One key insight: if you make government more efficient, you reduce friction for everyone.
When you cut tax filing from three hours to three minutes by crowdsourcing ways to simplify the process, you also save civil servants hours of complaints. It be...
We built two platforms.
One is the Join platform. Anyone can start a petition, and once it reaches 5,000 supporters, it triggers a ministerial response and a public conversation on tha...
For example, people under 18 are among the most active users. A 17-year-old petitioned to move the school day one hour later, because an extra hour of sleep oft...
And 17-year-olds often partner with 70-year-olds, the second most active segment on Join. Both groups have a bit more time, sure, but also the 70-year-olds carr...
That intergenerational energy helped grow the Presidential Hackathon. Here is how it works: local teams in a district or municipality take problems surfaced on...
The point is the commitment behind it: that local innovation will be scaled into national infrastructure in the next fiscal year. Local prototypes can become na...
So, Join for what sucks and Presidential Hackathon for what works.
I have a question for you, Zarah. When we met in Taipei, you described your role in government promoting social innovation. Now you are at an agency focused on...
Yes. My first step into government came from entrepreneurship. I founded a social enterprise to integrate refugees into the labor market. Then the ministry call...
Like you, I didn’t come with a classic political portfolio. That alone created room for a different kind of work.
But, I also found myself inside a very bureaucratic system, at a pace I wasn’t used to. Still, we changed a lot. We released the first national strategy on soci...
That’s where I met SPRIND, the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation. SPRIND invests in deep tech: fusion energy, quantum computing, Alzheimer’s research, di...
So, I called SPRIND and asked, “Why aren’t you doing social innovation?” Rafael, the head of the agency, said, “Why don’t you do it here?” And during my time, S...
So, not letting the natural sciences have all the fun. We can have quantum democracy in the social sciences too.
I learned today that “digital democracy” is already outdated. It’s quantum democracy now. Meanwhile, we’re still doing elections on paper every four years. How...
What we learned is that traditional Newtonian politics, bumping one party into another, is reaching its limits.
In Taiwan, for example, we faced deepfakes and scam ads. Two years ago, if I scrolled on Facebook I would see Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, promising investment adv...
Because Taiwan is the freest country in Asia when it comes to internet freedom, people did not want the government to solve this through censorship. So, what to...
