# Open Source・Social Innovation - Audrey Tang

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Hello everyone! Hello to all the Coders, Users, Promoters, and the international communities — openSUSE and GNOME communities. Good morning!

I'm Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister, and I have been working in open source communities for the past 20 years.

So let me start by saying: Happy birthday to Open Source! This term was defined and coined — a strategy made, an initiative made — exactly 20 years ago.

It started as a "fork" of the Free Software movement.

The Free Software movement — which has been going on for 15 or more years before the Open Source movement — defined four fundamental freedoms on which the Open Source movement is born.

These freedoms of software are:

0. The Freedom to use software;
1. The Freedom to change software;
2. The Freedom to copy software;
3. The Freedom to fork software.

Those are the four fundamental freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation.

Open Source, at that time, was a marketing campaign that tries to sell this "freedom to fork" as something that is not only about human right and about liberty, but also about practical usefulness.

It's been very successful, with Netscape Inc. first joining, which now leads to the Mozilla and Firefox initiatives. We see this year Microsoft embracing open source and, indeed, acquired GitHub.

So we're seeing a "merge" between the various different communities that was previously only interested in one part or another. In other words, it has been a very good campaign to promote social innovation.

At the beginning, the fork from the Free Software community to the Open Source community in the U.S. was a hard fork. A hard fork is something that breaks compatibility. It is something that moves communities in different directions. It is something that results in conflicts.

Recently — as late as 2015 — the initiative made a definite statement saying that "we're now moving toward similar directions." But this movement has already reached reconcilation here; this has already happened in Taiwan.

In 1999, in Taiwan's first open source workshop, people deliberated about how to reconcile the marketing of open source and free software traditions. In 2000, the community decided collectively on a term — the "Software Liberty" association, SLAT — that is neutral to both movements, so we can promote two values at the same time.

I think this highlights one of the main advantages in Taiwan, in that we're not seeing democracy as an opposition between opposing values, but rather a conversation — and indeed, reconcilation — between many diverse values.

We're now taking the idea of open source toward the general idea of Open Innovation — that is to say: Innovation that allows for Forks.

20 years ago, people would look at a fork and think of it as a bad thing. Indeed, in the jargon file, Eric Raymond wrote that forking are almost always bad.

20 years from that time — today — we see forks every day.

On GitHub, a good project is a project that has hundreds of forks.

In blockchain governance, in mutual distributed ledgers, a good chain is a chain that manages "soft forks" well to transition into new technologies.

In other words, we're now encouraging forks that are "soft forks" — they are forks with the intention to remain compatible, and to be one day merged by consensus. I think this is a good demonstration of the open source spirit that works in many other areas.

I'll use one particular example. Here in Taipei, we have a Social Innovation Lab in the TAF base near the JianGuo flower market.

This space is co-created by hundreds of people in co-creation workshops, styled entirely in the open source spirit.

By that, I mean the designers actually laid out the blueprints of this space, then we asked all social innovators to come every week to brainstorm; to ideate; and to make their alternate visions of how this space is to be used.

After five such meetings, with hundreds of social innovators who participated, we co-created this space dedicated for social innovation. In here, whatever people wished for that the government can help deliver, we delivered.

People asked for the space to open until 11pm every day — and that we did. People asked for a kitchen and a resident chef — and that we did. People said "it is great that the minister hosts a discussion every Wednesday, so don't stop, just keep coming every Wednesday" — and that I did.

So every Wednesday, from 10am to 10pm, this is my office hour, and anyone working on social innovation is welcome to attend.

We're also proving this idea of "forking" to the whole society through the Social Innovation Action Plan. For the next five years. We're going to allocate about 8.8 billion NT dollars toward all the different sectors.

The government's role has drastically changed with this plan. I think the openSUSE community put it best: instead of saying "for the next three years we're going to develop this, this and this" in a top-down fashion, we're just here. Anytime you find anything that the government is blocking in your way, we will help you resolve it.

Instead of commanding people, or working for the people, the government in this Social Innovation Action Plan is working "with" the people, to resolve any potential conflicts.

Here, in the Social Innovation Lab, we see a lot of open source — and indeed also open hardware — experiments running around.

Last year, we partnered with the MIT Media Lab, to introduce these persuasive electric vehicles, or PEVs. They are autonomously driven tricycles. They're pretty slow — so it doesn't harm anyone when a PEV runs into buildings.

It's all open source and could be modded — that is to say, modified. Students here, in the Mobility++ Hackathon, took these autonomous driving tricycles and forked them in every which way, trying to communicate with the human society.

How does this AI live in our world? Instead of just asking people to adapt to technology, through this kind of co-creation, we are asking the technology to adapt to people — to our social needs.

Whenever our existing regulations become a burden, become an obstacle to such innovations, we're now meeting every week to resolve any regulatory burdens and regulatory blockage that would prevent such social innovations from happening — please feel free to check it out at sandbox.org.tw.

For a fork to be a soft fork, an eventual merge must be made. For a sandbox experiment, an eventual consensus must be made. So we're also using open source AI technologies, such as Pol.is, to co-create policies.

For each new experiment, people will have very different feelings, and we made an open space for them. For each sentiment, people can click agree or disagree, and they move in their clusters.

But what this doesn't have, is a "reply" button. Because we don't have a reply button, people don't spend time discrediting each other; the trolls have no room to play.

Every time when people contribute, they only add to the consensus-making picture; they don't subtract from it. So in a carefully guarded space — a safe space with a code of conduct — we often see after each participatory campaign, people converge on the consensus statements.

People can agree to disagree on certain divisive statements, but they don't spend time on it. People just spend time on refining the consensus, until we can all find our common values, and find some solutions that works for everyone.

This is how we celebrate forking, and this is how we merge the forks into this society — into social innovation.

In closing, I would like to read a prayer that I wrote when I first became the Digital Minister almost two years ago. It goes like this:

When we see "internet of things", let's make it an internet of beings.
When we see "virtual reality", let's make it a shared reality.
When we see "machine learning", let's make it collaborative learning.
When we see "user experience", let's make it about human experience.
When we hear "the Singularity is near", let us remember: the Plurality is here.

## c-lab 空總臺灣當代文化實驗場
靠近建國花市
地址：106台北市大安區仁愛路三段55號
[社會創新實驗中心揭幕 　唐鳯每週三駐點](https://www.economic-news.tw/2017/10/socialinnovationlab.html)

* Part of [Social Innovation Action Plan](https://issuu.com/pdis.tw/docs/2018-08-09-si-action-plan?e=30178544/63698409) ( 2018~2022 )

## 創新法規沙盒案件
[創新法規沙盒案件申請平台](https://www.sandbox.org.tw/)

## end

* When we see “internet of things”, let’s make it an internet of **beings**.
* When we see “virtual reality”, let’s make it a **shared** reality.
* When we see “machine learning”, let’s make it **collaborative** learning.
* When we see “user experience”, let’s make it about **human** experience.
* When we hear “the singularity is near”, let us remember: the **Plurality** is here.

###### tags: `COSCUP2018` `misc`