There’s automated tools for that... I wrote one myself.
To do a proper lexicon-based substitution through e.g. OpenCC, it doesn’t cost you a dime to translate to traditional Chinese. You can start with the corporate home page... That technology, it’s open source, by the way.
That would, of course, help. I wrote a tool early on, HanConvert, that converts between the scripts, which you are free to use as well.
I think it’s year 2000. I started to get a lot of grateful, thank-you emails from the likes of BBC and so on. [laughs]
Our procurement people said they have to really convince their bosses that the red here doesn’t mean PRC. [laughs]
I know, but a Simplified Chinese website doesn’t help.
Very much so.
Yeah, we made that very clear in our procurement rules. If they can use PostgreSQL, they will use it. If they’re still stuck with, I don’t know, DB2, at least they can turn it into microservices and put it on a more open orchestration platform. At least the API should be open and things like that.
It’s really a thing in the last two years. Starting this year, the government, digital service principal spells that out. Then, after a year, it will be not beta but just procurement strategy.
It’s like a flash mob, right? You just have three people. Then, it draws a crowd, which draws a larger crowd.
I would also stress that, of course, we’ve been saying open innovation in policy making for a very long time, but I think it really caught on this time because we changed the wording to say social innovation. The basic idea is really the same but social innovation involves the whole society. Not just the civil tech people or the tech people.
It puts the emphasis on bringing power to the people closer to the pain, to empower instead of colonize the people. It’s less solution thinking. It’s more co-creation thinking. Using social innovation as the branding and the sustainable goals as the concrete like 169 targets.
It puts the emphasis on the digital as a way for communities to connect rather than digital as a way for people to "deliver solutions."
Exactly. While open innovation is a pursuit, the thing that we’re doing. It does have a kind of connotation, a copyright, or a patent, or the intellectual property truths that is happening between the major vendors and so on, which is rightly so.
We started open source movement as a marketing campaign for free software for these people. Obviously, then, it carries the more economic instead of environmental or social undertone. When we say social innovation, it’s equally social, environmental, and economic. That is the branding we’re using. Of course, we’ll still do open innovation.
Of course. When I go to, for example, during the UN G8, they ask me what does the digital minister do? Then, I say, I work on 17.18, 17.17, and the 17.6.
The beauty of the SDGs is that digital is in the 17th, and the 17s is very well placed in a way that is a combining force to all the different sectors. I think it is a more collaborative message.
The comic, which I really should bring now because I would like to read a few pages.
Do you read, I don’t know, Hakka or Taigi?
That’s all the six languages. The English one, Japanese, and Amis too. I can bring you more English copies.
We invite everybody who complains to open innovation.
Contribute by criticizing. I think that the main message I want to focus on is page 10. I think that is one of the messages that we can all help to spread, which is bringing the user from the waterfall model, the last touch point to the first touch point. It also touches on how to cross silos, use ICT and so on.
I think that this would be the main message to talk to startups and perhaps in your next focus groups. If anything, that is the one message that they already is buying in. They understand if they’re not working with users, they are not going to succeed or survive.
We can translate it to traditional Chinese?
That’s great. Maybe just start with them. This cartoon and your cartoon and...
Feel free to bring comic books. [laughs]
Sure, sure, sure. I’ll have to wear this SDGs pin then.
We’ll send you a transcript, and everybody is free to edit for 10 days, then I publish it online.
This is the radical transparency principle that I am practicing for two years now.
Yeah.
Also, even for internal meetings that I’m a chair, I just publish everything after 10 working days of editing.
That’s right. You really need a way to present it as structural data for people to easily quote and make intertextual comparisons. This is like literally all my meetings, like everything.
Then for example, I went to New York, have a conversation with Mariéme, who runs iamtheCODE. Then you can see that every word that we said can be linked both in-context and shared on social media, and also as a link by itself.
This boosts the search engine optimization. It’s far more likely to be searched, to be indexed, cross-referenced, and things like that. If you’re interested, I’m happy to export this system. It’s called SayIt.
Anything in particular you would like to explore?
That sounds good, like all these goals together.
We’re SDG indexing everything we do, and we’re making the CSR reports to also SDG index everything. We are asking social entrepreneurs to also SDG index their work, because it’s just so easily explainable.
When you ask me what kind of work I’m doing, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m working on 17.18, 17.17, 17.6,” that’s it.
It’s a very good indexing system. More concretely, this is the boring office. I have a more exciting office.
It’s called the Social Innovation Lab.
Yeah, we should totally do that.
There’s actually a VR headset right there.
Yeah, but this place is unique, because it’s co-designed with more than 100 social innovators. These soccer fields are drawn by people with Down’s syndrome. It turns out they are brilliant artists. They see the world through a different lens.
We have a foundation that works with them for more than 20 years, the CAREUS (Children Are Us Foundation). I think one of the staple nonprofit here. We also do a lot of co-creation around, this is self-driving tricycle. Just get people in the mood of having a kitchen that opens until 11:00 PM every day, and have the minister to be available in office hour every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM.
Just generate creatives. Nothing is surprising, but everything is less fun attitude, and ask all the 12 ministries related to social innovation to just station there. Just by changing the engagement social infrastructure, we were able to basically meet people by having them come to us.
Also me touring around Taiwan to meet with local social innovators, with people dialing in from remote islands or indigenous nations, and then have the, as I mentioned, 12 ministries in the same room, sharing food or drink, and see through my eyes what the local regional innovation needs are.
Instead of shoving text, document, and whatever to each other, they develop a rapport over those virtual teamwork, collaborative work, and really see people, immersive re-presentation, not a representation, of their lives.
They were put in the mood of innovation. If things go wrong, it’s always me who absorb the risk. Because of radical transparency, if things go right, they take the credit. I share credit. It’s very much unlike previous century, where the minister takes all the credit, and blame gets spread around.
I think that that’s my two cents of designing for innovation.
What are your tricks? [laughs]
