This theory of change is not invented by myself. Indeed, it’s not invented by anyone, not even Jeffrey Sachs. What they have done is to ask a million people around the world, “What do you want to see in the year 2030?”
We can discover the common problems and start working together, finally, 17.6. When we invented someone, we can share with anyone for them to change it in the way that fit their society, instead of colonizing them, by forcing their society to change to our technology.
Digital Minister means 17.18, making sure that everybody’s data is trusted by everybody else, using distributed ledger and other technologies. It means 17.17, by making sure that we all have in our mind the same objective fact.
Now, the common good can be manifested just by looking at trending hashtag on SNS. This is a fundamentally different landscape, compared to pre-social media era. When I’m making introduction of myself to the United Nations during UNGA and so on, I just say, “I’m the digital minister in charge ...
Sometimes, they never meet, but they still use crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, reach great things together. That is how the common good can make itself seen in the digital era. Before, the common good can only be seen among people who already know each other somewhat.
We can say hashtag, I don’t know, MeToo, or #ClimateStrike. With the raise of the SNS, the social networking services, sometimes, people first see the hashtag, and then they start working together, before they meet.
We must have, in our mind, an image of the other people we are working with. In the digital transformation era, we can collaborate. Meaning I don’t know you, and you don’t know her, but we use the same hashtag.
By inventing an index that joins peoples’ ideas together, even when people don’t know each other before, before the Internet, people can only cooperate, meaning I know you first, and you know her, and then we start working on something.
Even though this is in kanji, but even if I’m speaking in Europe, in South America, or whatever, I don’t have to translate this slide, because everyone understand the 17 icons and what they mean. The great thing about digital transformation is something like the Sustainable Development Goals.
Let me begin by saying that the Sustainable Development Goals, which is the 17 goals listed here, is our common vocabulary.
Never in the first five minutes.
In Taiwan, also. Everybody start raising hand in the last five minute.
Maybe we do this round, and feel free to start thinking next round.
They know nothing about cooperates, [laughs] which is sometime in between. How to make this in between not something that is forced to go one way or the other is our main challenge here as well. Thank you raising this point. Anyone else?
The other way around, too, so it seems like a zero-sum or a tradeoff that one need to make. It’s a tradeoff relationship. This is also an excellent observation. Indeed, many Taiwan people split the organizations into profit organizations, companies, and nonprofit organizations or charities, NPOs.
You think that, if the company or the management of that organization concentrates on profitability, sometime, the social values suffer. Maybe you can promise not to hurt the society, but that is the maximum [laughs] one can do if you are focused only on profit-making.
The value to the people participating in the service. That’s great. Anyone else, before?
This, I totally agree. Thank you for the point. Anyone else?
Service is something that everybody wants a little bit differently, so it scales deeply, but not widely. Hardware is easy to scale widely, but maybe not that easy to scale deeply. These two much complement each other and mix, instead of just using one to dominate the other.
Excellent point. Anyone else?
Feel free to speak in Japanese, and she will translate.
Anyone would like to add something?
Those two values may sometimes conflict, and that creates attention that did not exist in the previous product-based era. Is that understanding correct?
How to build a relationship that sees the customers not as consumers, but as partners in the common good, is something that is opened up by the possibility of a service-based economy. However, this maximizes the public value, while this still optimizing the shareholder value.
Your idea is that this, which is usually called digital transformation, is not just a simple transformation from selling product to selling services. In your idea, the strategy or the design should also incorporate the common good, because service is relationship. Product is about transactions.
I will just check my understanding. You just said that everybody sees that what used to take a hardware to make or an appliance to make can now be what we call software-defined. That is an industry-wide change, by changing from a product model to a software model.
You would like to know, aside from the traditional Industrial Age way innovation, which is the input of hardware as well as energy into the industrialization process that then trickles down to the society and to the environment, sometime negatively, sometime positively, you would like to explore a different way ...
All right. Let me just check my understanding, given my background in using ICT for the government to form partnerships with not just the business sector, but also the social and the environmental sectors.
…to encourage social innovation?
Use ICT for the government…
How should we proceed?
Wow, OK.
He is from Kaohsiung. That I remember.
Some of them will?
I also am grateful to you to give me this experience, which never happened in the Social Innovation Lab.
You are not looking for facts or information, but looking for the experience of thinking together. I think this also captures the idea of social innovation. It is not about just sending brochures to each, but rather on brainstorming together, regardless of which sector we are in.
I received the invitation to tell me not to prepare anything. This is the first time that I received a meeting request saying that I should not prepare anything.
Welcome to our Social Innovation Lab.
OK. Yes, have a good local time.
OK.
I’ll make a transcript and we can edit it collaboratively. We can also embargo, as in publishing after you do, if you would like.
Yes. Are you OK with publishing this video to YouTube or would you prefer a transcript instead?
Sometimes, I find it difficult to take all the sides so I just put everything to sleep. When I wake up, first I discovered that I can actually take all the sides and second that there is some unifying value. If things are really complicated, if there’s many, many sides, ...
I suspend my judgment during the day, and I do all my value cleansing work to find common values to the positions that I have led during the day in the night during my sleep. When I wake up, I always wake up with some new ideas that could unite ...
I sleep eight hours every night.
It’s social in its input and socially beneficial in its output. We think of social innovation as something grand, something that takes a theory of change, and things like that. Sometimes, it’s just a domain hack. With the domain hack, kind of subliminally people just think, “Oh, if I don’t ...
I joined g0v about half a year after its founding. I think g0v taught me that a simple domain hack that is changed an O to a 0 in the URL is itself a social innovation. A social innovation changes the society by making everybody reimagine some part that were ...
They set a standard so that no mayors in this election or the next or the next would retract from that because people are just getting used to participatory policymaking on a city level. What we’re now doing is at an administrative level.
It’s just like in the 2014, the late that year, the mayoral election put everybody who ever cared for open government such as Mayor Ko Wen-je, Mayor Ko Wen-je into mayorship, and put everybody who are advocating for more technocrat or bureaucrat, closed-door meeting of the mayorship and mayors start ...
The very high level, very difficult, I think the UK people call them wicked problems. The president is not shying away from putting it to national-wide deliberation and debate. I think that set a really good example in saying that if we can survive doing these, there’s no reason why ...
