All of these, although not directly MoST-led, there will be a MoST component in it.
Yeah, sure, and the NAR Labs and so on.
I am aware of that.
What about NARLabs, ITRI, III, as well as the other think tanks?
OK. Traditionally they work with e.g. the Smart Electronics Industry Project Promotion Office.
That’s true. What we’re trying to do now with the SDGs, though, is to co-develop a Horizon Project, just like the European Horizon Project, or the Japan Society 5.0. We’re trying to say, "By 2030, we’ll be here, but what about 2050?"
How to get there, and what’s our collective imagination. The think tanks are now tasked with not just applied science, which is always with a horizon with only five years or less, but actually the envisioning of the society.
There’s that part, more like speculative design part, and also a social conversation consultation as well. That actually, you need a lot of scientific, maybe more scientific research and data-backed, because that’s how we to tell the science fiction from science nonfiction, right?
As far as I understand, many ministries are working together all toward this common horizon-setting scenario planning. This is a new development, like new as in this year.
No, I think this is a great contribution. It’s good to know that in Taiwan, your branch is doing well. If there’s anything that I can help, especially in terms of SDG. That is my main mandate now, is to make sure that our voluntary national review include not only the governmental contributions.
In Taiwan, frankly speaking, the civil society space is expanding, whereas everybody near Taiwan has a shrinking civil society space. We are the most equipped to do social innovation, but it’s not always accounted for. It is not always linked back to research.
The professors, they do a lot of work, but they don’t always reflect that in their scoring.
We really need to build a system where their work in creating social impact...
...about getting the credit. The same as you have one of the pillar of the excellence in teaching. We also want to have a pillar in excellence in creating social change. That is more than media exposure, of course.
It is, which is why we need international collaboration.
I know.
I visited the Ministry of DCMS — well, the D and C and M, I have not yet visited the S — they are experimenting with different ways to measure. Many of those are anecdotal at the moment. They are working, of course, with Nesta and folks to try to develop new methodologies.
As far as I know, they all of this are all in early research phases. It’s the same for all of us.
The PDF, the digital counterpart?
We’ll publish alongside the transcript, which we can edit together for 10 days.
Of course. This one is a little bit jumpy, and this one is more regular.
It’s bubbling.
Bubbling in your mouth.
Sure.
The civic tech toolbox, the OGP toolbox.
That’s one, but they can also attend our weekly Wednesday meetings and bring their cases or when I tour around Taiwan every other Tuesday, they can also bring it then. Personally, there’s three channels to reach me.
The Sustainable Development Goals.
The Sustainable Development Goals. The UNDP collected literally a million voices. As you said, they’re already placed. The UN has sorted them out into 169 concrete topic areas and grouped them into 17, which is how we are sorting things now. It’s very rare that a citizen-initiated agenda falls entirely out of the SDGs spectrum. They don’t often happen.
I warned you.
About 30 cases.
No. We can export this model.
We can export this model. There’s other forums, vTaiwan-like forums, to tackle this kind of multi-stakeholder issues. vTaiwan is not the only forum for multi-stakeholder discussion. For example, for regional revitalization, there’s a forum. For the national culture strategy, there’s another forum. Billy maybe told you about the justice reform forum and so on.
Why is it not true? We do have unlimited capacity.
Hmm... I don’t quite follow your line of thought.
Set a threshold?
No, it’s not quite that. I think we set a threshold mostly because we want to have a diverse reach of stakeholder groups. If it’s just two people petitioning, there’s no guarantee that there will be sufficient sides in a matter when we invite people to join the discussion either on or offline.
If there’s 5,000 people and they raise a lot of social awareness, both on the pro column and the con column there’s hundreds of people. We can be reasonably sure when we send our invitation there’ll be people from all walks of life that we can actually invite to the table. That is the real reason why we set a threshold.
There is no limitation of how many e-petitions can reach the threshold every year. If it is a throughput problem, as you put it, then we will cap the number of e-petitions that reach the threshold every month or so, but there is no such threshold.
There’s no limit of referendum amount by yearly election closed referendum as well. This year, we’re going to have 10. Maybe the next year, we’ll have 20.
How?
Why is it a problem that people pay other people to sign?
Yeah, why is it a problem? What’s wrong with it?
It’s the same with people who can provoke social outrage or can run demonstrations. It’s different power, but it’s still power. You’re basically saying people with power can gather more people, but that’s, of course, how organizations has always worked and social movement has always worked.
People can be incentivized by kinship. They can be incentivized by outrage. They can be incentivized by money. To me, it’s all the same. It’s just engagement strategies.
I would like to know more about this line of thinking. If we’re saying money buys the actual decisions, of course, that may be a problem. What we’re now saying is only collecting signatures to show the importance or the priority. It’s just that agenda-setting.
During the agenda discussion, of course, it’s not using money to buy voices, but just raising the people’s awareness of the agenda. If you buy a full-page advertisement on a major newspaper, you’re going to get enough petitions. That is one direct way to translate money into social awareness. What I’m saying is this is how media has always worked, and I don’t know what’s wrong with that.
Maybe, in some states, the threshold is too high.
I can see that. That’s always because it’s paper signatures, no?
It’s not electronic signatures. In our e-petition, it’s electronic signatures. Even for people who have a lot of money, of course, they can buy Google or Facebook advertisements, but their money is not significantly more useful than people who already have a lot of followers on social media, which is why I don’t see this as a problem. We are essentially e-signatures.
Decision-making.
