with tens of thousands in the live audience. They're all wearing masks, but anyway, I think that we may offer a glimpse of a post-COVID world in Taiwan. It seems that this is for the first time that each and every [body], no matter whether it is in the business sector, charities, government, we have encountered that same urgency in tackling the same problem together, regardless of our original priorities. It let us have a glimpse to look at what the world may be when we have hit the environmental carbon emission targets. Because of COVID, for a couple of months we actually reached our carbon emission targets.

It showed that a different vision is possible, that of solidarity and of the longer term and longer view thinking. It also elevated Taiwan on the international stage, so that we can participate in much more multilateral conversations.

For example, a few days before the World Health Assembly, we put together a 14 economies conversation around tackling COVID together. I'm sure that we can also apply this collaboration well with the Social Enterprise World Forum.

The first time that we've run these two forums digitally in the same place, which is cyberspace, would’ve been much harder if we had to bring all the Taiwanese to Nova Scotia. Also, it enabled us to tackle not only climate change, but also this information crisis, or even quantum cryptography or any other incoming issues that affect the entire globe.

Just now Audrey you've mentioned the Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit, and obviously there's a collaboration there with the Social Enterprise World Forum. You're talking about 400 delegates from Taiwan, really participating in this [APSIS]. Can you talk us through a little bit more about what's planned for the Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit this year?

The APSIS, (to shorten the syllables), theme is ‘Re-imagine Asia.’ This is our third summit, but the first digital one, and we are not only sharing Taiwan's achievements in the voice that I described.

We are also collectively re-imagining the next wave of social developments in the Asia-Pacific region, to create a friendlier and more mature social innovation ecosystem together. To that end, this is centred around the action, the impact, sustainability, solution and ecosystem.

The great thing is that the ‘re-imagine sustainability’ part is a few panels, and then we just lead everyone into the Social Enterprise World Forum. After our delegates and viewers purchase a ticket for the APSIS, they automatically get a ticket for the SEWF as well. After they attend the SEWF, then we have the high-level dialogue about how to transfer the learnings we learn from the SEWF beyond the voluntary local reviews, which many cities are now doing the SDG voluntary local reviews. But, how do we take more social entrepreneurship into account and put it in the front-end stance to the voluntary local review for the municipalities?

Wonderful. I love that action-based approach and no doubt throughout both APSIS and SEWF, a range of really inspiring projects and initiatives will be shared globally. Which ones are those that you have come across recently, which you believe are creating some great positive social change?

One of the most exciting winners of this year's Presidential Hackathon is as I briefly mentioned the Circle Plus tea serving app. The app is a combination of the tea serving culture, and mass participation, to put forward an action plan for plastic reduction. The idea, very simply, is a water refill map for locating drinking points in Taiwan.

If one doesn't have to buy water to really satisfy their thirst, people with an environmental inclination will be more willing to join in. The Presidential Hackathon was paired then with the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency who shared the latitudes and longitudes of water quality and so on.

The team of social innovators make it social, so that people can comment on ‘this water tastes sweet’ or anything like that. In addition, of course, there's various tasks. For example, going to a tea shop with a refill station in a business cluster, you get 50 gold coins and things like that.

Since this launch, it has more than increased its participation tenfold, thanks to that recognition of the Presidential Hackathon. I think it's a really good idea to use something like a Pokémon Go gamification to change people's habits in order to reduce plastic waste.

It sounds like a great initiative.

Audrey, to finish off then, you no doubt have a great array of books and resources and other things that you could recommend to our listeners.

Sure. I recently joined a RadicalXchange Foundation, where the 'ex' is literally an 'X', with the Ethereum Founder, Vitalik Buterin, the economists Glen Weyl and Danielle Allen and so on. At RadicalXchange, we're basing our ideas on this book called Radical Markets. Radical Markets is a few proposals of social innovation in a sense that we re-imagine how voting is done, how the distribution of matching funds and grants can be fused into quadratic funding and many other seemingly crazy [ideas], but actually in Taiwan, we're applying it directly to the Presidential Hackathon like quadratic voting.

Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit Audrey Tang.jpg

I would recommend Radical Market, not because I believe in each specific idea, but I believe it's a very interesting proposition that market and democracy reinforce each other rather than take each other apart.

This is something that all social entrepreneurs of course have, not left wing, not right wing, but an up wing take on the world.

Audrey, you have such great experience in the field. I can't help but put one more question to you, and that would be, for our listeners out there who have an idea, that are keen to go out there and turn that into impact. They would consider themselves an impact entrepreneur or a social entrepreneur, what would be a parting piece of advice that you would leave with them to consider in taking their idea to impact?

I will share my favourite quote from the singer songwriter Leonard Cohen, and it goes like this, "ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in."

If you perfect your innovation, other people may applaud you, but they will not join your work. Release early, release often, admit that nothing is perfect, and maybe just by correcting typos, or by making sure that whatever message you put forward starts a hashtag that you lose control of. If you lose control, other people can take part in your community. There's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in.

It's a fantastic insight to end with Audrey. We're very much looking forward to seeing you this year at the Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit, and the Social Enterprise World Forum. Now that it's gone digital, people globally are going to be able to join us. Audrey, thanks so much again for your really generous insights and time today. We do appreciate it and we'll look forward to following you on your journey and working with the Taiwanese Government.

This content is sponsored by Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan.