Mm-hmm.

Yes. If there’s one thing we can learn from Silicon Valley, it’s this risk tolerance. It’s this diverse set of risk-takers. Other than, I don’t really think we need to become any other parts of Silicon Valley.

No, it’s the wrong direction to go. Only Silicon Valley can be Silicon Valley. Taiwan should become Taiwan. Silicon Valley should not become Taiwan. Taiwan should not become Silicon Valley. It’s different dimensions.

No, it’s not. I wouldn’t say that, ever.

I did.

That’s fine.

It doesn’t really have to entirely replace a government service. It’s more like a citizen’s re-imagination of self-governance and things like that.

Also, they work with primary schoolers to use it as an education tool, so people can understand and operate these small machines while also being useful for analytics of weather issues and so on.

This is, of course, not government services. This is citizen science. Still, it provides an ecosystem where many different vendors can manufacture those AirBoxes.

They also just took the g0v branding and built a website that let people see how those citizen-deployed pollution-sensors work. If you go to this g0v map, it shows currently how good or bad the AirBoxes are pointing.

They’re still free to. For example, there’s people who deploy this AirBox that is a small PM2.5 sensor that measures the pollution of the air, of small particles.

It’s about services, so anything really, as long as it’s open source that is of value, it provides services, could be called a g0v project.

It’s still called g0v.

Exactly.

What I’m saying is that because there’s dozens, if not hundreds of people doing it together, each of us did not really put in that much amount of time to it. What’s done is collectively very useful, and many different spin-offs and startups can form based on these digital commons. ...

The government takes this contribution and make the maintenance better and so on. There’s many g0v projects that ended up being government services like this.

This is a private-public partnership that’s initiated by the civil society, that just looks at a government service and say, "This could work better," and then redid it in the imagination of the actual users. In this case, people want to teach their children Chinese.

The thing is that I gave up all my copyrights, all my intellectual properties as part of this projects, as did my contributors. When the Ministry of Education looks to revise, to revamp their dictionary programs, they then took our contributions in.

It’s a multilingual dictionary that combines many different dictionaries and resources that it was provided by the Ministry of Education, which is why we call it the MOE dictionary.

Because it’s trying to re-imagine the government’s services, starting from zero, from a digital way. The usual way of doing a g0v project, for example, I did a project with quite a few fellow hackers from Google, from HTC, from MediaTek, on a dictionary website, the MOE dictionary.

Right. We write G-0-V.

That’s right.

Yeah, but with the O changed to a zero, so G-0-V. We pronounce it as Gov Zero.

It’s government, G-O-V, but with the O replaced by a zero.

Movement? It’s called g0v, G-0-V. I’m going to paste you the link.

If it’s not, it’s for the common good. It’s open source. They return to their jobs and to trying out another innovation.

Every batch, there’s also -- well, I’m going to paste you the links -- the showcases where they do get funds and do something good together. If this business model proves to be sustainable, then maybe they will form a NPO or a company or a co-op out of it.

That’s right. The g0v, for example, has a grant program that is entirely funded by the private sector, and that rewards the part that solves a social problem that is doing for social good and so on.

That’s right.

They eventually become consultants.

That’s why I said that many of my friends is somewhere on this slope. Many of them still work for a large company, but some of them have successfully transitioned into being a consultant of the original company, but then started social innovations by themselves, but works with 5 people ...

It’s this kind of collective, collaborative social innovation that we’re trying to promote, because it gives people a sense of safety, like if they want to shift more work into this entrepreneurship, they can do this, but they don’t have to commit to it right away, and there’s many different ...

That has brought maybe 3,000 or more people online simultaneously, and tens of thousands of people contributed their part time on this kind of social innovation that is collaborative. This is being somewhere in the middle of full-fledged finding a new company, as well as just staying with a large ...

The idea is that every couple months, as well as every week on small gatherings, people look at what the government -- their local government, their national government -- is not doing properly, or the website is difficult to understand or whatever, and try to just contribute a weekend’s time ...

The point of social innovation is to ensure that people don’t have to take unreasonable risk to make innovation. For example, one of the movements that I helped fostering is called the g0v movement.

If people cannot jump from their day job to be an entrepreneur, maybe they can participate still to a initiatives or movements, or local social enterprises or NGOs as a stakeholder, as a volunteer or as a contributor, or as a part-time worker even, in addition to their day job.

Well, instead of saying, "These are the startup people, and these are the conservative people," what we are trying to do in every industry is to create an ecosystem where there’s this gradual curve.

It is. Our original topic was how to make the society more accepting of an entrepreneur that is more risk-taking than their spouse, their parents. That was the question.

Yes. The school’s curriculum development committee, as well as what we call those online separative courses, all this, we use a lot of online study circles for this, but they also get enrollment into empowerment programs. That is just a fixed certain hours to get this kind of training.

It will take a couple years to disseminate this culture. We do hope that by the end of this two-year journey, all the teachers will feel at least ready, if not eager, to try this out.

The early adopter schools, they don’t transform the entire school. They select a few classes to start teaching this way, and then share it with all the different teachers in that city.

What we’re now trying to do is to get as many teachers as possible to share their, not just successes, but also frustrations into switching to this kind of education, of relationship really, with children and their parents.

I wish I can say that all the primary school teachers will suddenly wake up, but what we’re now doing is instead of telling them to change overnight, to encourage more co-working with the community, with the parents and so on, so that when the new curriculum comes and they ...

If any locality’s K-12 education does not adapt to a new curriculum fast enough, there is always this possibility that the alternative schools will flourish and take over, even. There’s this new ecosystem about education that we’re building.

There’s also unique in Taiwan a competitive force in the form of alternative education. Because of the new alternative education revision, now any age child can engage in alternative education, be it community school or home school, or just a different school system, and still enjoy the full ride of ...

With the new curriculum, there really is no other choice because we’re taking away so many traditional ways of examination, or other ways to value students. We’re kind of just forcing the curriculum development committee of every individual school to try to come up with ways that the parents can ...

On the other hand, because of social media, because of the Internet, we also see more and more teachers trying to organize among themselves and trying to share their different innovations.

The thing is that when the teachers themselves were kids, were teenagers, and university students studying for becoming a teacher. They were one of the most conservative educational systems, the teacher training part. As you’ve said, it is difficult.