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]
"Inappropriate technology."
That’s right, a fabric.
That’s the whole point of me going to the indigenous or the rural places, because really, they are the most innovative. When we scale innovation this way, what we are actually scaling is the experience of listening, of being listened to. That traditionally doesn’t scale. [laughs]
No, but they love to broadcast.
That’s right.
This project, it was called The 22?
Well, better branding.
I said it’s just recently renamed to Embark?
Cool. Any other interesting thing you are working on at the moment, maybe not necessarily around Asia?
Yeah, in general.
That’s right, the Civil IoT system, yes.
Sure. First off, I am working with the cabinet. I am not working for the cabinet.
I’m kind of the midway, the lagrange point between the civil society, the social sector, and the public sector. That’s my working condition. If I start taking or giving orders, this whole notion of collaborative horizontal power just dissipates.
The very first utterances of me commanding another ministry would be the time when the ministry lose this peer-to-peer, innovative relationship with me. I always maintain that I do this in a very Taoist fashion.
To take a concrete example, we have this thing called the Presidential Hackathon.
Where every year, the president’s office selects among maybe, this year, it’s 100 and so teams. They have no monetary reward — there’s no "doing well" [laughs] part of the hackathon.
We call it a hackathon, but it’s actually three months of intense collaboration across sectors.
Anyone can propose anything to improve on the presidential promise during her campaign that they think the public sector is not doing well. We have journalists asking for better data from the government, so they can do more analysis on flood control.
We have Taiwan Water Corporation saying, “We are willing to share our pressure or measurement data, but we really want people who know machine learning to save our time in detecting leakage,” because climate change, water shortage is a real problem, and things like that.
Of the 100 or so cases, we find maybe 70, 80 percent is actually written by public servants, but they didn’t have the budget. They work in silos and things like that. Then they were afraid of innovating, because various conditions.
Because it’s meant to be cross-sectoral, they just find an NPO or a social sector partner to submit their admission for them. They are like, “Oh, we were just working with our NPO partners,” but they actually really proposed it themselves.
The prize for those five winners every year is the president’s office will oversee that it’s merged into public service next year with proper budget, proper support. This is really impact as the prize.
For the Water Corporation thing, the machine learning water shortage detection, because we SDG-indexed all this work, New Zealand discovered it. Just like you mentioned, and you see on the website, they also say on the website.
Say, “Hey, we’re running into a water shortage for the first time because of climate change.” Their choice is either buy a proprietary solution for it as well, that may or may not work, or co-create with those hackathoners from Taiwan Water Corporation, so on.
