She and I might use it for social media.

Then I have a final request that my wife asked me. She asked me to take a picture with you.

From London, it’s a shorter flight. If you, for other reasons, happen to come to Europe, and you want to add a stop-over in Berlin, please get in touch. It would be an honor for us to have you there, and to bring more of your experience and knowledge into ...

You can also put me in touch with them. I can reach out.

They’re colleagues of yours from here that are going to UK?

There are other approaches on how to think about this. You have tons of great examples. I think that would be very stimulating for the conversation that we are currently having in Germany.

I think you have a lot to say about these topics, and a lot of interesting examples also regarding the processes to give. If I can interest you to come to Germany, that would be really, really, really excellent. I also find it very important that people also learn that ...

The challenge for it, it needs to be integrated, and it needs to have access to the government. If you have just a social innovation agency, and it’s not really integrated into government thinking and bureaucracy thinking, it will not reach its full impact.

There’s a lot of discussion in Germany around social innovation. I don’t know if Julia told you about this. I’ve been talking with her about this, too. There’s some discussion whether we should create something like NESTA in Germany, like an innovation agency, for social innovation, because Prototype Fund has ...

I also wanted to invite you, you definitely have to come back. It has been so many years. If you are interested in coming, I would love to host you for a conversation with our community. I’ll definitely also talk to people in the environmental organizations and social innovation space.

That’s great.

You speak some German?

Where did you visit?

Have you been to Germany?

Now, with technology and automated translation, I hope that we are just a couple of years away from having really, really good transcripts, even for, as you know, especially for our topics, where it gets very technical. The automated translation often still fails. It’s not good enough.

We have also a lot of international organizations, stakeholders interested in the work. We also want to, one of our core goals, really, is also to advance the conversation and in Berlin, and to reach certain communities. Even in Germany, there’s still a language barrier if you don’t have it.

You have an even more difficult change. German and English are more similar than English and Chinese. We always have this conversation in our organization about putting stuff out, whether in German or in English.

I think her magazine, if I remember, I think that was in English.

If they, after they look at it, think it’s interesting enough, whether we could translate it into German.

It would be a little bit difficult for you to check, because to reach more people in Germany, and especially people also in government, it might be worth translating it into German. I will talk with my colleague.

I saw you’re also using open licenses. What’s is it called, CC licenses?

You even have a good spectrum policy in-place. You got it. You got a really nice package. I would definitely look more into this. I’m actually thinking, if you don’t mind, is it possible for me also to use the transcript to send to people interested in Germany?

Yeah, and the telecoms are very keen to get it, of course, but we have said there should be some spaces for experimentation. Look at what Wi-Fi. We wouldn’t have that innovation, range of devices, and use cases, if we didn’t have an open spectrum that everybody could use.

I know. There’s interference problems. Because there was lots of spectrum opening up with the switch to digital TV and things, same here. Then we are auctioning everything off.

We’ve been pushing for that in Germany, too, and it’s very, very difficult to get.

You have open spectrum?

That’s very hard for Germans to adopt that kind of thinking.

A lot of people in the German government will tell me that the biggest challenges for them is, we have 50 years of bureaucracy, so there is lots of rules that determine how things need to be done. It’s very difficult for them to step outside of these rules and ...

For implementation, you need to talk about collaboration. You need to talk about mind shift, culture shift, working differently, then changing things, how you used to work. Have you seen in your work, what would you describe as your personally, the biggest challenges?

The challenge has not been that there has not been a lack of...We’ve been talking about open data, open government, and things like that for a while in Germany. Our challenge is implementation. It’s not having ideas. It’s about implementation.

At some point, it’s going to be, advisory role. What we really need is somebody like you, who really is in day-to-day contact with the ministries, and driving innovation. Hopefully, the Digitalrat can get our government to adopt those kind of approaches, to make it permanent, and scalable across government.

I’m glad you’ve heard about the German Digitalrat. One of the -- I don’t want to say problem, it’s always better to talk about challenges -- one of the challenges of the Digitalrat is that it’s not permanent. They are coming in from the outside.

Wow. You’re really ahead of us. I knew it before, but now, talking to you, I can see really that. It’s very impressive. Also, how the things are connected. I really like that, how the thinking is very integrated. That’s really cool.

We are discussing this in Germany, too. There we’ll be probably, too, not very comfortable with the military angle in Germany about this, too. We will create a civilian DARPA in Germany as well.

Have you created some agency like DARPA for this?

Is education?

The other one is talent?

It’s one of the core pillars.

That’s exactly, this is really interesting.

What’s also great is that you make the law based on real experience and testing. This is one of the problems, that we make a law, and then we look, “Oh, what happens?” Then we see, “Oh, it doesn’t work out like we wanted it to be.”

That’s my experience. You cannot just tell people theoretically, “This is how it works.” They need to do it.

When do you sleep? [laughs]

On the local level. You will need to be giving trainings all the time, right?

Have you created some sort of academy, where you train people in these kind of competences? You not only need them on the national level, but you need them in the communities.

This is very interesting. This basically means that you need a lot of people familiar with this moderation and collaborative process, right?

How do you determine that, if it works?

It can also be a private company?

The main applicant would be a city, a local community, a city council, or something?

They will need to get the approval from the national government to do such a test bed, right?

They can get some exemptions from national regulations?