In their parents’ generation, it’s not like that. It’s giving a good account for the meaning of participating in any institution, day job or not, is now a collective demand of the business sector. They are somewhat ready for it if they’re publicly listed by a lot. But if they’re ...

They start working on circularity and other newer things. We’re featuring them prominently, mostly because they signal a different reaction for the Taiwanese teenagers. Now when they are looking for jobs, they look for more meaning than wage, that they would not trade for a lack of meaning.

They’re interesting, because many of them, they started life in a municipality or they’re trained in a kind of business-worthy training. Then like you, they decided, “Maybe social design actually makes more sense.”

Sure, it’s fine. Let’s see. I think, first of all, you should talk to ST here, [laughs] who has interviewed social innovation organizations all across Taiwan, just for the film that we’re about to release, either this week or next. She can give you the link of such social innovation ...

How long do you have here?

Just move the regulation out of their way, so that telemedicine, even telepsychiatry, and things like that, now becomes legal in Taiwan. If you are always in municipalities, clinics is more dense than 11. Within walking distance, there is going to be a clinic. “What are you talking about about, ...

That’s where we find most social innovations. Our work is just where they run into trouble. For example, if they want telemedicine, and our regulation haven’t yet caught on, my work is just to sit here or visit them to listen to them outlining the problems.

Truth to be told, most tech sector is located in the six municipalities. To learn about the organizations, it may help to talk to the municipal people who actually live most of their time outside the municipality. They maintain that connection to their municipal friends, but they actually do their ...

We’re here just an exhibit space of what people actually do in Hualien, in Taitung, in Tainan, in all those places. The six municipalities, if you are looking to source of innovations, you can spend some time there to learn about the governance mentality, the tech sector.

It is mostly around national government matters. [laughs]

That gave them a far larger canvas that they can paint in, for example, Wellington, which is all bureaucrats. I probably have to edit that in my transcript, but yes.

They had an earthquake, so they had to plan everything again, anyway. They have pretty good social sector participation rules for such public buildings. People, they are willing to wait a very long time, by Taiwan standards, for it to be properly rebuilt in a sustainable way.

When I visited New Zealand the third time – I visited first Wellington and then Auckland – the third time, to Christchurch. That was the most memorable. They are in the south islands, but they’re large enough.

…for each of us. [laughs] I think some local councilors or mayors – they’re actually quite flexible and nimble. I think Okinawa to Japan is somewhat like Catalonia. I’m not advocating or anything. I am just saying.

Last time, g0v contributors worked with Code for Japan and the Korean equivalent to run a hackathon across three jurisdictions in Okinawa, which is the same distance…

[laughs]

They just randomly threw me, from their minister, the Catalonia Charter of Digital Rights. I reviewed them and they seem OK, so I just signed. You don’t see that happening in many other ministries.

Yeah, including hologram presentations.

[laughs]

It’s a jurisdiction.

Maybe we design norms first, and the large institutions can implement them, but please leave the norm design to these nimble horizontal networks.

Yeah. Zdeněk Hřib. We all share very similar worldviews. It makes collaboration far easier than go-to statecraft, multilateral and unilateral meetings, because we see them as not quite outdated, but not good to figure out norms.

That’s right. That’s right. I think the Council foundation, like I’m going to work with, is now moved to the Netherlands, which is also very much in tune of this kind of horizontal governance, and also this place was also visited by a pirate – the mayor of Prague, also ...

Yeah, including the 15-M movement.

Exactly.

‘96 if you talk about presidential election. There’s local elections before that.

He wrote direct democracy into the constitutional ideas.

From the very beginning, they have a participatory direct action nature in it. It also helps, the person who developed theories that inform our current constitution, the Dr. Sun Yat-sen, believed not just in republics but more so in direct democracy. Kind of ahead of his time, actually.

They all started at the same time. There’s no 200 years of republican tradition that you are introducing a little bit of change to, which is very difficult. It literally all started the same year.

We literally got democracy during the same years as World Wide Web. The people who designed democracy is meeting, demanding the constitution that doesn’t quite fit, or changing the election rules, or introducing referenda.

One of the thing about Taiwan is that democracy is so new, so the institution doesn’t have history. There’s no inertia.

Their activity as a organization and agenda-setter is now much more important than their KPIs of people trained, which is meaningless, actually.

We’re making a similar shift. Starting next year, when university engage in regional revitalization, they have to index both by the SDGs they create, but also on how many organization that previously didn’t know each other that they introduce by virtue of being a university and therefore have some public ...

The thing with that is it makes the association something that part of the professors do on their spare time, as the CSR usually brings that association. Now most publicly listed company say “sustainable strategy” now. They don’t say CSR anymore.

No, public university can also apply. It’s just the bureaucracy takes more time. A private university register as soon as we introduced the registration. Public institutions already run…They call it University Social Responsibility, USR programs.

I always operated like that, but we didn’t code that up in regulation, but now we do. That’s a very recent development.

That’s the governance change from a traditional top-down way where each ministry take care of the organizations of their type, to a decidedly horizontal way where we just make introductions and make sure that we find common values despite different positions.

This is important because then we explicitly say it’s not about how large your employee base is, how many page your GRI Sustainability Report is, or how many ballot scorecards you can fill on the B Corps scorecard. All these are fine, but, frankly speaking, we are here just to ...

You’re not keeping them. After four years, they’re gone, so you’re not growing your human resources, [laughs] but you’re still a social innovation organization. That regulation was just passed maybe last month, and we just had a university registering today.

Now if you are a university that restructure empirically around the sustainable goals, if you teach all the business school people how to make circular design, if you teach all your humanities people how to use digital technology to rebuild social trust, suddenly, you are a organizer for social innovation.

If you’re a social entrepreneur, nobody runs a university from scratch. University have a lot of institutions behind them, so they cannot be a start-up either. It doesn’t fit into any of those traditions that I was just describing.

Most importantly, these more siloed definitions could not include the universities. University are not open for business, certainly, and they are not quite charities either. Where are they?

To operate as a entrepreneur, it defines a kind of a growing institution. You want to grow the person inside your wall, so to speak, your institutional perimeter. To define you as a social innovation organizer means that you’re spreading something. It’s a paradigm shift.

The term digital social innovation was defined then. We didn’t know that this is a word, but it apparently becomes a word that’s broad enough so everybody can join. That’s the most important part. Now, instead of saying social entrepreneurs, which can mean anything, my office say, “You can register ...

My point being these are actually different intellectual strands. Somehow, in a rush to balance the excess of capitalism, [laughs] they’re now, right after the financial crisis, banded together as a viable alternative to excessive capitalism. You see lots of Horizon 2020 projects. [laughs]

It could be a large company suddenly deciding, dedicating their mission to a social purpose as B Corps. It could also be a co-op that’s already doing perfectly fine and creating increasing value to the society between them. They’re not even seeing themselves as a charity or a corporation as ...

That’s because New Zealand, like Taiwan, is caught in between the different views of social entrepreneurship. Social enterprise get to mean three not-overlapping things at once. It could be a charity or a foundation that has some service or product to sell to sustain itself as a community CIC.

…for the public good. It’s tech for good.

To people who have a more British or Italian background, it means something like a co-op, a CIC, or something like that. If you talk to someone who has a more American background, they will start thinking about Kickstarter, a B Corps, or something like that. If they have trainings ...

There’s a new development that literally just happened this week. We reclassify universities, including private universities, as a social innovation organization. It’s important because, if you say social enterprise here, it means different thing to different people.