That’s something I would love to work on as well.
We are also talking with the people in the SDGs for... It’s a think tank, SDG for Africa. They do the SDG index for Africa and...
Actually it started in Rwanda; the headquarter is in Kigali.
Belay Begashaw. That’s the name.
Yes.
Yes, I’m aware of that.
Yes. The way we’re helping is largely on the SDSN so far. I went to Vatican for SDSN meeting with Jeffrey Sachs and friends, because it’s academic, so Taiwan has no problem attending.
Do you know anyone working in eSwatini?
Previously called Swaziland.
It was called Swaziland.
They’re Taiwan’s only diplomatic ally in Africa right now...
...so any work we do physically, we need to start from there.
Yeah, because we don’t have embassy anywhere else.
We’d love to!
I understand that.
I really think Africa needs to set your own agenda.
The way we have been working now, we’re not so much with Africa but with the ASEAN countries and New Zealand and so on. It’s a model which I call warm power, meaning that we solve a local issue like the water leakage with some people there.
We open innovation. There’s no patents. There’s nothing like that. We make sure people they own the technology, they can either upgrade it without connecting back to Taiwan, and then once they own the technology, of course they brand it themselves.
We’re totally OK with that, and of course we hope that they keep contributing back on GitHub or whatever. I think that’s the...
That’s the main idea because it’s in the SDGs. I mean, the...
...the goal, in the 17th, is about to make sure the innovation is accessible to all, and I think this is based on...We choose partners very carefully by their ability to produce reliable data. Once they show the ability to produce reliable data, now we just transfer whatever local solutions we have.
Taiwan has been the top one on Global Open Data Index for a few years now, so...
I think this is really in line with our value because we believe that only when the people themselves own the data, like this, all the Taiwan Air Quality, these are collected by more than 2,000 people each using the air quality sensor in their home balcony and so on.
None of this paid by the government. It is entirely citizen science, and because of this, in other places in Asia, people will want to suppress this from the government because it threatens legitimacy.
For our government, we just join them and so we say, "In the places where you’re missing, we going to set up in the offshore wind turbines where there’s no way that the home makers can go there. We will set up our complementary systems there."
Yes, I know.
We’re seeing a lot of adoption of IT, but in the terms of Digital Transformation, as you can see, the communities are really key.
It’s about empowering people to co-create.
That’s great. I tried to doing something like that in an event in Burkina Faso, but I had to appear as a pre-recording, because Burkina Faso...
...allying with Taiwan just a week before I’m scheduled to talk... [laughs]
...so we’ll have to start again. [laughs]
That’s great, so let’s make that happen.
I know. But what we’re now saying is that...
...we can be all all working on the 17th global goal.
The potential is this: Because Taiwan is not a player within the UN dashboard, we can be the referees.
We can work with you on collaborative governance, for example, around distributed ledgers.
We can also be of assistance in accountability mechanisms, so that everybody keeps his word in a fair way.
I know.
The project of air measurement that I just mentioned is called Airbox, and it’s integrated with IOTA blockchain system, so that whenever they store in the super computer that Taiwan government offers, if they take a snapshot, store it in a public chain so people will know that government will not change the number the day before the election.
This is very important because there are so many different sources going on. With people like the Distributed Ledger Technology Laboratory, that’s Taiwan, the Cheng Kung University. They work on Tangle identity, they worked on distributed environment data storage, they’re working on many other things.
I’m sure that it can be extended into statistics tracking, mineral mining, whatever.
Yeah, you need to have those paths into blockchain systems for governance to work.
That’s right.
There’s a platform I want to show you. It’s called Dodoker. It’s a Taiwan social enterprise. For example, they had a partnership with Yunus Social Business Center in NCU. Basically, what they do is that they use either the Ethereum blockchain to track international fund.
For example, this is Nepal after the flood. People really want to donate, and if it’s just any other crowdfunding platform, it would just be in bar with people talking and things like that.
Different thing that they do, the value proposition is that they use the blockchain to track where exactly has the money has gone and flowed, and it’s not in cryptocurrency. They’re still tracking fiat money, but it’s just they require the accountants in many different points to obey some very simple protocols.
The point is that nobody has to bear this very expensive KPMG audit or things like that. They just follow some multiparty protocols, and you end up with pretty pictures like where the money has flowed, where did it go, where did it pass?
Even if the website goes away, you can reconstruct it very easily in a few lines of code where it’s going. Very importantly, they cannot change the record. They cannot go back and say, "I did that," or, "I did not do that."
It’s like a clock that stopped?
So it’s right twice a day.
