There was people who care a lot about this, even during the martial law era. As I mentioned earlier, Leezen, Union Consumer Co-op, etc., they’ve been working on this ever since the martial law was lifted, but always in a way that seems nonthreatening.
They are consumer right protectors or whatever. They’re environmental protectors, but they’re not the loud kind of people, the dissidents. I think there’s a lot of it should now come to the forefront, which is why in the National Social Innovation Plan, we are now actually adding the Ministry of Interior here also, responsible for value-based capacity building.
The empowerment and education of sustainability values as actually the first goal of our National Social Innovation Plan, that’s what’s sorely missing, and that’s what we need to put a lot of funding and resources into.
Everything else is much the same as other countries’ social enterprise plans. I think the national SDG and international connection, as well as the value-based reeducation across generations, these two, I think, are really Taiwan-specific, and really needs to happen before we can have a truly useful dialogue about participatory sustainability.
There’s a lot of it. What we are now trying to do is to bring the new innovative models, like just this today. The AVPN, the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, here has this workshop on pay for success, which is a new social impact bond thing that changes the procurement relationship so that the government pays only when such-and-such actual benefit happens.
It will change the procurement. Instead of paying for people to do something, it’s paying for people to deliver some actual value. It doesn’t pay if it doesn’t deliver such a value. What happens is that there is an independent evaluator, and an independent intermediary that absorbs the risk here by picking and choosing the right team for this kind of innovative process.
Deliver a profit if the government actually pays the extra budget, and absorb the risk if it doesn’t meet the goal. There is a referee here that tries to bridge the social beneficial goals from the government, as well as the individual social innovators, as well as people from the different parties, to join this common goal.
They were as an intermediary. This kind of complex relationship, called pay for success, is one of the procurement innovations that we’re trying to do here. There’s many others. There’s ones tailoring for the co-op movement for, as I said, NPO owning a subsidiary company. There’s ones designing for smart city, but for farmlands.
Right, smart agriculture. AgTech, as they call it. Each of these minister are tasked to try something new -- it’s like the president hackathon -- and report to us which method actually works. We absorb the risk of them trying these kind of things.
This kind of promotion on social innovation, as well as, I think, well-being, disaster recovery, whatever, is really aligned with the Minister of Health and Welfare’s core mandate, so there’s a lot of innovative programs here that we assemble under our national platform, se.pdis.tw, social enterprise-dot-PDIS.
We have a lot of experiments. The list of experiments that’s going on, all the reward programs that we’re taking out, the cross-country tour that we’re doing, the actual programs that each of the ministries are looking for.
We actually align the values first, and say, "You don’t have to be...An organization can be just a person. Just call this number, and tell this person that you are working on such-and-such social innovation." It’s guaranteed that you don’t have to be indigenous person.
You don’t have to be a university. Many of those programs work across organizations. It’s just usually, they just talk with organizations they are most familiar about. Actually, you can apply to any of these. This is the call for social innovation list that we’re posting every other week.
That’s one of the concrete things that we can collaborate. There’s many other things.
Yeah, it’s se.pdis.tw, social enterprise. I’ll send you the transcripts.
It’s a cultural thing. We’re working for the next generation. It takes a generation to fully mature. Cool. You’re good?
I’ll send you transcripts. You can edit for 10 days, and we’ll publish everything.
Yeah, but you can edit away the parts you don’t like to be published. You can just randomly pull out...
Right, exactly. You can pull everything out. You can pull everything out.
Change your wording into some more amiable or whatever. I think that’s one of the reason I publish all the conversation, is because there’s a lot of synergies between people who are looking for governance, for sustainability. This is why we can send people, like, "Hey, this guy here who said just this sentence is well in your ballpark, and you should connect with this person."
Yeah, everything is in English.
Yeah, right, exactly.
It’s part of the bottom-up process. This is how you get presidential letters in the end.
OK.
Cheers.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The Public Digital Innovation Space is literally a space. It comprises of physical spaces that’s on the ground floor of the administrative building. We have two offices. On the third floor, we have another space, and here, the social innovation space.
We also have the office here as well as the [non-English speech] , the nobody’s library on the second floor. It’s at a total, five different spaces. Of course, there’s countless -- actually, countable -- digital spaces online, as well. We have a GitHub. We have a slide channel. We have a Sandstorm Rocket.Chat, a shared comment board, and a lot of spaces.
The idea of the space is very easy. Everybody joins here to do something for the public good. People get to decide what project they work on. There is no commanding relationship between the PDIS members.
People who join PDIS, primarily through three means. I’m a political appointee. I get to appoint two other secretaries. The three of us is the core co-founders, if you will.
Then there’s people working other ministries. I asked their minister to be stationed here. We have seven different career public servants stationed here. The implicit promise is that I won’t ask for more than one person from any ministry. Also, we have the technical team from the III.
From the Institute of Information Industry, the III. The III, again, supports six regular staff and three contractors, or consultants.
Nine people came from the III. Again, I ask each department of III for one person only, and not two people. Basically, it is a very crosscutting skill set, as well a very crosscutting composition, including NPO — if III counts as an NPO — and career public servants.
The idea is that whenever we lack any skill, we try to recruit people who are givers, who give more than they take, and they excel at something that none of the existing PDIS members are good at. That’s our only two recruiting criteria.
The benefit of the digital are twofold. First, that is can overcome space restrictions. We can connect these connected spaces. We can connect remote islands, rural places, and so on, using digital technology so they can be part of the policy-making process by having people speak in their own habitat and having the people in Taipei, or in anywhere, really, in the world to understand their life story more. That’s overcoming the space difference.
We can also overcome the time difference because everybody has two minutes of kindness. If we can let people join in their ideal two minutes, whether to sign a petition, to do online voting on pol.is, or whatever, then we engage people in their best, most altruistic public-minded time.
If we only say, "This town hall only opens for 15 minutes, and you have to travel four hours to Taipei for that," then it only includes a very small kind of people. By extending the time and reducing the time commitments, we get the best part of everybody.
Social innovation is anything that has a social mission, a social purpose. "I want the society to function in whichever way."
That it changes the social organization. It used to be like this, but now it organized like this, so you changed the social organization.
Then it, finally, has some social impact. Usually, we now define impact in terms of sustainable development goals, but there could be other metric, as well.
Again, a mission, an innovation in process and technology, or even organization, so a innovation, and then impact. Mission, innovation, and impact together defines social innovation, as opposed to, say, industrial innovation.
If the innovation is digital in nature, instead of purely face-to-face, then we say it’s digital innovation. It doesn’t mean that it’s wholly digital. It only means that it use digital technology as part of the enabler in the innovation part.
The mission, the purpose, and the impact, the outcome, these two are the core, and whatever models that’s operating in-between. It doesn’t always have to work, but always it has to make something new. If it fails, then it fails in a public way, so that everybody else can learn from it, and then do some other innovation.
Exactly.
We are trying to make a culture based on trust. We have the mutual trust between sectors as the core, because in our members we have people of all the different parties in Taiwan. A lot of us, like us, are Independents.
We have people from all the different generations, different discipline, different skills, different ministries, different stakes.
If we are to increase trust at all, we have to first build trust between people here, in PDIS. We do it by, first, being transparent. Everybody work out loud, so everybody knows what everybody else is doing, even though they may not partake in it.
Then accountability. Every week we review as the comment board, or every couple days we do a stand-up meeting so that everybody knows what people are blocked on and what kind of help any member wants. We can freely enlist each other’s skills to do worthwhile projects.
