After this came about, then the central government-level discourse now has shifted more into the direction that you’re talking about, sustainable participation. Because this plan is not yet permeating to the local government, we have to invent new principles like the government digital service principle that the Taichung CIO Hsiao ...

What I did is, mostly on the cover page, to redefine the DIGI⁺ to not be just the development -- it used to be just this -- but also be inclusive for innovators to include a multi-stakeholder governance and especially to include the civil society in a sustainable dialog.

One of the things that we’re trying to do in the DIGI⁺ plan, and that’s one of my other contributions, is to redefine the NICI plan, which is an OK plan, as plans go. Really, it was very much technocratic.

They are not using smart city moniker. They may use the term "conscious city." They may use the inclusive habitation, or whatever other monikers. Smart city, in Taiwan, is already very well associated with a very technocratic way of viewing things.

In Taiwan, what we’re trying to do, when you talk with the social bureau or the environmental bureau, they will start to argue in a more virtue-ethics kind of way, like what kind of characteristics, how inclusive we’re going to be. How welcoming we’re going to be with people of ...

These, in a utilitarian logic, they’re not quite translatable. They don’t commensurate that well into a cost-benefit analysis. You have to invite new ideas like social return on the investment, and that doesn’t really work in all the different cases.

There’s a lot of business strategies in Silicon Valley economies. Those are all doing this IBM turn when it comes to smart cities. I’m not saying good or bad. It’s just a fact. I think what’s missing, as you said, is I would call it participatory sustainability, the social side ...

There’s a lot of its work, which used to be on personal computing, but are now working very closely with any verticals to introduce parts of their components. That’s where they need to be to survive, because they don’t have a phone, so they have to be elsewhere.

Microsoft is taking its IBM turn now. [laughs] IBM was a pioneer in doing this whole smart city branding. I think maybe one-fifth of it is IBM’s branding. It’s really no surprise, because Microsoft is now pivoting into the business model of IBM.

I’m sure they can subcontract... [laughs]

It’s Deloitte. [laughs]

Exactly.

Not the only part.

Exactly. The main thing here is that it has to link together. As you just mentioned, the bureau of economic development, in any city, who work on these parts, they often don’t have the language of the other parts. When you talk about sustainability, they think a thriving economic investment ...

Because it’s a different bureau. It’s a social bureau or the environmental bureau.

The expo.

It’s through this cross-sectoral referee process that we establish these working relations between the Academia Sinica people, as well as the III and other people. This is a social problem that we’re now trying to solve, and really did take a presidential letter to start to be solved.

We have also, of course, the CIO Hsiao from the Taochung city government. It’s to establish a panel, a cross-sectoral, collaborative relationship, so that we, as judges, to these proposals can have some rapport. Any one of us can flag a proposal as untenable, infeasible, not really innovative, because each ...

Exactly. The reason why we get the judges of this hackathon...We have the National Development Council. We have Academia Sinica people.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, Academia Sinica really only respond to the presidential office, which is outside of the administration. [laughs]

I don’t know. Having the president sign a letter or something?

This is something that I personally care very much about, so that we are on the same factual basis.

If you search for 民生公共物聯網, the IoT for Public Good project, that is the thing that we allocated some budget into doing.

Anyone can submit their own sources also, as long as they conform to the metadata. Because it’s a cluster of high performance computers, anyone can submit their machine learning code or whatever code to analyze the correlation between the weather data or whatever other kinds of river data, water quality ...

It doesn’t really make sense for all the researchers to download all the data from all the sources. People may miss some sources they don’t know about. It makes, instead, more sense for the National Center of High Performance Computing, in its different facilities, to keep a mirror of all ...

There’s researchers for Academia Sinica who do this recalibration. One of the key issues is that we needed to bring code to data, instead of bring data to code. The previous open data paradigm was that people can all download their dataset, therefore the air quality data, soon the volume ...

The other thing is that, even though they come from other sources that are not necessarily certified, it still shows trends. It could be useful in a way that says this is the overall trend. Even though it’s consistently twice as low, [laughs] at least it increases over time when ...

What we are doing first is having the ITRI, the Industrial Technology Research Institute, to produce its own sensors, so that it could serve as a benchmark on which to benchmark the other sensors usually imported abroad. That’s, in a very technical idea, to get cheap sensors that are already ...

By lowering the threshold of participation, that’s one of the main contributions that civic tech can do, just by making people who care to save their time.

Everybody can come on here and comment something, like something, and explore some part of the budget, and so on, as long as it’s under two minutes of engagement. It’s either online or face-to-face. It doesn’t matter.

I think a lot of the work could be done in a way, we call it a recursive public, meaning that the space itself is a subject matter that people in it can participate, so it can morph in time. This is a little bit like the "comprehensive community development" ...

There’s a lot of it that are just cross-sectoral dialogue, by having a generally trusted system for people to independently publish their observations and work with the cities’ observations and work with international bodies’ observations. It’s not just on air pollution, but on all kinds, water quality, you name it.

I think we’re pretty unique, in Asia at least, but there’s many counterparts in Iceland, in Madrid, in Ottawa, of all places, and in New Zealand to recently. At least in this region, I think we’re kind of unique.

It’s based on the fact that there is no paper legacy to begin with. There is no bureaucratic legacy to begin with. It’s city-sized, to boot. So far as I know, we’re trying to do this inter-generational reconciliation between the digital and the paper culture, digital twinning and so on.

The thing is that Estonia is city state-like. It can’t very easily export its governance system like this, which is purely electronic. It include no migration path, because there’s no migration needed. It’s widely hailed as being the example of cross-platform, cross-department, cross-sectoral data integration.

In Nordic countries, this is common sense. [laughs] In Estonia, in particular, because they were founded after the Internet, they’re constitutionally a very inclusive e-government, just by nature of being founded after the Internet happened.

If they run into regulatory issues, we work with sandbox laws, we work with the local governments, to make sure they can challenge existing regulations without being fined for it. They can go back to their investor, saying, "The government provided us a safe space for innovation." That’s the main ...

Overall, as long as they work on one of the SDG goals, we’re trying to now amplify their social impact. One of the main mission of this place is to have the people experiment with all these SDG innovations in a safe way that is backed by the government.

This is essential. Otherwise, we can’t say everyone can participate in the government’s process. In this, we have a lot of cross-sectoral buy-in. Every other SDG goal we can’t say is equally treated, especially the fishing situation in Taiwan really needs work.

If people can’t afford broadband, we have a special budget that subsidize the broadband access for them. Even in the most rural island, like Kinmen and Matsu, we make sure that there is still fiber optic lines specially crafted for them.

That’s our presidential agenda.

The SDG idea is that, when we work on anything, we can’t do it at the expense of the other goals. It must be done in the holistic way. My main work is on SDG 17, which is by providing digital opportunity, broadband as a human right, make sure there’s ...

...to align themselves in one of the SDGs.

What we are trying to do is, as I said in the beginning, trying to get all the companies, charities, and so on...

As long as they can find a local government or even the civil society or private sector partner, anyone can propose it. They’re like, "OK, we’re just supporting this civil society proposal," but it’s actually their idea. [laughs] We see a lot of very innovating cases coming out of it.

If there’s any data, any silos, any cross-Yuan communication issues, it could be solved in a very quick way. We see a lot of section chief level public servants proposing in this innovation. It could be that they were blocked by lack of budget, lack of resource, siloed communication, or ...

We now get some buy-in from the presidential office. For this year, we’re going to pick 20 proposals. There’s 108 candidate proposal. We’re going to pick 20 of them, and make sure that they get a three-month to six-month incubation period. Ten or so of those cases will be overseen. ...

It’s saying, if you see a government website, it doesn’t do the thing you want or it doesn’t exist, you can set up a g0v.tw website that does the thing you want, and eventually, by relinquishing our copyright, to encourage the government to merge it back in the next procurement ...

This is very important. Otherwise, we can’t have a public discourse. This spreads very quickly, and so the buy-in doesn’t have to come from the government. It’s already there in the civil society. That’s the spirit of g0v.