I don’t know what’s next, right?
The Hong Kong’s protest is mostly about people currently looking at the PRC and seeing that in terms of sustainable development goals, they’re 16th goal is about a strong institution for a fairer justice system.
I’m sure that if the PRC have reached those goals and if they are independently assessed as having the same fair trial system as people in Hong Kong enjoy, then there won’t be as much outrage to this extradition law.
The reason why they went to the street is that people can plainly see that the right to the rule of law — the right to a fair trial and things like that — are at the moment not present in PRC to the same level as we enjoy in Taiwan and they enjoy in Hong Kong. Also, they are not showing a very encouraging trend of improving rapidly over time.
If the PRC wants Hong Kong to adopt this extradition law, I think it’s best if they can just focus on implementing correctly the 16th goal of the sustainable goals by making their trial process fair and transparent and generally trusted by the international community.
Only then would the legitimacy of the extradition law make sense to the oversea community and also for everybody concerning this protest, including people in Taiwan.
No problem. Thank you.
Yes, thank you.
How is it going?
What are some highlights that I may be of help to...?
Yeah, the Secretary for the National Sustainability Council.
Oh, OK. I’m going to Hualien early tomorrow too.
No.
That’s right. That’s right. What’s your impression so far?
OK. That’s great.
OK.
Yeah, definitely.
It is.
That’s right.
It transcends the political issues.
Very much so.
You can’t politicize it out. [laughs]
Are global, yes.
That’s right. Have you talked with the people who are doing the voluntary local reviews for the municipalities of Taipei and Taoyuan? They’re following the example of New York and doing local reviews also.
We have our national reviews, of course, but I think in the local review, they can highlight the diversity around the municipalities. For example, there is like 10 percent of the world’s marine species, the biodiversity, in our seas.
If you are an inland municipality, maybe you don’t care that much about sea life. The diversity represented by municipality, also very important.
Exactly. Those coasts are the same, in a sense.
We’re actually coding our existing cases where there are collaboratives around particular issues. Like the one that we shared last time, around using machine learning to detect water leakage, and that we partner with Wellington, with New Zealand.
SDG is a very convenient language that we are working on 6.4. Everybody said, "Oh, you solved 6.4." That become a common language. This year, we actually engaged the population to vote the 100 or so cases that become the cohort that is 20.
At the end of it, of course, we’ll select five to be merged back into the policy. They will win the trophy from the president signifying that their solution will become part of the public service by the end of year.
The important thing is that they all have their flags in their teams, cohort, public communication materials. It’s just concrete goals, concrete targets. This is like 20 out of 169 right there. It really increased the reach.
This is national. This is the presidential hackathon.
This year, we are choosing this as our Presidential Hackathon’s international tracks theme, "Enabling sustainable infrastructure." It is explicitly coded so that we can get not just 20 domestic teams, but 6 international teams as well.
We get application from 15 countries. We selected six. That’s Australia, Netherlands, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand. These are the principal contact. They may be international crew members also.
They are focusing on things that are, broadly speaking, sustainable infrastructure, like climate change mitigation, like looking at sea waste and how it flows with the seas, so that you can estimate the area from the beach using just machine vision and things like that.
Using Open Contracting to make sure that it’s fully accountable, that how the procurement counts toward making environmental impact without taking away from other parts of the environment so that it’s a net positive and things like that.
We are expanding it to international level but maybe not as fast and certainly not as loud as we can be. That is what we need help...
Yeah, so basically, we partner with sponsoring organizations. This time, we partnered with the Open Contracting Partnership or the OCP. OCP uses procurement data and so on to track infrastructures to make sure that they agree with the SDGs without pulling away from it.
It’s basically an accountability initiative internationally. They send to other members saying, "OK, Taiwan is releasing for the first time their procurement data for other people to analyze and also donating our talent to analyze other countries’ procurement data. What kind of infrastructure focused on SDGs can you propose?"
We got a lot of applications from 15 countries. That is the process. I’ll be very happy to work with more broader sponsoring organizations, not just the Open Contracting. Open Contracting is maybe focusing a little bit too much on SDG 16 and some 17, but that is...
Sure, sure, sure. That’s the main thing.
We’d be happy to partner with more environmental or more equality or gender or some other sponsoring organizations.
Yeah, Denmark can help.
Yeah, I think this is an excellent design.
Yeah. In the presidential hackathon, we’re doing five days.
Yeah, I think that will certainly require more than public sector funding. For the public sector, the most we can get is the winning team gets to demo to our president and be selected as part of our public service.
