 All right, welcome to the session in Bechelon. And I received a bunch of questions. I just wanted to make sure that you have the actual questions that you have sent in the other group. And so I mean, usually I started my conversation with directly Q&A, but I don't have any slides or PowerPoints. So I can, of course, talk about the listed questions and feel free to interrupt me anytime. I think we do have more to follow in person. And I just want to ask, is there anything that many of you are in mind that you would like to discuss as I have these questions after you were given a tour and had some conversation with the message innovation or should we type straight into this? Yes? Yeah, so based on the introduction of what it seems that it's very outward facing and supporting social entrepreneurs and citizens, I'm wondering if there's any work that's being done internally, like with other city agencies or city employees in terms of improving operations and bringing organization to those spaces? You mean whether we scale horizontally to other cities? No, no, I mean like internally within government, whether it's like city agencies that provide social services, trying to support them in terms of improving those services, service delivery processes or operations. You're innovative. Yeah, Odo, Odo, I'm, we are situated in the heart of the city. This space is a national government space. And so the most of the bureaucratic innovations that we did is actually around the central government. And so during our social innovation tours, which is what usually happens every other Tuesday around here, for example, this is here actually. You can recognize that. That's one of the meeting rooms here. And sometimes it's right here that we're at. And I tour around the various cities and indigenous places and rural places to join their campus by bringing through video conference, decision-innovation lab, and the 12 ministries to look directly at people's problems and brainstorm possible solutions. And they get the credit if they innovate. And I take the risk because you can't punch people across a projector screen. And so if anybody here says something that will face a lot of people, it's me who facilitates. But in any case, the point here is that we're scaling this out horizontally. I don't know what happened with the projector, but in any case, we're going to go ahead and do it here. And so the idea here, more central food, is that we're bringing tech to people. We're not asking people to come to the social innovation lab. We're using 360 live streaming and all sort of augmented reality to bring social innovation lab to the various remote places. And so I think that is one answer to your question. The capacity by itself and as a smart city center and the smart city office is kind of arm's length from the Department of Information and Technology. So we do work on several cases. For example, the self-driving vehicles that's been tested for a while here now, self-driving tricycles to be precise. And these look like shopping baskets, which they are. And we co-create with the market, like literally the jambore flower market, which is every weekend around here to make what people feel initially as kind of alien creatures into useful self-walking shopping baskets that can follow people around. And then you can buy some orchid flowers and put it in and so on to found co-domestication. And once we learn something from it, then we turn it into a sandbox experiment. So right now, the DOIC and smart city office is finalizing the sandbox plan for the self-driving bus, which will probably run out to April in a dedicated lane in Taipei City and that directly takes the co-domestication into what the self-driving bus should do to integrate well with the society. There's also various other cities like Oshun is doing self-driving boats, solar power boats and things like that. So this is where the ideas incubate or originates and find the social norm but the individual application is still evolving into a municipal level. I hope that makes sense. Okay, three questions. So maybe in this sequence, like proximity to microphone, please. Hello, my name is Ines and I study sustainable development at Columbia. I was wondering if you could give a little bit of personal background and maybe explain what inspired you to take on your work that you do. Personal big rounds, okay. My big round is pretty transparent. But yeah, so I'm a, like, out of that act, I dropped out of junior high when I was 15 years old. I found this great website that's still around, Quartarcliff.org, and that has a lot of preprints like people posting their journal article drafts and then I started writing back and just doing research together and then I talked to the principal of my school and he said that a future of humanology has been completed on this team thing called it. Where I went, that was 95 and then she said, okay, tomorrow you don't have to go to school. I then dropped out of junior high and then just started founding a few companies, a serial entrepreneur and worked for like 20 years and then retired and then joined the civil society movements and things like that. Just a normal, you know, serial entrepreneurship thing. Hi, my name is Fatima. I'm studying development practice and last speaker shared a statistic that Taiwan has the lowest survival rate of startups. I was wondering if you could kind of explain why that's the case. Yeah, yes, we fail fast. Yes. Yeah, that's true, literally. The Taiwan startup ecosystem is centered around the idea of both triple bottom line which you're very familiar with, wouldn't take any extra effort to explain you what is the triple bottom line. So the point here is that the startups mostly need to not only make a profit but rather to demonstrate to the society that they are also contributing to social and environmental process. And the startup that worked on one now while sacrificing any of the other two part of the society gets into the value of social sanction and in Taiwan the social sector has higher legitimacy than private and public sector combined. And so because of that, any startup wouldn't survive social sanction. And so because of that, there's a lot of effort in the startup world to find out such triple bottom line solutions. So our unicorns, for example, will go wrong. They have to build themselves as a mobility company like mobility as a service while solving energy storage problems, while being a battery innovator, while doing renewable and solar, while reducing carbon footprint, while and so on and so forth. And so it's a really difficult thing to do. And so as soon as there's any like inkling of there may be some sacrifices made or negative externalities made, the startup co-founders or founders usually just pivot. And by pivot, I mean just discard that idea and try something new. I did that like five times because of that. The so-called survival rate is very low in the sense that once people understand that the product market fit creates negative externalities, it's not rewarded by the customer base, neither by the investors. And so that's one of the reasons. Sir, if we could ask the participants to stand up while they ask a question, you'd be much appreciated to give a quick introduction with the... Okay, like just so that we know where to put your phone. Yeah. Okay. So the microphone's coming. Hi, my name is Bryd, my colleague James has a question, but he lost his voice. He studies national security at Columbia. So what social innovations have you found to have dual use purposes? That is social and national security. Pretty much everything. I mean, everything can be done in a kind of military lens. And so just very recently, we saw the Zettelite imagery analysis, which is, I think, originally designed to calculate forest coverage and environmental impact. And so one is put on the export banning list of the US because it could also be used in a dual use fashion. And so I would say like everything, like literally, there's a question here. I'm really trying to bring in a lot of social policies. My question about the role the government can play, so I understand it's not provided in a special environment for social and military. I think there's many private companies that provide this kind of service. So my question is about what kind of unique value the government can provide. Well, I'm sure that the private sectors are really good at like accelerators and incubators. But I don't think a private sector incubator can say that feel free to violate existing law and regulation for a year and see what happens. They probably get put into prison if they say that. Because Taiwan, although we are a continental law system, which means that everything has to be written and authorized by the parliament, we nevertheless have a very progressive parliament that authorizes very sandbox acts. So instead of driving in platform economy, in fintech, in 5G, whatever, you can break the law and break challenging existing regulations for a year in the hope that your idea can convince the society after a year that your alternate regulation is a better one compared to the previous one. And then during the sandbox period, people of course need to look very carefully at whether these new innovations, for example, using your phone instead of going to the bank to pay real independent account using your telecom bills instead of your previous payment bills to calculate the loans, things like that. That's the fintech one, or self-driving buses that already talk about that and so on. And just recently, emerging out of the sandbox is telecommunication for psychiatric consultations. Like many ones, literally too many to remember. But in each and every of these cases, the government can play a facility role in a sense of not anticipating social response but helping the developers to communicate to stakeholders and to listen at scale. And if it turns out that their idea really is good, then after a year, when it emerges out of sandbox, we just take their fork, their new version of the regulation as our regulation, that's the commitment we can give and every single ministry's any regulation is fair game. Well, with the two exception of money laundering and funding terrorism, because we know what happens. I do do those two things, we don't have to do experiments but everything else is fair game. No questions from the audience? Oh, yeah, I didn't, I didn't. Max, I'm sorry. Hi, my name is Max. I am from Caledonia, but I was born here and I have a question for you and that question is, how do you think office play out and school play out in terms of design can be designed to maximize innovation and the potential of the student and office worker? Thank you. Okay, right. So, as you can probably feel, there's such innovation here is not just, it's multi-use as it could be used in every which way. Most of our space here doesn't have a designated structure or designated layout. It could be repurposed according to the need of the events at play. So, and that describes also the entire C lab, which the SI lab is just one part of. So, if you walk that normally to the Jimbo Flower Market site, you can experience, for example, the sound lab, which there's no reverb or any of the reflection of the sound there and if you close your eyes and they play the sound, you can feel you're transported to one part or to any of the other places that is the space for immersive experience. But if you open your eyes, it's just an empty place with a lot of sound systems. So, basically, we designed the entire C lab and tools because SI lab opened first. So, to a more advanced form in SI lab, this sense of a malevolous space that is designed to do a well-required recursive public, meaning that anybody who step into this space is a co-creator of the space if they feel that people with Down syndrome paint the space and in a more creative fashion than we with our trism and differences, we can see this building but always see its lines and boxes and obstructions, right? But the people with Down syndrome see the topology and geometry behind them. And so, actually, we then replace the lines and boxes with their vision and then people enter into a much more creative mindset when they step into this space. And so, because every Wednesday I'm here, like from 10 a.m. to the evening, anybody can just come and talk to me and change the space. And so, having the space itself be a social technology for the social technologies to innovate and when they're done innovating and talking about things and holding concurrent events like by 9 p.m. every day, there's usually something very tasty in the kitchen and the kitchen opens until 11 in the midnight. And so, people can at least have a good feeling, a affect, a positive affect even if the innovation is pretty prototypical, like it doesn't quite work. But after a week, they're compelled to go back here to enjoy the food even though they forgot about innovation. And so, I think that is very important that after like five concurrent events being held, people can mingle together in excellent food and drink in the atmosphere for no particular purpose in a kind of open space technology. So, I think having the space itself as a social object that people can improve on I think offers the most chance of innovation. That's the answer to your question. There was a question here, I think. It's you. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Ben, it's fine. I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Maria, I'm a state urban policy. So, another question I have is that so a lot of these government innovation initiatives whether it's in the US, the digital service or gov.uk with their digital service, really it's the effort to break down barriers just to their participation. And the assumption is that the easier it is to participate in government, people will and the more people participate, the better the policy outcomes would be. Well, at least it's more fun, but yes. Right, do you necessarily agree with those based on your experience and when more times were you felt that wasn't true? No, I'm optimistic for fun. So, it is always more fun. I don't know about equality, but it's fun. So, but I mean that is important because there's things that's more appeal nowadays. Anyone, like waiting in lines used to be a boring thing, but then social media and mobile phones gets invented and people are perfectly fine waiting in line because you're also online, right? So, basically what this changes in the social configuration is that people no longer need a physical space, a physical representative or a physical council to work together on social production issues with the right hashtag. Hundreds of millions of people who don't know each other nevertheless establish swift trust and then coordinate hashtag me too, hashtag one strike, hashtag you name it, right? So, all these means that if democracy or governance institutions do not use the same attitude of working with people and instead if they keep remains and we're working for people then they are no longer relevant. People will then only feel democracy once every two years or four years and people will only feel democracy in a very small amount of information like five bits every two years, that's called voting and basically down to 10 we will make democracy itself not relevant in people's collective imagination so it become fossilized and ritualized and once it becomes ritualized, the governance lose the fun of it and then people won't feel that's the public forum or public endeavors or whatever is something that was investing their time on and so no people will then feel that they contribute to the public space forum in discussions. They will just follow what is institutionalized as so-called model of democracy and so that's then give rise to a exclusionary populism because then people will feel excluded by existing institution and there's always such people will then be incentivized to join the hashtags that are quite anti-establishment meaning to tear down the barriers to but from the outside and not from the inside and then that creates a atmosphere in which the democracy feels that there really is no easy way out from this exclusionary populism so what I just described is pretty much everywhere in the world so if democracy doesn't make it so fun and take the barriers from within like we are tearing down the walls like literally now so that you can already walk in from the street but you can walk in from the entire street nearby then that sees if we don't do that then this sees to be relevant to people as my answer so it could even be interpreted as a survival thing it's not just to like make wild experiments over there this is about democracy being still relevant to people yes, that's true well, yeah, whoever has to make a move so you just mentioned exclusion and my question is that often for teens in social innovation spaces it's that they're male-dominated so what steps is the government taking to ensuring diversity within social innovation related to gender? so we're perhaps very blessed here because after 12 years of gender mainstreaming we're now like having problems for example convincing boys to participate in programming so like the reverse problem but I think there's a few things going on here first is that we have 12 years of gender mainstreaming and so we have pretty good ratio like not quite Nordic but very close to that when it comes to gender balancing in the apartments and we also have a gender dashboard that for each project and each bill that the government does they have to contribute to the measurements of inter-policy and that forms the theory of change so that for each policy could be labor policy, financial policy whatever policy, they have to fill this extremely long form that calculates exactly how much impact on gender this policy will have and it gets reviewed by a council the gender equality council that is by design more civil society leaders than ministers in it and then they have to collaboratively contribute this measurement even after the projects and bills have run the scores you can continue to look at the measurements in inequality so that builds an evidence policy system and all the public service regardless of which department they are in, they are thoroughly aware of the gender impact that their policies do and so that is why after the constitutional court ruling and the two referenda we can set on a marriage equality bill in very very short time that addresses all the design constraints and that also makes it easier we are designing our innovation policies to look at existing measurements of inequality and design our innovations policies around that so in my view which is programming in Taiwan we translate programming as transition to like literally program design and not software engineering or anything that contures this construction worker with all due respect to image and so basically as designers it is actually seen as a slightly more feminine profession just like fashion designer and things like that and so we are working hard to keep the boys interested in programming design and so fortunately around my alliance around incubators or incubatees here we don't have that much of a problem it comes to gender balance and we intend to keep it this way what is the gender impact dashboard? another question from James so in what ways do you find as a political official has the Chinese government been trying to make democracy more fun and engaging and how successful has that been? and also I think you guys we've seen some of the crackdown on political participation due to voter restrictions and policies is there anything similar in Taiwan? so no but ok thank you filming games yes so it is actually a lot of work to do mimetic engineering and phrase all our conversations around say rumors and clarifications because so this is election time but even in non-election time there is a lot of disinformation around because no one is according to the civics monitor the place with the most civics space it turns the freedom to assemble and speech and whatever around our part of us I think all the way to Africa we're the only one that has a completely open civics space the nearest one is New Zealand but in any case this means that whatever we look at people who want to next amaze people's interest in democracy which is about for example precision targeting messages that discourage people to vote whatever the current trend is or spread disinformation that try to undermine people's trust with each other we have the relevant ministries for our clarification messages using mimetic engineering to make sure that their clarification messages are fun and are viral by itself because if we don't it actually only reinforces stereotypes and doesn't nobody any good and so within two hours they're required to write and two characters are left in at least two pictures to clarify any part of the rumour to help people understand more of the political context so this is one example there was a popular rumour that says Pamira here within a week, multiple times will be subject to one million dollar fine which is not true and the Prime Minister, a younger version of him says I may be bought now but I will not punish people here a fine freeing that says well we've done this will introduce a labeling requirement for hair products in effect on 2021 and the Prime Minister as he looks now says that however if you perm your hair many times a week you will not damage your pocket but it will damage your hair if it's quite serious you may look like this so that's really funny and if you laugh then really there is a kind of mutually exclusive pathways in the mind that you cannot feel fun and humour if you are feeling anger to outrage on the other hand if people see this picture first and turn anger into humour and into fun they cannot feel outrage and so because these are two different pathways the idea is that having a viral message that is humourous that makes one an expensive himself and other people a good humour it dominates like search engines if you search for a perm your hair a fine you will find this picture in all the original disinformation package so that it goes more viral than the disinformation and inoculates people's mind against this social outrage thing and that people can start talking in a more rational fashion about what exactly this labeling requirement do which is of course the beginning of democratic discourse but people are already feeling outrage there is no room for democratic discourse so fun, very important and we have professionals in each ministry working on this my name is Britt, I am also studying national security in Columbia it is not a personal question I was wondering, we haven't had the chance on this trip yet to hear the perspective of someone who lays LGBTQ and so much in the public eye and we know that the DPVs have other progressive positions on LGBTQ issues in Taiwan but what is your experience then when you are so much a public figure and with the elections coming up how do you see the future of LGBTQ rights and representation if, for example, the DPV doesn't manage to secure majority of the legislative guns yeah, I think the LGBTQIA plus it is gaining a lot of ground in the past decade or so, that's for sure and I think actually Dr. Tsai's presidency really helped in one key way in that when she, for example, shares this message she is not sharing this from a kind of LGBTQ activism point of view but rather a loved one point of view like equality point of view which is important because in Taiwan different generations have different ideas about marriage before 2007, marriage could be done by social ceremony meaning two families holding a ceremony together give legitimacy, legal legitimacy to the wedding even before the household registration and so social ceremony wedding is a thing and marriage was seen as a marriage between two families not just two persons and it's informed a lot of people the elderly people's view on marriage until 2008 where marriage is defined as purely by registration and therefore between two individuals and so a lot of the conversation and the confusion around marriage equality is the two definition of marriages the first one has like 10 different words for aunts and uncles and people fear that they have to reinvent another 12 words just to describe marriage equality relationship relationships whereas the people who are subscribed to the registration theory thinks that it's just between two individuals so it's obviously a equality thing and so that is why at the end of the legislation the so-called hyperlink act it is chosen to hyperlink only to the part of the civil code that has the rights and duties the bylaws of marriage instead of the kingship clause which is not hyperlinked the in-laws of marriage is not included so we legalize the bylaw and none of the in-laws or imaginary in that is our approach to marriage equality marriage equality with Asian characteristics and that actually exports really well to Thailand or to Japan or whatever and so my point here is that she's tackling this in a decidedly cross-generational kind of taking all the science view instead of a very activist to hell with the eldest view and this is important and so I think that is a really good balanced approach and I think this will continue regardless of the election results of the members of the parliament because people are seeing that their kingship relations are being respected even after the hyperlink law is passed and activists also understand that we need to respect the social ceremonies when our elders are with the two families that is just a historical fact and so we need to respect that as well and cautiously up the mistake as I'm going to come to the GBIQA plus RADS So it looks like we have time for one last question So here's my name Thank you very much My name is Lily Kibah I'm from Germany and I study energy and environmental conservation energy in Ireland and my question is to you as a serial entrepreneur having transferred into the government and all politics what do you see as the biggest challenges and obstacles governments have created for entrepreneurship and what would you recommend governments across the world to implement in order to advance entrepreneurship and adding to that what can internet or western governments and Europe for example learn from Taiwan to enable more social and general entrepreneurship Thank you very much I think a lot of the government take a kind of linear view or even zero sum view when it comes to innovation on one side and say social justice on the other or economic development on one side and environmental sustainability on the other I can go on but that is kind of the traditional like zero sum like number of seats or whatever whenever there's a financial resource there's kind of this view of one minister here one minister there a lobbyist here a lobbyist there and I think this is detrimental to social entrepreneurs because kind of by definition social entrepreneurship is about finding out innovations that takes the strength from all the different sectors and co-create new values that people can accept or at least live with while keeping their original positions and things that are good for all the stakeholders involved and so I think the one thing that government need to do is to switch to a view that the government is actually not asking who are the representative and what is the trade off which is unanswerable if people are going through hashtag anyway and so instead we need to ask even in different positions are there common values after all and given common values are there innovations that work for everyone even though it breaks on laws and regulations and then we change our laws and regulations too much and so in terms of how common can help well we can't help on all 17 goals but this is my kind of job description well three years ago when I become digital minister the HR asked me measure what does digital minister do because it's a new role right so I'm like so this just started 1718, 1717, 1716 which is reliable data effective partnership and open innovation and which is great but the SDGs were just roll out in 2015 so in 2016 nobody memorized this and if you're happy and so the HR is like no you can't just give me three numbers you have to write something that's more legible to people and so because I as a serial entrepreneur I understand if you take a mechanistic view of technology people tend to think in a linear zero sum fashion and so changing the zero sum fashion into a co-creation of innovation is the key so I wrote a quater really a poem as my job description which I'll read to you now so my job description literally means let's see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings let's see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality let's see machine learning let's make it collaborative learning let's see user experience let's make it about experience and whenever we hear the singularity is the end that is always remember the virtuality is the end thank you so much so minister we've prepared a small gift for you okay