Thank you so much. [laughs] Really enjoyable. I hope you enjoy the masks.

Frances will also send you the transcript for co editing. We can time this so that we release right after you do.

Sure. Our foreign service secondment Frances I’ll introduce she to you. Then you can just send email…

Thank you.

…we might as well to capitalize on that.

Exactly. The WEF already constantly already called Taiwan super innovator…

That’s right. Exactly.

It’s open innovation. “You can do this.” Then, it prompts action.

It’s just, “Oh, you can do this.”

When we say “Made in Taiwan,” it used to mean that the product is made in Taiwan but now, more and more that we mean that this innovation model to make the cross sectoral link possible started in Taiwan. You don’t have to buy anything. It’s not an export product.

It is unlikely that these sectors will collaborate in such a way but once they did, it gets replicated but with different constituents in different jurisdictions.

We honor these ideas through the Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award, which is a weird award. It doesn’t give to any specific company or group or organization. It gives to unlikely partnership between sectors.

It’s about netting zero carbon emissions from the Asia Pacific partners. I talked about Sunny Founder. Is there a way to crowdfund solar panels for charities? I also talked about how a South Korean company helped Nepal and other developing countries to switch from a coal based brick firing mechanism ...

Issues that do not move unless all of us understand exactly what is going on, and then are willing to coordinate and move. My columns are witness to show that for each incoming emerging issue. For example, my latest issue on Commonwealth. I sent it out today, literally a couple ...

Even though some measures are well understood, it is about the idea of all of society, social sector first, People-Public-Private Partnership approach, to tackle what people in UK call “wicked problems”.

Currently, I am writing mostly columns on Commonwealth, Storm Media, and Business Weekly. The unifying idea is that the telemodel is not about one or two measures.

Truly organic, then. [laughs]

How did you learn about that project?

Be the change. Be the nobody.

…center of coalitions, or things like that. This “be water” thing holds a lot of potential. It originated in Hong Kong, but it is already making the rounds in the world when it comes to new forms of leaderless social movements.

We do learn a lot from the idea of “be water,” from these leaderless movements, of the new way of organization that truly empowers each activist on the ground instead of awaiting for a centralized…

In a sense, I remember back in the ‘80s when I was young. Sometimes, because both of my parents are journalists, we can’t report our news, and then we have to work with international correspondence in Hong Kong to get us to reach out to international community. Now it’s exactly ...

Haruseki-san of Covert Japan is now deputy CTO or something of the Japanese cabinets. There is a close relationship between Japan and our open government task forces. Moving beyond Japan and Korea, we also see that many people in Hong Kong are now in Taiwan.

In Japan, it’s very exciting. I hold mostly talks to their special adviser to the cabinet in charge of digital ministry affairs. For them, it’s called digital agency, and they’re explicitly referring to the time when setting out the new digital agency with up to 100 people from the civil ...

Even to this day, they have some higher legitimacy compared to the public sector because of this approach.

Without fact checking the more political sensitive topics on public health and mental health alone, these social civic network organizations can prove its legitimacy. That’s exactly what Taiwan did in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Even before the lifting of the martial law, already strong charities, co ops and so on ...

For example, starting a fact checking community that gets the civic media on the same page as institutional media. That goes a long way. Even if that country is not particularly democratic, people can already work on for example, about masks and vaccines like the public health, like pharmacologists and ...

The norms.

They agree to compete on making these values more well known internationally, but they do not compete on accusing each other thinking about authoritarianism or about non participation because we were way past that. After the Sunflower Movement, everybody understood if you don’t stand for transparency and participating, you don’t ...

I think just standing firm on a social sector and regardless of which party like in Taiwan. We have four major parties in the parliament, but all of them signed on the Open Parliament National Action Plan. Transparency, participation, and accountability, inclusion, these are the thing that all the four ...

That’s I think a strong social norm. It is the best defense because otherwise you also get into the shape of us versus them, this partisan politics. Which party is more authoritarian and McCarthyism and things like that, which are not always foreclosing future possibilities, but sometimes evolved in such ...

…decimated and right, literally cut by 10 percent.

When people understand, for example, that it is the norm to instead of taking anything down, offer real time fact checking materials, that becomes a very strong norm against the arguments made by the totalitarian authoritarian governments, that in order to achieve harmonies on press freedom need to…

I think one of the key ideas here is that we need to continue to make the case that is not a trade off between civil liberties and public health, for example, right. The strong social sector automatically guard against that, because the social sector sets the norm.

It’s wrong.

I think the democratic policies are now definitely considering digital as infrastructure and with that the same sort of common space thinking that we’re discussing.

It seems that US is — because of pandemic apparently taking this idea and amplifying it so that universal profit is no longer a FCC only idea, but rather a idea about as I mentioned, media and digital competence and democratic participation and things like that.

We definitely said at a time that even though it’s not made out of concrete, not concrete. As long as in the commons, it means everybody can actually use it to improve it and make it better, therefore qualify as infrastructure status.

The US is already considering now digital as part of public infrastructure. That’s the deliberation we had in 2016 when we included digital into the special act for looking infrastructure.

That is the sort of incentive structure that I had in mind that isn’t purely speaking advancing private interest, but it does reduce personal risk. It does save time. If it’s reduced rate and save time, sometimes it’s good or even better than advancing personal interest.

No public servants will get the blame for revealing data bias or something previously design, the incentive such that is published upon collection anyway. Without a human review, nobody is at blame.

I think this is one of the reasons why in Taiwan, we are really keen on this open API, open data. We understand that the collective understanding about what the situation really is including from investigative journalists, from students, and so on, makes the society better off because people then ...

Human nature. The great thing about software or digital realm, is that it really is possible to build something that benefits oneself without taking anyone’s values away, right? Because it’s a world where copying doesn’t carry any inherent cost. What worked for me if I just copy it to you, ...

That’s right, so…

The purpose is to make it easier for people to get into software engineering and programming. To make it easier for people to share the maintenance burdens to support your hardware and so and so. All these are good economic argument, but they’re not altruistic. They’re just self interest but ...

I figure out how to make myself better without hurting anyone. I might as well share it, so that everyone can improve. That part is the important part, the open innovation part. You see the same thing about the term open source, the term open source is a deliberate fork, ...

That message did not spread that easily. Taking private interest, and honoring this self interest, that’s still important, it’s very important. What’s important also is the idea of open innovation.

If the message was about respecting the elderly or something, if I share it to my other friends, it looks condescending a little bit.

We didn’t actually appeal to altruism, we appealed [laughs] to rational self interest. That’s important because that makes the message go viral. It’s in our interest to share these messages of self protection to our friends and families so that they can offer to themselves.

I think private interest like self interest is still very important. When I took the job yesterday, my tweet was about protecting myself, and then protecting others. Well, we share about wearing masks, we say just protect your own face against your unwashed hand.