We allocate a national program to provide them with high-quality, super-computing devices. We provide cheap and good sensors from the E-tree. To make sure that when we’re analyzing where does the air pollution come from, we all work on the same data.

Taiwan is different. The administration is like, we can’t fight them, so join them.

It really threatens the legitimacy of the national government. In other Asian countries they will get attention from authorities very quickly.

They even come up with this kind of citizen science. They measure the air pollution, just like the drones in the Taichung Smart City. We were talking about measuring 100 meter to 100 meter high. The local people has been doing this with the very cheap drones and sensors for ...

We make sure that by the time we return, which is every two months, everything they raise is recorded transparently and resolved timely by the regulators. The idea, simply put, is that we solve the problem of the problem-solvers locally. When we do this, they are very innovative.

Every region, I go there every other week I go to these places, meet with social innovators, through projection to the 12 different ministries here in Social Innovation Lab, to make sure that all the ministry people listen to what’s happening in Hualien, like yesterday.

Yeah, very much so. One of the great thing in Taiwan is that the civil society doesn’t wait for the government to lead innovation. We have this co-creator space, and we do make tours around Taiwan to listen to the social innovators all around Taiwan.

I’ve been here for a year and a half, but I was kind of understudy minister to the previous cabinet minister, Jaclyn Tsai. That role is another year and a half, so maybe three year in total.

A lot of people like this way that things are going. This is my main mission from the social innovation side instead of a open government side.

The next generation can have something to feed back by bringing service design, design thinking, this ecosystem play, digital platforms, and so on, and to flip around to traditional disadvantaged people, so they become service providers in this digital age.

What we are doing is to bridge a new generation of designers, architects, and computer programmers to work with this older generation of co-ops, charities, or MPOs, to make sure that the values still carries on to the next generation.

We encourage any innovation that can absorb all these different forces together. There’s been a lot of organizations as co-ops, as NPOs, and as companies, who has been working on this in Taiwan for 20 years.

People who caring for the environment can argue as representative of the environment in this governance process and so on. People who work in co-op movement and so on, they all add to this link between the society and the business forces.

Basically, the government becomes a space instead of a rope. Within this space, we tell everyone, so that they are no longer restricted by their organizational forms. A charity can own a subsidiary company. A company can work not just through CSR, but though business development, through its HR, and ...

The question we’re asking, the two questions are now become morphing into, "Can anyone innovate to find a solution for all?" If you can’t yet innovate to find a solution for all, what are the non-controversial essence, what are the common purpose that we share, nevertheless, despite our different viewpoints?

The questions we ask is no longer, "How can we balance the interests of the stakeholders" or, "How can we make the stakeholders’ language understandable by the other sides?" because it’s a lost cause. We can’t do this, as government. We are not up to it.

What we are trying to do from the social innovation side, the open government side, is by saying we’re in a democratic company. Democracy means rule by the people. Instead of by the people or for the people, which are two side of the same mirror, we’re trying to say, ...

You can use the ICT tools to essentially create a Panopticon of society. [laughs] What we are trying to do, because we are a...

The more authoritarian you are...

Right, exactly.

Yes, and it’s a worldwide thing. It’s called democratization.

The social forces become much stronger, no matter which side they’re on. The tension become higher and higher, it become much easier for the public to lose trust in the democracy. The more democratic a government is, the less trust it gains from its citizens after the advent of mobile ...

We’re the regulatory link between the civil societies and the private sector. However, after the mobile Internet, these dogs became much bigger. [laughs] The interested stakeholders organize among themselves. They don’t really need an MP or a traditional media to organize. Anyone who could share a hashtag can organize. [laughs]

Traditionally, before the advent of mobile Internet and social media, the government does a pretty good job to balance the interests and to make sure that we don’t break, in the sense that we translate the language between those different stakeholders, so they understand what each other’s concerns are, both ...

...the concerns of this generation versus the seventh generation down the road.

It also means it’s unproven, but I absorb the risk. The idea, very simply put, I’ll give you the two-minute version, whereas before, the government is like the rope here. There’s a lot of tension in the government to balance between the sustainable part and the development part. These two ...

It’s a very different governance model.

This is a very different...

If they have a social mission in their charter or in their founding documents of the company, they could announce it and be subjected to the many preferential treatments that is enjoyed by traditional charities. We also make sure that the traditional charities can also found subsidiary sub-companies to participate ...

Social innovation is really key here. What we are trying to do here in the Social Innovation Lab is to make sure that all the companies preferably, but some companies at the moment, announce their alignment to sustainable development goals.

In Taichung, I gave the open government side of this story. In Yuan and in many other meetings, I gave the social innovation side of the story, which is kind of the same story, depending on whether you tell it from the public servant’s viewpoint or the civil society and ...

If you’re comfortable in English, we’ll do this in English.

Not quite.

No, not at all. I am a junior high-school dropout.

No, not at all. English is my fourth or fifth language. I learned it when I was an adult already.

I can do this conversation in English, if you don’t mind.

Thank you.

Sure, of course. I relinquish all copyright, as will be this transcript after we edit it for 10 days. It will be in the Commons.

The Thai people seems to be happy with this lineup.

Finally, somebody from our office, Romulus, is going to share how we build such technological tools to encourage rough consensus rather than polarization online. Any of these might be your resource when holding an Indonesian workshop.

That was a pretty good success story. When you have that, there’s no room for disinformation to grow, because there is no misinformation or no misunderstanding in the first place. I think the NDC have a lot to contribute as well.

I think it also helps that environmental group understand the position of the plastic producers in that they were joining these industries long ago with a social purpose, and they will respond to the new social purpose.

Now hepatitis B is cured. You just take a pill and everything is gone. It’s not a problem anymore. They’re very willing only if better material than plastic is available. People started developing sugarcanes. They work really well. Starting this July for indoor drinking, it’s banned.

We met with the producers of one-shot utensils and they said they were social enterprises. Back when you first came to Taiwan in the ‘80s, because hepatitis B is everywhere. They entered this industry not to earn profit, but to solve a public health problem. They were with a social ...

Taiwan has 10 percent of the world’s marine biodiversity and we thinks it’s a treasure. We arranged a collaborative meeting, because she very quickly get 5,000 petitioners under a pseudonym, which is allowed, we thought that this must be a very senior environmental activist to get so many people so ...

That’s important, because the Join platform has 10 million unique visitors out of 23 million of Taiwanese. That’s like our own community where people can raise e-petitions and meet the officials face-to-face. Two years ago, a 16-year-old girl proposed that we ban plastic straws gradually so as not to harm ...

We also have the National Development Council Deputy Director, Chuang Ming-Fen, in charge of running our open data and our open government platforms and our e-participation platforms.

Dr. Peng Chi-min has always been very helpful in advising Taiwan's open data strategies, especially around open government data. Here in Taiwan, when we say open data, we also have citizen science data, private sector data. Open data by its own means data collaboratives across sectors. He is a real ...

Our Central Weather Bureau can only issue one press release, but Taiwan actually [laughs] have a lot of different islands and altitudes. A micro-targeted weather service is a large market. This actually can be seen as analogue to disarming this information thing.

He is generally seen as reputable – that’s very important – and currently makes that open data around air pollution, water pollution, earthquake prevention, and so on, public or even open as in open license, especially just to promote such independent broadcasters to give a more understandable framing rhetoric to ...