Ethan Tu, which runs the AI Labs here, a not-for-profit AI research team, think OpenAI, open company, was also one of the people behind not only the largest online community back then, the PTT – our equivalent of Reddit – but also contributing to Yam’s technical infrastructure.

The online morphing of these on-the-ground social communities is best captured if you get to interview some of the earlier Yam co-founders. For example, we have Ambassador-at-Large Chen Jen-ran, JR, who was the founder of Yam. We have Hsiao Ching-Teng working now on the Board of Science and Technology as ...

They call themselves 蕃薯藤. They’re probably one of our first digital social enterprises, started as a association but then re-incorporated as a company. That was ‘96, ‘97, around the time I also run another start-up. In any case, Yam took a social purpose – just think Yahoo, but everything is ...

That’s right. After the introduction of the World Wide Web and the direct presidential election in 1996, they kind of changed. The person to interview here is probably someone that ran Yam, Y-A-M, if they are still around. They call it the “yam vine”, like the rhizome, a idea that ...

They’re very well-funded, but they mostly rely on volunteers in the local chapters, which are all micro-institutions. This gave them agility that can respond to the September 21 earthquake or any other large disaster in a fashion that is simply unimaginable just after lifting of martial law public service.

At the time, the Counsel for Culture very much encouraged the building of the social sector. Again, seeing that this is before direct presidential election, the end result can be seen in disaster recovery, for example. Tzu Chi is really strong in the social sector here, and they do carry ...

People didn’t get to vote for the president, but people do get to organize locally. The co-op movement, the movement for community colleges, the movement for educational reform, and so on all took the form of micro-institutions is what I’m referring to. The federation of micro-institutions very quickly emerged because ...

Taiwan has a culture of community-building movement since the ‘80s. When the martial law is being lifted, they proposed to don’t have presidential election. There’s a decade or so for people to build their communities in a very much peer-to-peer way because there’s no legitimacy of the president.

Here we call them the social sector, but I think it’s the same idea.

22 or so.

All my colleagues choose their own work as well. We’re thoroughly leaderless.

Whatever.

No.

It’s very useful for internal negotiations. If your director general doesn’t like the idea, just summon the president and he or she will say nothing. In any case, Tainan Sprout is good to talk about if you are interested. We can certainly make that introduction.

Each of them are tri-sectoral already by then and carry a presidential promise that, whatever you do, you will become public policy in a year. We will do whatever to make it happen. The trophy is a project. If you turn it on, it shows the image of the president ...

Urda Yen is one of our judges in our Presidential Hackathon, so she’s well-versed in the more community building part of civic tech. The Presidential Hackathon, very simply put, is a three-month-long hackathon. By the end of it, the president gives out five trophies to five teams.

It’s all happening in Tainan. There’s lots of happening there. I don’t know. I can introduce you to the Tainan Sprout – I think that’s the translation – Association, which is doing a lot of such things in Tainan, both from a civic tech side as well as from a ...

The tech part of civic tech?

Maybe we can make some introductions, but that depends on whether you’re interested in space-building, community-building, that sort of thing, or whether you’re interested on applied digital technology. These two are not always the same thing.

Very much so.

It is. It’s our cultural capital.

Sure.

So we just shared our experience.

We run some workshops to explore the seal thing in Japan, the seal versus electronic document exchange issue, as well as the telework issue, which seem to be two very hotly debated issue in Japan. We had that debate in 2015.

We run a collaborative project. I was invited as a guest to a vTaiwan Code for Japan, Pnika or something like that, collaboration in Tokyo and in another nearby city where I met Hal Seki-san.

Just regular meetings. Every week, there’s a smaller project meeting, a meet-up on the vTaiwan project. It’s right here on the second floor, sometimes in the kitchen. Every Wednesday by 7:00 PM, you’ll find a bunch of civic interests here. You can just chat to them. Some of them speak ...

It’s OK. Take your time.

If the public service likes it, then it takes it back and maintain it for you. If the public service doesn’t like it, at least it form a social object that you can have a dialog on. That’s the basic idea. It’s just a meme, really. If you look at ...

I think it’s just a idea that if you see something lacking from the public services, if something.gov.tw isn’t working, people are encouraged to offer better alternatives, something.g0v.tw, literally just a change in the URL. Then release it as open license to the commons.

The easiest way is to participate in one of the g0v hackathons. They just had one in the Taipei City Council, of all places. There’s many city councils that are also g0v participants. They offer their workspace and invited everybody in.

G0v.

Three years and, as understudy, working in the same administration office for another two years or so – so five years in total.

Physically, we do still have three rather large rooms in the administration building itself. We have a room here on the ground floor, a room on the second floor there, and a room on the basement. Altogether, six physical rooms that anyone who joins this horizontal team can fairly use ...

Most people-facing ones did. That’s the personnel allocation.

I just said I have three working conditions. One’s voluntary association. I don’t accept order, I don’t give order, but I welcome each minister to send one person to my place so that we can work in a collaborative fashion. At the moment, we have 22 people, meaning not all ...

My office, if you care about personnel, is one person, at most, poached from each ministry. It’s a, by definition, cross-functional and, indeed, cross-line team. Because we’re in the administration itself, there’s 32 vertical ministers, but I’m one of the 9 horizontal ministers. In horizontal minister’s office, there’s no rules, ...

Open government and youth engagement.

All the questions are recorded in real time, and it can be tracked on this single website. That’s one of the three branches of my work. That’s social innovation. The other two is open government and youth engagement.

We have a central platform for everybody to register. It’s called si.taiwan. Here, you can very easily see which Sustainable Goals are which locality concerning about, which organizations are currently organizing to tackle these Sustainability Goals, which proposals are being made that needs regulatory collaboration.

The public service, this way, gets credit because everything is published to the Internet in a transparent fashion. That covers the social innovation part of PDIS.

We’ve been doing bi-weekly tours, half of them organized by ministry, half of them by our youth counselors in the national administration. It’s been producing pretty good regulatory changes because they are not just abstracted A4 papers. They’re real people talking across screens to the public service.

It used to be that Ministry of Economy would say, “But this is not my ministry alone. We have to talk to Minister of Interior or Minister of Indigenous Affairs.” Because they’re literally in the same room, in the Social Innovation Lab, sitting next to each other, they cannot help ...

Virtually, this means that we build a rapport between the local co-ops, social entrepreneurs, and so on. I often live there, stay for a night or two, to mingle with them, to understand their local conversations. Then we relate them as questions, but I don’t represent them. I re-present them ...

We have 98 percent coverage on all the rural and indigenous places. When I go there, I don’t go alone. I set up a Zoom video conference and bring all the 12 ministries related to their issues in a virtual conversation. They proved to be so useful that not only ...

I talk to the elders, in both senses, in indigenous lands in the more rural areas, in offshore islands and so on. Because in Taiwan we have broadband as human right, no matter where you’re on the top of the Yu-Shan Jade Mountain or on the Pacific island of Dongsha, ...

On Wednesdays, literally anybody can walk in and claim a chunk of my time and then talk. It’s a open space designed to host policy-making across sectors. Every other Tuesday or so, I tour around Taiwan to especially reach people who don’t have a high-speed rail station. It makes it ...

The third thing is that because I was facilitating a conversation every week, and then seeing it’s such a good idea. I will stay here every week for office hours. I’m here in all Wednesdays obviously, because today is not a Wednesday, but it’s more for pre-book meetings.

Yeah. That’s the cafe. It’s the cafe. The second priority is that it has to open every day from early morning until 11:00 PM. The space is provided for free, for anyone working on any sustainable development goals, so that people can mingle after their activities. That’s the second one.

In that time, we constantly talked to a bunch of social innovators around Taiwan and co-created this space for mutual benefit, and so not just for people in Taipei. I think the number one consensus was that we are to have a cafe, a open kitchen, a dedicated chef in ...

We have only one meeting room available, and the basement was flooded to the knees. Not a happy time. [laughs]