Right, and the juries are all from Asia-Pacific. Judges, there’s no Taiwan judges that vote. We can say that we’re neutral. We’re just providing a platform. Therefore, being even non-political, then we are already non-political. There is common vocabulary from Asia-Pacific.

We just chose 10 partnerships this year, but we are trying to expand next year. Maybe not just as Asia-Pacific. They may be interesting project to replicate.

Being CareFor, it is unlikely partnership, to say the least. They are actually piloting in Taiwan. I think it’s the first in Asia. That’s why they get the award, and so on. I think that’s an interesting, this is small scale.

That are cruelty-free, and then they are also moving onto other projects that focus on, for example, carbon neutrality and things like that. They do it in a way that basically, with the consumer’s taste, by essentially providing free design service for the advocacy.

Yeah, CareFor Taiwan works with the animal protection group to just get out a publicity campaign about free range chickens, about getting consumers to prefer eggs that are produced in a way that are...

They have to sign that they are already working together in a formal way. It includes some really interesting cases that it may be CSR, but it is actually, for example, Carrefour.

It’s a reward for a promising partnership. They have to show that some work has been done.

It’s a really good story to tell, but the key thing is that there’s like five different players here. They can’t really get this model working without the UN creative city supervising its work and things like that. What we’re trying to highlight is the unlikely collaboration between three sectors ...

Then they partnered with people from the Netherlands to introduce a way to make those waste back into upcycling products, form a local co-op, and make those damaged village regrow itself, and build an international brand out of it.

Basically, the idea is that we recommend people to suggest unlikely partnerships, like the winner is actually from Indonesia, the Cigondewah Fashion Village Lab. It’s from Bandung. It’s basically a fashion production with a lot of waste.

It’s called the Social Innovation Partnership Award. This is the first award of its kind that we’re aware of, that gives out SDG-based award not to any single organization or individual. It gives to partnerships, so at least two organizations must enter together.

I think mostly, we just need a couple years more to make it more known internationally because there’s a lot of, I think, pretty good design, but at the moment, we see limited penetration, and mostly just in Asia, because mostly, we have Indo-Pacific links. I think there is a ...

You can also see nationally what other top stories are there to further these issues. This icon is what we are spreading the idea of the products or services that also deliver one or more of the SDGs values. We are basically making social environmental procurement, supply chain integration, and ...

Yeah. We’re building such an index at the moment so that you can see that each municipalities and counties focus on, of course, different goals. They are asked to choose top two or three priorities, and then you can see exactly which they are and why they are focusing on ...

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think for the next year’s presidential hackathon, we really should broaden the international partnership. This year is really just a pilot.

They select one team from each of the 16 SDGs to showcase what kind of drastic impact they can do, and they have this kind of notebook that says just Unreasonable Goals. I think this is a similar design.

I think there’s also a related thing that I encountered a couple of months ago called Unreasonable Goals. It is basically a similar idea, just getting to 16 because not the 17s world-changing entrepreneurs and just making a cohort and with mentorship and things like that.

That’s something that maximizes impact, but it is not the same as securing, as you said, the impact finance that makes the prototype happen. Maybe we should talk to our social finance sector and see what we can get out of it.

Yeah, I think that will certainly require more than public sector funding. For the public sector, the most we can get is the winning team gets to demo to our president and be selected as part of our public service.

Yeah. In the presidential hackathon, we’re doing five days.

Yeah, I think this is an excellent design.

OK.

Yeah, Denmark can help.

We’d be happy to partner with more environmental or more equality or gender or some other sponsoring organizations.

Sure, sure, sure. That’s the main thing.

We got a lot of applications from 15 countries. That is the process. I’ll be very happy to work with more broader sponsoring organizations, not just the Open Contracting. Open Contracting is maybe focusing a little bit too much on SDG 16 and some 17, but that is...

It’s basically an accountability initiative internationally. They send to other members saying, "OK, Taiwan is releasing for the first time their procurement data for other people to analyze and also donating our talent to analyze other countries’ procurement data. What kind of infrastructure focused on SDGs can you propose?"

Yeah, so basically, we partner with sponsoring organizations. This time, we partnered with the Open Contracting Partnership or the OCP. OCP uses procurement data and so on to track infrastructures to make sure that they agree with the SDGs without pulling away from it.

We are expanding it to international level but maybe not as fast and certainly not as loud as we can be. That is what we need help...

Using Open Contracting to make sure that it’s fully accountable, that how the procurement counts toward making environmental impact without taking away from other parts of the environment so that it’s a net positive and things like that.

They are focusing on things that are, broadly speaking, sustainable infrastructure, like climate change mitigation, like looking at sea waste and how it flows with the seas, so that you can estimate the area from the beach using just machine vision and things like that.

We get application from 15 countries. We selected six. That’s Australia, Netherlands, Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and New Zealand. These are the principal contact. They may be international crew members also.

This year, we are choosing this as our Presidential Hackathon’s international tracks theme, "Enabling sustainable infrastructure." It is explicitly coded so that we can get not just 20 domestic teams, but 6 international teams as well.

This is national. This is the presidential hackathon.

The important thing is that they all have their flags in their teams, cohort, public communication materials. It’s just concrete goals, concrete targets. This is like 20 out of 169 right there. It really increased the reach.

At the end of it, of course, we’ll select five to be merged back into the policy. They will win the trophy from the president signifying that their solution will become part of the public service by the end of year.

SDG is a very convenient language that we are working on 6.4. Everybody said, "Oh, you solved 6.4." That become a common language. This year, we actually engaged the population to vote the 100 or so cases that become the cohort that is 20.

We’re actually coding our existing cases where there are collaboratives around particular issues. Like the one that we shared last time, around using machine learning to detect water leakage, and that we partner with Wellington, with New Zealand.

That’s right.

Exactly. Those coasts are the same, in a sense.

If you are an inland municipality, maybe you don’t care that much about sea life. The diversity represented by municipality, also very important.

We have our national reviews, of course, but I think in the local review, they can highlight the diversity around the municipalities. For example, there is like 10 percent of the world’s marine species, the biodiversity, in our seas.

That’s right. Have you talked with the people who are doing the voluntary local reviews for the municipalities of Taipei and Taoyuan? They’re following the example of New York and doing local reviews also.

Are global, yes.

Very much so.

You can’t politicize it out. [laughs]

Very much so.

Very much so.