 So, as you know, the government lab, the work that the government lab does, it offers consultancy support to governments. And the project that I'm working with right now is with Victoria. I don't know if you know her, Victoria Adzina, and she is, we're doing a research and a comparative study of innovation labs around the world for the project with the Inter-American Development Bank. And what we want to do is basically get as much information as possible about the most successful innovation labs around the world in order to write a report that can inform other Latin American governments who are looking to establish their own innovation lab. And so far, I've interviewed around 10 experts in Latin America, the UK, and we're trying to expand it more in Europe, Asia, but so far, the focus is Latin America. So you have the interview script, right? Yes, I do. So some of the questions at the end are about the Latin American landscape, because the study is tailored to Latin American governments, that's why. So I'll start with the laboratory-specific questions, and perhaps you can tell me how many employees are at the lab, at the entity, what are their professional backgrounds, and do they undergo any training, and the skills and competencies that you look for. Okay, great. So at the moment, all the full-time people working in the public digital innovation space, or the PDIS, is 21 person, including myself. And you can find all the lists of the people, how they look like, as well as all the alums, as well as interns in this URL that I just pasted you. Oh, perfect. Right. And so half of them were ministry or delegates, mid to high-level career public service, delegated from ministry. We have a written rule that says, at most, one person can be delegated from each ministry. So that's half of PDIS. The other half of PDIS are professionals. We have interaction designers that we poached from IDEO. We have actually two interaction designers, and a service designer, as well. So there's a heavy design bent. There's a few professional facilitators. There's stenographer, also professional programmers, but everybody kind of wear multiple hats. The programmer also is a filmmaker by profession and director and all things like that. And so there's a lot of cross-disciplinary learning going on. And you mentioned real quickly that there's a delegate from each ministry and the government. Yeah, at most, at most. So theoretically, I can have 32 colleagues each from every ministry, but obviously I don't. So for example, the Ministry of Defense never sent anyone. But the ministries who did send are mostly public-facing. So we have delegates from, for example, the Ministry of Interior, of Culture, of the National Communication Commission, the Ministry of Education, the usual suspects, as well as foreign affairs who work with us on public diplomacy. That's really interesting. This is the first time I hear that, and it makes sense because, yeah, that's really cool. And the people that are not from other ministries, do they undergo any other training to work it? Right. So usually they're the trainers, actually, but they're all professionals. For the work that we do, we do have training material, and they get their training mostly by following the loan. It's more like apprenticeship thing. So for example, a junior facilitator follows a real case through with a senior facilitator, and they learn about facilitation along the way. So there's no training. There really is just on a few exercises. I see. So it's by doing, by watching others. Right. It is a mentorship module, and we do have teaching guides. This one is in Mandarin, but it's very beautiful anyway, so I'm pasting you that. And there's also comic books and things like that. That serves as training material that are translated. So I'll get you the translated version. Thank you. And who would you consider is the audience of the lab? So it's everybody, right? Everybody on Earth, literally. We work toward achieving the sustainable development goal. We specialize on the goals 16 and 17, but we work with the entire global goals framework in mind. Do you specialize in 16 and 17? Yes. That is private access. What's the private target? So 16 is, so I'll specify the actual targets, okay? So for 16, we work on 16-6, developing effective accountable and transparent institutions. We work on 16-7, ensuring responsive, inclusive, and representative decision-making. We work on 16-8, strengthening participation in global governance, and finally 16-10, ensuring public access to information and protecting fundamental freedoms. And in goal 17, we work specifically with 17-8, strengthening the science, technology, and innovation capacity, especially for developing countries. And we work with 17-17, encouraging effective partnerships. We work with 17-18, which is enhancing availability of reliable data. And then we work with 17-19, further developing measurements of progress. And arguably, the existence of us, the lab, is 17-6, knowledge sharing and cooperation for open innovation, but that's not something that we work on, that's something we are. So would you consider all of these targets to be the lab's main policy focus? Yes. And in terms of the most significant institutional and social impact of the lab thus far? Well, we worked on the mask rationing system that includes a real-time map with excess of pharmacies used by the civic sector, as well as the online ordering system. And all together, we made sure that everybody in town can very predictably get sufficient amount of surgical masks. And we do have evidence to show that this significantly reduced the R0 of the coronavirus. We have many other work that we consider successful, but this one, I guess, saved more lives than everything else combined. That's really cool. It's an interactive map for masks. Yeah, so it's actually built by the civil society, but we ensure that the open data needs it is available, as well as making sure that the relationship between the civic tech community and the GovTech runs smoothly. And so more than 100 applications, including voice assistance, chatbots, and, you know, regular maps are available. And this is the site that we maintain. And we also work with other ministries on the e-mask system, which is the same, except with an e-prepending to it. That allows people to very easily collect without doing, because in pharmacy, even with the mask map, you're probably still queuing a little bit. And the e-mask is a pre-ordering system, so you don't have to queue anyway. You just place an order in Friday and collect starting next Thursday on the convenience store near you. But these two are in parallel. And so you can choose one of the two modalities in any of the weeks. That's something other countries should hopefully be following. That's really cool. Korea actually worked with the Civil Society friend and developed exactly the same system and providing their API by using the Taiwanese visualization. And Japan also worked with us in the online hackathon, as well as the stopping coronavirus dashboard, which started from Tokyo, but is now using Taiwan everywhere else. So there's a very strong connection and collaboration between the three jurisdictions. That's really cool. I've been seeing a lot of labs are doing or involving civil society to work towards containing COVID-19. That's a really great example. And in terms of innovative methods that the labs uses, any specific methods that's the labs to go method or. So I think basically there is no fixed methods, but there are ways of thinking. So design thinking, obviously, and specifically human centered service design. I wouldn't say a method, but it's a kind of North star that we hold. And there's also another kind of value system that says we only make Pareto improvements. That is to say we reduce the risk for career public service. We increase their credibility and trust. And we also save their time, but we never trade one of those three access for another two. Can you repeat that? Sorry. Yes. So the second idea very simply put is our work from viewed from a career public service perspective. It saves their time. It reduces their risk. And then it improves their credibility. Meaning they're more trustworthy. But we never trade one for the other two, meaning that we only make Pareto improvements. Thank you that helps Pareto improvements. Right. And the first that I talked about is human centered service design. Or human centric. There's many ways to spell that. And then Pareto improvements. And in terms of financing, how does the lab obtain financing? Well, there is a plan called the DG plus plan that runs for eight years. That includes the necessary funds for the lab to operate. And for more information, it's in DG plus Taiwan. And it's so basically it's government funds. Yeah, it's 100% of government funding. And there's no funding from any other sectors. Like the lab does not get funded by the private sector or by consultant projects. Well, the individual projects that we do, for example, the mass pharmacy map is actually like 95% of the R&D are from the social sector. And so, for example, the first on the map uses Google map. And they incur a very high cost just by the Google map usage in the first couple of days. And then Google Taiwan said, okay, this is for public good. We will just waive your existing costs and absorb all the API use costs afterwards. So it's, I guess, a kind of in kind donation. And so that's cross sectoral. So, so it so I guess and depending on specific projects, the specific projects can be funded by other and because we cannot waive other people's Google map usage. Right. So, so the API usage waiver needs to be donated by Google. Okay. But but the lab itself is the staff itself is entirely government funded. And why would you consider the key organizational capabilities of a successful innovation lab? Well, I think this reflects my HR policy. Each newcomer need to offer a news perspective. That's partly why we do not have to delegates in any of the ministries, because if the foreign affairs ministry, for example, send 10 people, then we become a section of the foreign service. So each person need to offer a new perspective. So they also need to work with the idea of global goals. I mean, it's okay for them to work kind of selfishly for the career improvements and things like that, but at least equal part need to be devoted to the public. And finally, they need to work in the open work out loud. So making sure that through the use of the collaboration tools that they work at any time is made visible to every other ministry or delegates as well as to the civil society and the people who are professionals that are comprised the other parts of the penis. So work is visible and Right. So, so we say work out loud. That's the slogan. And so there's moving to more innovation labs and society at large. How do you engage or motivate citizen participation. Right. So in Taiwan, we literally occupied a parliament asking for citizen participation. And the parliament, after being occupied for three weeks in 2014. Let everybody see that it is possible with half a million people on the street and many more online to achieve a set of consensus that is coherent and eventually adopted by the head of the parliament so it was a successful occupy. So because of that, I would say that the legitimacy of this methodology is very high and the government officials who didn't support that lose their mayoral election on the end of 2014. And so the mainstream political idea in Taiwan now, for example, in the previous presidential election, all the major parties candidates, as well as their vice president candidates argued for open government. And so it is kind of rare that this is one of the few cross partisan idea that everybody think is a good idea across all the four parties in our parliament. So open government is has full support of all the different parties and of the government. Yes. And the legitimacy is derived in part from the Occupy movement. Yes, because it's a demonstration, but but not in the protest sense but a demo sense. And so how so the, how does the lab perceived by society. So, um, I think the, so the question was how do we collaborate with society. Or what, how, how does, how, for example, in certain countries, and when, when you tell a citizen about an innovation lab, or it's part of the government there is this people perceive that as something because it's part of the government so there's this trust But we're literally a park in the in the heart of Taipei that everybody can walk in we tore down the walls and everybody can walk in during my office hour in Wednesday from 10am to the evening and have the 40 minute chat with So we're seen as very accessible and also just a place to to enjoy good food because it opens until 11pm every day with a kitchen and all that and people can hold really anything. So we hosted, for example, the universal basic income folks and as was people while teaching the elderly like 70 or 80 years old how to use phones to make movies and digital opportunity stuff and, and everything in between I mean, as long as you can say which global you're working toward which target you're fulfilling then our facility is offered for free for you to use and also we work with in the second floor dinners like two dozen teams freshly entered for a almost a year of incubation program and each one again working on a startup or a social innovation idea. And so it's also an incubator in in the same building. I'm not saying in the same office, but physically it's a very happy place. Wow. So basically, everybody can can access the building and everybody knows about the labs. The social innovation lab is. I mean people know if they watched a certain stand up comedy show, their address, which is number 99 section three run I wrote, they may or may not have visited it before, but it's pretty well known. And the website is also bilingual. So we can check out the English part as well. Perfect. That's good. And what role do you think government labs play in ensuring participatory policymaking or in the sense holding public policymakers accountable for participatory policymaking. Yeah, I think it ensures that whatever people's innovation is, we can listen to them and this and the distance between a new idea like we should have a hot spot map for mask distribution from the inception of the idea to the implementation to me noticing it or people bring it to me during one of the office hours to me talking to the Prime Minister, the premier and the cabinet colleagues about that is in a matter of days. And so previously it would have taken weeks of very growing meetings across all the various levels of the government for the Prime Minister to notice it. But now with the social innovation coach everybody's know that they can just find all three and if it's a really good idea that saves lives, then the premier will learn about it next Monday. So, in a sense, you could say that it facilitates access. And both ways to right. So the Prime Minister can of course visit the actual convenience stores and pharmacies to find things out themselves but he can also rely on tools like polis to gauge the feeling of what people feel about his new policy such as opening up the mountains for free access of mountaineering, which is of course a great policy because red tapes and so on. But people also, of course, have legitimate concerns about ecological preservation about indigenous culture and things like that and we can make sure that using polis we can listen at scale. What is the tool that that that can be access to people. Yeah, so it's called polis pl that is and there is a somewhat dated but still very useful MIT tech review article about it. And if you have more time that there's a less outdated BBC click film and also write up about it. And I'm sending you both. Thank you. POLIS. Yeah, POLIS is a technology developing Seattle, but we helped developing and translating it. And in terms of the private sector on OMG NGOs and not for public sector. What, what role do you think they play in public sector innovation. Well, first of all, I would say that our private sector. Often have a social purpose. So one of the Taiwanese unicorns for example go girl is not only a company that makes like electronic scooters powered by electronic battery, but it's also a energy use and renewable energy innovator. They have carbon emission as well as reducing traffic accidents and things like that in their company mission. So in a sense they are companies with purpose, but of course still for profit. And on the other side we have social sector that are for purpose. Let's do with profit. So we have successful like consumers co arms and which is the home makers union. And we have the city and Keras Foundation and so on, which are often considered charities, but they're also with profit. So with the private sector being for profit but with purpose and the social sector which is for purpose but with profit. Their role in public governance is very clear. It is to make sure that we work on a common purpose so that everybody can benefit. And so most of our work is not doing one on one relationships with specific vendors or specific departments, but rather making sure that innovative partnerships can happen and we even design an award to it so that the recipient of the award is not any particular organization, but rather is awarding unlikely partnerships between two organizations usually one in public public sector and one in private or one in private and one in social and things like that. Unlikely partnerships in the different sectors. Right so it's called Asia Pacific social innovation partnership award and I've pasted you telling Thanks. So the quote was the private sector is for profit but with purpose. Yes, and the social sector is for purpose but with profit. Yeah. So, moving on with more about innovation labs and their relationship with government and the public sectors, and how receptive our government officials to consider the policies designed or the projects assigned by the innovation lab. Has there ever been a time where where they weren't as receptive. So Taiwan has a very strong mechanism design culture. And so mechanism design is essentially about evidence based policy making. And you design mechanism to gather more evidence for more evidence based decision making and it repeats right. So our contribution is to say it's not just the experts and representatives holds useful input in the evidence making people's feelings are also important. And we instead of using very crude tools like telephone poles, which have fixed questions and really has a very bad uploading that bit rate. We make sure that we use slightly better way such as police and very flex people's a tour reflections and they can also contribute statements and innovations themselves, essentially increasing the uploading bit rates to gather evidence is in designing public policy projects. And we also work on face to face meetings, what we call open collaboration meetings as well and say, I don't think anyone in the time of government needs convincing about evidence based policy design, but participatory evidence based design or participatory mechanism design does take convincing and that's what we mainly focus on. So it's so the work is in the participatory evidence. That's right. That's right. So, because, you know, if you, everybody knows that if you do a telephone poll, the poster can actually influence a lot just by ordering and the wording and things like that of what the eventual outcome is. And so it's not necessarily seen as a very strong evidence in evidence based policies that if people do meet face to face and deliberate and facilitate it. A common consensus that people can also spread by themselves and even commit themselves to perform part of the work, then it's a much stronger evidence that there is a popular will. So, in a sense, could you say that you work to improve the evidence. Not so much. Yeah, I improve. I work with other sectors to improve citizen input into the evidence. And so many critics sometimes claim that innovation labs tend to be isolated entities. In this sense, this question, we simply don't have that problem because our minister delegates are anywhere from section chiefs to director generals. And yeah, I think all these questions is does not really apply because yeah, but in terms maybe in terms of how does the lab differ from the rest of the government institutions. So we have the same value as I said global goals. That's a universal value. So not only it's the same in Taiwan is the same everywhere in the world. That's why we use SDGs as the value our methodology is slightly different, because far as we know, no other industries tear down their walls and allowing people to walk in and just have 40 minutes of my time to chat. And so in terms of access, it really is different. But otherwise we do have the same values. So the walls are teared down in all the ministries, not just at the innovation lab. Just at the innovation lab. So you asked about the difference. That's the difference. Right, so my office is literally in a park in a tour around Taiwan to the rural indigenous and offshore islands and connect back through telepresence to Taipei and asking the 12 ministry or section chiefs or hire to listen to the local people's voices and so we are methodology make use a lot of telepresence and co presence technologies and and these are really new I mean these are evolving technologies. And so it makes sense that government institution isn't designing them in because it's just literally to new but because of coronavirus everybody in the world need to learn about it now. But in any case, we were pretty avant gosh but but now it seems that everybody need to learn about it anyway. Yes, this is my this is my, I think third time using soon. So it is a necessity now right. Yes, we have our own meeting platform actually so and it's open source so and it is hosted in meet the P this the TW. So next time around we can just go there and you can type in a room number and you can start meeting. And it's a free resource that we make available so you're free to use it here. And then anyone in any citizens can use it. The world anyway in the world. Oh, interesting. It's really cool. Yeah, well it's open source. What we do is just contributing to a networking infrastructure. People people shouldn't yeah it's right and especially now it's a really useful tool to have. In terms of the biggest obstacles and biggest challenges that the lab has faced. What are the, what do you consider to be the biggest obstacles that you face within the state or or just in general to innovate. Well, obviously, anywhere that doesn't have broadband access is a blind spot. We can't reach them. Fortunately, Taiwan has broadband as a human right. And so anywhere, even on the top of Taiwan almost 4,000 meters, you still have 10 megabits per second for 15 euros per month. A limited 4G connection, but in the very few spots that this still doesn't cover. Well, these are our main obstacle and challenges. And I consider it personally my fault if anywhere in Taiwan you don't have a 10 megabits per second connection. And so that's the main challenge and we're well on the way of solving it's our internet penetration rate coverage rate and everything like that is very high. According to multiple international services. So you said, what is considered a human right broadband access what internet access broadband internet bird bird bird. And actually now you can see that. Definitely, definitely. Yeah, so. Yeah, so for example the individual internet usage rate in Taiwan is 88.8% as of last year. So it means that around 11% of people still are not using internet regularly. Our phone availability is at 97.9% meaning that there's 2% of people or their area doesn't have mobile access. And so these are the two main obstacles, both in terms of familiarity of the devices as well as the connectivity the last 2% and that's our main obstacles. The lab is part of the of the government but was it when the lab was first started. Was it hard to institutionalize the programs and the policies created by the lab like. No, not at all because because in the cabinet we have this design called ministers at large, or variously horizontal ministers or minister with a portfolio. But the idea is that above the 32 vertical ministers, there's nine horizontal ministers that doesn't have a fixed ministry, but can have their offices comprises of ministry delegates and their work specifically is to tackle cross ministerial issues. So there is already a design, a structure for it and I just apply it for digital innovation. So, and in that sense, do you think the your experience had to do a lot with there is already political will in the government and political structure. So that facilitated everything that even the institution. That's right so in a sense the boost trapping is already done by the time I joined anything else that you think credit it this this institutionalization the political structure the political will. So anything else that you consider was key to having everything set up well as well as the popular will which is evidenced by the occupied movement right so you need both political will and popular will. And that was all right the set was the stage was said, yes. Now moving on to the innovation landscape and that in America which is a little bit different. This question I don't know how much would you consider a Latin American government would have to invest to establish an innovation laboratory. I am sure that more expert people can answer this section of questions than I do, because although I did visit Buenos Aires and so on. I did not have in depth interview with the career public service here and we do hold presidential hackathon and I do meet that is from from say Honduras and so on but again we didn't go through this career public service level working level discussions I mostly talked to political appointees or ministers and so on and so all the information that I get from them is not from a working level perspective. But your your questions are all working level questions. So I really cannot answer anything from from the Latin America section because I do not have sufficient information. Okay, yeah, the same happened with the when I interviewed the UK so. But in terms of in general knowledge, if there was any government in the world that was looking to establish an innovation lab, what top three advice would you give. Well, first of all, I think radical transparency really works, especially if the innovation lab is as Peters is a combination between career public service and professionals from a civil society. Each side will want to hold the other side accountable, and the most easy way to do that is through radical transparency. And so, people who walk in to have 40 minutes of my time really need to go through the visit protocol which I just pasted you, which mandates a open transcript policy, including our own conversation that at the end of the conversation we can choose to publish as video or as transcript. And so that's the first advice. The second advice is voluntary association. If a innovation that beginning their work to command other ministries to obey without empowering them without explaining why without coaching and facilitation, then the innovation lab while it may have the presidential or the Prime Minister's will tend to dissipate and get relocated to an unimportant ministry or agency once the president or the Prime Minister challenge ends. But if you speaking by saying no, we're just accepting volunteers from other ministries, then they will think that it's their own idea, and they will sustain the innovation ecosystem, even after the Prime Minister changes well we've survived quite a few Prime Minister changes now. And so the third thing is I'm sorry. Can you can you expand on that you call that monetary association. Voluntary Association so the radical transparency. Voluntary Association, and finally location independence. Now, I really don't have to explain location independence because now is a necessity given the coronavirus that the same office need to separate into two different chunks. And in co-working spaces that are nicely ventilated, but something that needs convincing nowadays everybody do it by default. So radical transparency, voluntary association and location independence. And can I ask you about voluntary association. How can, how can someone and another government lab create that perspective of Voluntary Association. When it's being set up by a specific government. What advice would you give a government lab, who is transitioning between two different, one Prime Minister one president to another to promote that Voluntary Association. So, for example, we have a principle for interview before collaboration meetings that talk in a lot of detail how the various ministries and sections need to work together, like orchestrating something. And that's for the working level collaboration for the mid level like section chief collaboration on how to choose a topic for cost ministry or partnership. We have the principle for the topic selection, which I also just pasted you above that there is a direction for implementing the role of participation offices, and that is a like institutionalized directive. And that provides for the ministers, the what what they require to actually enact this within their own ministry. And all of this is legal East, right. It's very verbal text. So finally, we have a like quick drawing gov lab style, like one one pager that explains the role of PO's and then that's the last link, but it mostly just summarizes the three institutionalized legalize. Perfect. Thank you. And now the last five questions. You have to say if you strongly agree or you strongly disagree with the first one I strongly I strongly don't know. Nothing about the LSE context. The second one public sector labs can ultimately change the culture in the public sector governments. So strongly agree. We agree and public sector innovation labs are effective at developing new policies. strongly agree and specifically for policies that the government knows nothing about. Truly exploratory policies. No, it's nothing about. And funding is the biggest obstacle to innovation. I think it's access from broadband access to political access to cross sectoral trust as a mean of access. These are the biggest obstacle funding flows in kind of automatically if you solve the access and trust issue. So access political including political broadband and trust. And if you have all those, you will have funding. Yeah, you'll have funding because essentially all your R&D cost will be absorbed by your partnering organizations so you can run on a zero budget. And once you can run on a zero budget there is no funding problem. True. And innovation labs are most successful when they're embedded within a government agency. I would say it's successful if they're embedded within multiple government agencies the more the better. And multiple. That's an interesting point that no one has brought up so far because you because you want them to be you want it to be all over governments. Exactly. Yeah. And normally, yeah, it's interesting because when I did this, I strongly agree to strongly disagree. At the beginning, I guess depending on the context context or where each lab is based, sometimes funding was the biggest issue. Sometimes other labs already have funding but it's strongly attached to the political will of where where they're located so that's very interesting to know. All right, that's it. So, are you comfortable with me just publishing the video or should I embargo it after you finish your research, or do we just work on a transcript. I'm comfortable with the video. Let me just confirm with Victoria. Okay, okay, okay. He's my supervisor. I will ask her. I posted as an unlisted video on YouTube so that people won't see it, but I'll send a link to you and you can see how it looks like and then you can tell me what to do. Okay, I'll ask Victoria and I'll get back to you. Thank you so much. Do you have any other questions for me. No, not at all. And stay safe and have a good local time.