Hi! When did you arrive to Taiwan?

I got here yesterday morning at daybreak. So it was a great flight from Vancouver on EVA, because we leave at midnight and then you get here in the morning. You just have to skip a day.

Yes, so you sleep well on the plane? Any jetlag?

No, I’m very lucky. I travel a lot. And in Canada, we have four-and-a-half time zones, so you get used to it. So for me to go meet with someone in the federal government, is a three-hour time change. So you get used to traveling to go to meetings.

Exactly. At the time, I’m here in the office only for six weeks, so I’m a new minister here. I’m still getting used to this whole setting. At the time of the announcement of my entering the Cabinet, I was actually in New Zealand and participating with some, it’s called the Open Source Open Society conference and with people from the Akina Foundation, actually.

Yes, right, who are hosting next year’s Social Enterprise World Forum.

Christchurch.

Yes, right, this year was Hong Kong, the Social Enterprise World Forum. Next year is New Zealand. Kind of sad this morning, they had another earthquake.

What I meant is that, before I knew that I would become a Cabinet minister, I’m already very interested in participating in such kind of activities and I’ve already actually registered for Christchurch myself so that Taiwan doesn’t have to pay for my ticket. [Laughter]

I don’t know if you’re aware but this year, our keynote, one of our keynote at the World Forum was Mark Surman from Mozilla Foundation, because Mark and I have worked together for many years. And I’m actually on the board of directors at a small startup, that I think you would enjoy given your background, called Ethelo. It’s a decision-making thing, so Ethelo Democracy is all about this colleague creating an algorithm that allows group decision making.

Awesome, it’s called Othello?

Ethelo. Ethelo.org, and from reading your background, it might be something you would be interested.

Yes, I have very close connection with the Loomio team which is working in a similar space. I’m very interested in technologies that facilitate scalable listening.

So it’s kind of fascinating because it’s done as a “for-profit” on one side and a “non-profit” on the other side. And I’m very impressed with all of your social enterprises. We just came from the disabilities building—it’s quite so amazing. You really have to be at the dinner last night with KPMG, so to see the private sector engage the government. People say, oh, Taiwan is behind, as you know, but you really should be very proud of your social enterprises.

Yes, but we still have to learn from your experience a lot.

I’m more familiar with social enterprise work a lot because I travel to Paris all the time—five months out of the 12 this year. So I’m actually more versed in the social enterprise theme in Paris or in maybe Madrid or in Portugal than in Taiwan. So it’s after I entered the Cabinet that I knew I will be in charge of social enterprise affairs. [Laughter.] So people like Karen, like KPMG of course, are now my teachers. So like you, I’m learning what Taiwan has to offer.

It’s quite amazing because this morning, it was interesting to see the disabilities community focused on technology development and competing in the market place. And we asked them about their customer, and they said our customers don’t know who works here disabled people.

Actually I know of that BIM contracting house before, and I never really learned that it’s a disabilities social enterprise until I read on the online press about this. So I’m like, oh, this BIM company is like that.

So they were pretty amazing because oftentimes, as you know, social enterprises start by saying you should buy from us, we’re a social enterprise. They are like, no, the customer has no idea. But then when the customer does find out, it’s such an added value.

It’s such a great model. Right, so, anything I can help you?

No, I think one of the things that we wanted to encourage, because we know you’re coming to the end of your three-year action plan, that if there’s anything we can do in the next phase, we would really be pleased to share about that. I think that what we can share with other governments is that kind of commitment. As Karen and I were just talking, oftentimes it’s an one-time grant, as opposed to having that multi-year engagement, which we use as a model with other governments. So we would really encourage that continuation of that multi-year partnership.

Definitely. Here in Taiwan, I think, the previous multi-year plan that was led by the minister before me that was really successful, and I’m really feeling blessed that all the important aspects has been covered really from scratch, because at the beginning of that plan there’s no such a recognition of social enterprises and the impact of its importance. But after that plan, by this year, the awareness is sufficient, so much so that we’re talking about changing the Company Act as part of a rewrite that says that maybe companies’ obligations is not just to the financial shareholders, but all the social stakeholders and all the impact must be considered as important as earning value.

One of the things that we have found is, how do we level the playing field? Because governments have been very, very encouraging, using things like tax credits and purchasing to generate incentive. Now we’re saying what happens if governments start to do the same thing with the social enterprise sector? And we start to look at how do we use purchasing and tax credits and services like we’ve done for the last 40 years in the private sector. So level the playing field, not necessarily special, but the same encouragement. Like in Canada, as the economy is where it is, the government has just made a commitment of $176 million in infrastructure to boost the economy. So now, we’re supporting a bill that allows the minister of procurement to add social value onto all our procurement purchasing, especially infrastructure. What it allows is the contractors, who are going to get the bid anyway, to capture some kind of social value, so they may not do it in their main contract, but how do they do it in their supply chain. So like in Scotland, there’s a major construction company that won a big bid to do an arena, and so well you should, you have to do something social. And they said, we’re a construction company, what do we do? So they actually worked with social enterprises to do the food service at the construction site. So now, that construction company says, hey, I could never hire those people with disabilities on the construction site, but now every job site he does, he does with the social enterprises so that he can create those jobs that has a social impact.

Well, that’s great.

And in Vancouver, when they wanted to expand the casino. So we went to the city and said look, you’re going to expand the casino, what’s the social benefit? Because we know it’s not necessarily a social benefit to have a casino. So the agreement was, the casino has to employ 10 percent of all its employees and do 10 percent of its purchasing from the inner city, not just during construction but ongoing, which means they’re getting very creative. So last week I stopped by a social enterprise that does chocolate and coffee around multiple barriers, and they’re getting a big contract from the casino and the hotel to do the chocolates. So it will mean more jobs, right away. So I think that’s the emerging thing that you may want to pay attention to is the use of existing purchasing. Because it’s not more money, some people say we don’t have more money in government, we don’t have to spend more, but how do we get a greater social value out of what we’re already spending? So we start to look at these contracts, and then we help to make it a competitive level playing field. Like in Scotland, they have learned to identify all the contracts that are coming up in the next three to five years so that the social enterprises actually have the opportunity to build capacity. We can’t do all of it but we can do part of it but then they know a contract is coming in three years and they sit down with someone like KPMG and the investment fund, and they say how do we scale up to be competitive? So it’s really, that’s why your government’s decision to do the multi-year action plan becomes so important. [Next sentences inaudible.]

Right, we’re working on some infrastructures that makes this possible, I wouldn’t say overnight. The first is the transparency part because I’m also the Digital Minister in charge of open government. I’ve worked with the PCC, the procurement committee here, 工程會, that publishes, transparently, both the procurement that’s about to be bid—all the tenders—and all the tenders that’s won and how exactly they’re allocating their plans. And by early next year we’ll also publish another set of information that how it actually corresponds to the maybe monthly or every three-month’s quarterly reports from all the ministries as part of their plans. Because otherwise we don’t have the connection between what procurements are doing and our three-year plans. Usually each ministry keeps it originally to themselves of which procurement fulfills which plans, and then they of course have to report to the National Development Council, but it’s a kind of back-end internal system. What we’re trying to do is we are trying to publish all this in as transparently as possible on the internet forum. And then people can come here and then comment and say, okay I look at this three-year plan, it’s now in its second year, and this monthly reports says that it fulfils such and such a plan, but I think some social impact may be added to the next monthly or quarterly report.

LaPage: So will that help? Because one of the issues we have is the silos of all the ministries, and the need to create intersecting lines out of parallel lines.

Exactly, that’s what I’m doing, is mostly adding a new dimension to two-dimensional thinking where they may never overlap, but have a cloud in which that they may actually share all their information. And therefore the interested people, there’s a lot of communities like g0v, like Data for Social Good... these people they can take these numbers and data and then try to figure out which part of it is actually amenable to this kind of addendum that you’re mentioning.

LaPage: But even for the public service to know what the other ministries are doing, it is important.

Exactly, right, how they’re aligned.

Because we’ve… With the new government, with Mr. Trudeau’s government, he said work on social enterprises, so there is like, three different ministries working on a social enterprise strategy, and they didn’t know. I knew. But how do we get there?

We start with actually just sharing all our meetings. We had two meetings already after I entered the Cabinet with the ministries of economic affairs and with labor, and the idea is that for people who are presenting the meeting, we have a stenographer who types out everything everybody says and then sends it to not just the people in those ministries but also all the related ministries like of interior, of education and so on, and then everybody can provide addendum information as appendix to that meeting for the next meeting to look at. And after 10 days, we publish everything to the public, so the public also has some chance to comment.

Wow, that’s amazing.

So at least for the social enterprise part, I think this is working really well. Like in the first meeting we actually found out both ministries independently declared November as Social Enterprise and Small and Middle Enterprise Month, but they never really coordinated. And it’s kind of fortunate that we were able to just coordinate that at the right point—like a week before November, but at least it happened.

And that’s where we find these concerns too, when the purchasing people say we can only purchase what someone tells us, and so how do we instruct the people over here to say, do that? And then your point, how do we monitor and measure the transparency of that. It’s a lot of money government spends.

Right, I expect the first wave of comments may not actually be random internet users but ministries, like other ministries and even local and regional governments who will know that they now have a chance to realign their plans.

And to know what’s happening two or three years out because so often we find out after, or 30 days before. I don’t know if you’ve watched, but the Trudeau government is also doing huge amounts of consultation online—very impressive. At one point we’re like how many weeks? But when you think about it it’s the first time that they’re actually doing that and using them so it’s a start.

Right, the internet of course has its good and bad, but for consultation I think you dramatically lower costs so people can look at all the information in the same place, and then go to face-to-face meetings, but with the face-to-face meetings recorded and then becoming the material of next meeting and so on. Before which, public hearings, even if it’s happening in maybe 10 different cities over Taiwan—those don’t really network. It doesn’t really scale because every region talks about the issues that that region needs, but there’s no national view or the view of the entire Asia-Pacific region.

Because that just happened with one of the ministries of economic development. They did a social innovation consultation all across the country, but I don’t know what happened in the other cities.

So for all the cases like the Company Act rewrite, of closely-held corporation that I mentioned, I told all the professors working on that to basically keep a recording, taping every single public meeting that they have, and then we work with, there’s a lot of machine speech recognition technology now to turn them into transcripts and so on, so that everybody can just carry on instead of doing very parallel things. So, one final point. We’re just passing at the end of the month what we call the Digital Nation plan, which is a plan of the next eight years. This plan I think it’s the first time, and that’s my main work actually, after entering this Cabinet, is to make sure… We call it DIGI+ and D.I.G.I stands for “development,” that’s the infrastructure; and then “innovation,” that’s the private sector; and “governance,” which is the public sector; and “inclusion,” which is the civil society. And this is I think the first time that the term inclusion with the civil society enters this kind of eight-year national plan. And in the plan we basically say, for inclusion, the public sector and the private sector have to admit that they really don’t have the best answer of what exactly what the disadvantaged people are saying. And instead of saying representing them, we should figure out a way so they can represent themselves. And so I think if Taiwan has a chance to host maybe SEWF sometime in the future, then I would like really to learn from all over the world, how exactly to make this kind of grassroots bottom-to-up consultation work.

And the advantage of that approach is SEWF is also trying to do more than just our three-day event. So how do we use that international network between the events.

Right, exactly.

Because right now we have a three-day event, and then everybody goes back to their countries, and then next year we meet and there’s no… So trying to build on your model of ongoing conversation, this is not an event, it’s a process, how do we build the process? Because one of the things for us at SEWF is when we choose where we’ll be is really about the impact it’s going to have, not just… So we start where we started, the first one in 2008 in Scotland, then we said we should do every nation. That was our first objective, to cover every continent. So we got to every continent then we said, now what? And now we’re at the point of how do we use it, the event, as a catalyst, but how do we do more than the event? So I think we’re going to engage the communities. That’s exactly the kind of elevation the sector needs, is to have something that takes all these little pieces that are everywhere, and we don’t connect them very well.

One concrete action I can do is write the Ākina Foundation and find out what kind of after-event, post-event, like online forums or other kind of continuation of next year’s SEWF they have in mind, and what kind of ICT technology or what kind of process innovations that I can personally help with as a participant.

But also to elevate the discussion at the event.

So that’s before and after.

That’s not like you coming up saying afterwards, but to engage in that discussion during the event.

So make it like the process that’s in common that we can all add in.

Right, so at that event, we say, ok what happened to Scotland on Tuesday? but if we have some discussion of how that becomes a platform to launch something like that, because then 2018 is Scotland and then after that we haven’t decided yet, so it would be great to move that to the online discussion.

Yes, that would be great.

We would be really pleased to work with you on that.

And New Zealand has a very good civic-tech scene around Wellington and Auckland to actually support ICT infrastructures to make that happen. And I know a lot of people there who would be very willing to join such a cause. So I think I’ll just do this today and keep you posted on that.

That would be great, because that would change the whole presence of SEWF from an event to a process.

And network. So as soon as I entered the Cabinet, I got this internet forum link from the World Economic Forum, which is the private sector part. And it’s very interesting between Dubai-Davos-Dubai-Davos, they have this what they call “TopLink,” an internet platform that links all the agendas together so that they make the most of the days that they meet together and I think it’s something we can learn from.

[Laughter] And steal from the private sector. [Laughter.] They’ve often taken from us!

[Laughter] Exactly!

So I know you’re busy, but I wanted to thank you for your time. It was great.

Thank you, and it’s great. Thank you too.

Okay, cheers! Thank you.

Take care.