 I'm so sorry it's beautiful I'm sorry my friend my colleague here John is in London so I'm sorry for John but it's it's 29 here in Sydney it's absolutely a beautiful day it's excellent it absolutely shines through shines through the screen sometimes I blow my background so I don't make my London colleagues too we've got fair weather here too so it's okay I don't view that's much envious actually I think we're having a Taiwanese day today we've already had we've already had showers and sunshine showers sunshine so I'm very I'm very in keeping with your spirits today I think okay now I wanted to tell you since the last time I met you I've changed roles so I'm now in KPMG Impact and I'm working with John it's a new structure in KPMG and our overarching platform is the Sustainable Development Goals very exciting so we're doing a series of podcasts to talk about some of the themes under the SDGs and that's what we wanted to talk to you about today and the podcast will go on KPMG Impact website okay well since this is a podcast I will also have a local track where it's just my voice and I can send it to you afterward for maximum quality John's got one too and I must confess I've just bought one but I'm on my training wheels I don't know how to use it yet okay so do you have any questions otherwise I'll launch straight in yeah I think the revised list of questions is really good so I mean is the speed that I'm speaking okay for this podcast audience or should I attempt her to speak a little bit slower John what do you think I think it's I think it'll be fine I think you're very clear and audible okay okay excellent okay so so let's just dive in okay let's go you gonna call us down John are we on welcome to our KPMG Impact podcast I'm Ruth Lawrence a senior executive with KPMG Impact the global initiative designed to build a more sustainable and resilient future before we begin our conversation today I'd like to acknowledge that many of us listening to this and meeting today are actually on the land of our First Nations people and I'd like to pay my respects to elders past present and emerging leaders and recognize their continuing connection to land waters and culture KPMG Impact is highlighting the sustainable development goals in our podcast and today I have the great pleasure to speak to Minister Audrey Tang Taiwan's digital minister we're talking about social innovation in Taiwan how we see innovation solving critical social problems promoting economic growth and offering new ways to address the UN sustainable development goals Minister Tang I've heard that you're enthusiastic about the sustainable development goals where did that passion start well it goes way back when I was six years old my mom co-founded with a few other homemakers the homemakers Union which is Taiwan's one of the Taiwan's earliest environment protection foundations and they advocate for low carbon life green consumption green diet green energy and so on around the turn of century we switched to a co-op lifestyle where the homemakers Union's consumer co-op did this like purchase to the agricultural lands that is committed to the pollution free and low carbon way of farming sometime organic farming and so on and nowadays I click also myself and I make sure to use such materials so I mean sustainability it's as far as I remember it just runs in the family fantastic so it sounds like it's been a very long journey and it's part of your DNA what opportunities have you had to work on the sustainable development goals in your current position yeah so I often say that digital which in Mandarin is a wordplay Shoei also stands for plural and plural means that we have many different values societal values environmental values economic values however the digital technology enables these different values to make account to one another so that we can see actually we do share many common values around inclusion innovation and sustainability of course so my main contribution I guess is to make sure that no matter if you're registered as a co-op or as a university with the university social responsibility programs or listed company with CSR or GI reports and so on all the different organization types use the same 169 SDG targets as a share vocabulary to make accounts to one another and so on the social innovation database which lists more than 500 organizations I offer them my office hours where they can meet me every Wednesday for 40 minutes at the time for the on-the-record conversation of how to collaborate with other sectors friends and also running the presidential hackathon were the top five social innovation ideas gets the trophy from the president that's a projector that projects the commitment from the president saying whatever you did in the past three months will become presidential problems for the next 12 months as a national policy there's a lot of information there can you tell us a bit more about the hackathon how many of you had up till now sure yes we're on our fourth year now and each year as I mentioned five champions are selected and the selection process itself I think is very interesting which is only possible using digital technology because each year we have more than 200 different ideas each corresponding to one or more of concrete SDG goals and then because no jury panel is an expert in all 169 areas we make sure we work with collective intelligence so our national participation platform the joint platform which lists more than 10 million visitors in the country of 23 million each visitor get a 99 tokens so with these tokens they can vote for the SDG projects they're interested in there's a new way of voting called quadratic voting and this is a mechanism design that makes sure if you really like a project you can vote more than one vote but it's going to cause you more so with two votes that's cost four tokens three votes nine tokens so with 99 tokens one can vote for nine votes which is 81 tokens but not ten which would cost 100 and then with 18 still left right people are motivated to look for some synergies with the project they just get voted and maybe they do four votes and which is 16 tokens and there's two tokens left and they're more motivated to look to another two SDG targets and in this way we make sure we popularize the idea of synergies between the SDG targets and people end up doing it maybe seven and seven and so on so people on average vote for like five or six different goals different targets with the 99 tokens that they have and the upshot is that when we select the top 20 for the incubation everybody feel they have won I like the older voting methods where maybe 49% of people feel they have lost it's not like a very innovative voting scheme and one that we should be looking into can you tell us about some of the ideas that have actually come out of the hackathon and that have actually gone further I have heard about an innovative weather platform extreme weather event platform would you like to tell us about some of those certainly so the earliest hackathon idea are now all policies that's been implemented for a while for example the civil IOC Taiwan project born out of the earlier hackathon ideas about the air pollution map and the water level map and so on is now a fully fledged distributed ledger that's contributed by the civil society for example primary school teachers and students the measures air and water quality as part of their environmental education program so instead of teaching about media literacy or data literacy with these ideas we teach about media and data competence meaning that the young students they are producers and stewards of data not just consumers of data and with this of course the idea of data bias responsibility data collisions and so on become a part of a very natural curriculum for people to contribute and using these systems which enabled more accurate prediction of weather models of the for example water levels that causes evacuation needs and then we sent automated warnings including earthquake warnings and so on that then powered during the COVID the mask availability map which is essentially also a distributed ledger but instead of a mapping the water or air pollutions it maps whether some pharmacies still have masks in stock and similarly the advanced warning system which runs on SMS became the digital quarantine system which once and when people doing home quarantine left their home more than 50 meter radius day and the local medical officer received automated SMS and so on so I think it enabled us to fight the pandemic successfully without lockdowns and fight the infodemic successfully that this information crisis with no takedowns thanking to these public infrastructures digital ones that has people's broad input and people already understand the cybersecurity and privacy parameters of these were not declaring emergency state or inventing new data collection points during the pandemic. Wow that's very interesting around the pandemic and that new software what do you think was key for your population to actually embrace that software and use it and make it successful? Well because they wrote it right this is what we call a people public-private partnership the people the social sector came up with these ideas in the first place and the public sector endorsed these ideas instead of beating them we joined them right so we embraced the best ideas that is worth spreading worth amplifying and the public sector supports without controlling the data governance for example and so because of this the social sector could be rest assured that this is not about surveillance capitalism this is not about state surveillance but rather this is what we call participatory self-surveillance where people review the data for the public good only if they're concerned to it and also only if they understand repercussions. Government's not always keen to share data or decisions can you tell a bit tell us a bit more about your radical transparency policy? Sure so this very conversation while we're having I'm doing a full recording and we usually publish the recording as is on the Creative Commons platforms or make a transcript after co-adding by 10 days publish it as the public domain and this has two effects the first the people who come to me to visit me for a conversation or interview or a lobbying they always lobby for the public good for the like seven generations down the line because they understand it will look very bad for the upcoming generation if they lobby for something that's only good for the short term for themselves at the expense of other corners in the world so this is a way to make sure that the better parts of us are in part of those conversations and the second thing is that because people understand the why of policymaking instead of just what the resulting policies so even if the resulting policies has mistakes even if we did it incorrectly and so on the social sector has the context upon which to make better suggestions or in a parlance of open source development to fork the government to take the government's plans and make a different direction a different contribution so we had for example the opposition party's member of parliament doing the analysis on the mask availability and rationing pointing out that we were too happy in the government to announce that the population center and the pharmacy distribution match almost like exactly and she said and P. Gau Hong An said actually if you look at the rural places and correlate with the open street map you will see that the time cost for the rural people to reach the nearby pharmacy even though it's the same distance by helicopter it's not the same and by the time they reach the pharmacy maybe the pharmacy has already closed and so on so there's a bias in the data there's a bias in the way that we analyze the data and once this is pointed out then our minister minister Chen simply said legislator teach us and then her interpolation became the new distribution method completely was pre-ordering 24 hour mass PM and so on the very next day so like literally within 24 hours this would not be possible unless we publish whatever we have collected in real time. So transparency pushing along for social good. I'm wondering about some of the partnerships that have been forged so one of the SDGs specifically focuses on partnerships and I'm wondering about some of the partnerships that have been forged in your work on covid. Definitely so when we talk about people public private partnership we do rely on the private sector to scale out the solutions that's co-developed by the people and the government so for example when I mentioned the four convenience store chains in Taiwan they have more than twice the number of stores compared to the professional pharmacies so when they joined around March they dramatically extended the reach for people to get the PPEs so that by the time they joined I think we have almost half of people having access to medical grade masks but right after they joined by early April we have three quarters of people and at that time we reduced the basic reproduction value of the coronavirus the R0 to be under one and so that we've been largely covid free every after April and so without the scaling out of the distribution center the logistics of the four convenience stores without for example the Google CSR group supporting the necessary computation towers for the initial prototype of the mask availability and so this would not be so quickly deployed to every corner in the Taiwanese society but when private sector joins we make sure that they respect the same cyber security and privacy boundaries set by the previous social sector prototypes. I know in some of your work that around developing social innovation one of the first platforms was to look at values and to get values more immersed in the culture to develop social innovation I'm wondering if you could tell us about how some of that work has led to the success of these partnerships today. Certainly so when we're looking at the common values in emerging technologies we see a lot of potential for for example labeling one another like when in 2015 UberX first came to Taiwan they said oh this would enable more efficient routing of public transportation options and so would reduce for example the wasteful like taxi idling by and things like that on the other hand there's people who said this is not really sharing economy this is more like a gig economy this will destroy the social solidarity formed by workers unions and taxi associations and so on and of course they all have pretty good points however if we look at the core values that everyone supports it's very apparent that everyone want a more fair like meter everyone wants proper insurance registration not undercut existing meters and so on but this is not a rough consensus readily understood by people in the more anti social corner of social media such Facebook the controversial points get far more attention and calories and clicks than the more nuanced ideas that I just outlined right so we need to build a pro-social social media instead of the more anti-social corners of social media so we work with a Seattle startup a social enterprise now a non-profit called Polis and we deployed that and showed people that if you remove the reply button but encourage people to resonate or not on each other's feelings so instead of jumping straight to the decisions we just share how you feel about the uber act situation and after three weeks of voting just on the feelings and visualizing the common feelings people discover that actually most of the people agree with most of their neighbors on most of their points most of that time they agree to disagree on a few ideological points like platform economy versus gig economy but by and large we do have shared values and so this is when we realized that if we build a platform that highlights the common values and rewards a more nuanced idea of inclusion and diversity as represented by the user interface instead of just rewarding the clickbait like short-term attention spend and calling quote-unquote engagement then we actually have a pretty good public infrastructure also on the digital realm the internet doesn't have to be bad for discussions and that led to better co-creation in common values thank you you've mentioned several social enterprises in our discussion already how have social enterprises fair during the pandemic yeah they are very very important because they have on the one side the trust of the social sector and then the link to the private economic sector so they can both crowdsource the best ideas and then turn those ideas to production so I think one of the most exciting things during the COVID-19 is that people are more aware that those digital social innovations are also pretty good business these infrastructure that I just mentioned about tracking the PPEs about making sure that people get like physical distancing and now vaccination information correctly and so on are widely applicable in other domains as well this bot that automatically clarifies this information about PPEs could also be used to clarify other scams and this information as well so we get a lot of leading companies such as Trend Micro the leading antivirus company investing heavily into a new tool that just clarifies the online scams and this information and so on the so-called Miss Buster and who's called a leading company for like online scams and so on detection also developed the main another bot that will when you invite it into a group chat automatically compare incoming pictures and so on like a virus scanner and then show you like very fun like meme dogs and cat pictures and so on that will have this humor over rumor effect so that when you laugh about it you vent this idea of outrage and then you wouldn't share this disinformation and wouldn't increase its basic reproduction value but would instead share this very cute dogs message about for example where must to protect yourself against your own wash hands and so on so people see generally that anything that fulfills the public good and catches the public attention imagination is also good business it's taken a few years to come to this level of maturity in terms of alignment of values in terms of the social enterprises in terms of the ecosystem and the development there in the maturity to serve the public good I'm wondering if you've reflected on what have been some of the key elements that have led to this success and maturation I think just like the Q spoke stock is essential to our counter coronavirus communication campaign the cute icons the 17 SDGs as well as the icons for the specific targets and the very pretty colors the 17 colors I mean that actually play a really really large part because they're they're quite neutral they they don't speak like it this is a preference to the non-for-profits there's a preference for the large industries there's a preference for the state intervention right these 17 icons that they show people living happily together right people in wheelchairs people who are young people who have blindness or other disabilities and so on they all look actually quite comfortable around each other in the SDG portrayal and so I think this iconography more than anything made sure that people see that we may have very different positions just like those colors they're so contrasting with one another but we can also form a circle form a ring of sorts and then share this common space this common values and that let us innovate and make things better so reflecting on this past five years I think definitely without the SDGs and this related vocabulary iconography we wouldn't be that easy to join up the prior previous very like distributed sectors and some at arts sectors together to where the common ways so I fantastic the the actual icons playing a big part there in terms of working together and actually symbolizing where we're heading towards I'm wondering about the social innovation lab at the moment what are the top conversations that are taking place yeah the social innovation lab which is literally my office as I mentioned I'm there every Wednesday and anyone who is a registered social innovator can claim 40 minutes of my time and have conversations and I think partly because I think of the presidential hackathon people nowadays care much more about how to make a good business case out of a social mobilization toward a shared environmental goal previously we would have ideas that maybe just join two of the 17 goals together but nowadays I get the pitch that joins at least three sometimes five or six different goals together for example in the last year's presidential hackathon there is this team called circuit plus and which is already converted the social innovation lab to one of their check-in points it's like a Pokemon go game which you download on your phone and it shows you where are the nearby watery filling stations that you can take your bottles to check in and then not only comment on how a warm or cold or tasty the water is and have a real conversation about collect like gold coins and things like that and then leads you to nearby like walks that makes the community values the history and so on apparent just like the Pokemon go makes the environmental characteristics apparent with the selection of pocket monsters and then once you collect throughout those walks then you also get automated notifications when the temperature is getting hot like almost 40 degrees in summer around here in the recent years to remind you to drink more of this water you just collected so that you don't suffer from heat damage and then it also after you collect those coins you can also spend these on the social enterprises products and services and so on and after you form a habit of checking in like 50 days in a row then it also reviews like exactly how many plastic bottles that you have just saved and how much impact it has on the environment as a whole and so all in all I mean just by describing their play style this is maybe six SDGs there are already and so this is what I think is very interesting is that people are thinking about partnerships with very unlikely stakeholders nowadays and this really cheers me up what a wonderful example with that complete interconnectedness between the SDG that's a wonderful example and just finishing up now watch on your agenda for this year what's your big area of focus yeah this year we're going to announce to the world the national action plan on open government for the administration side and open parliament on the legislature side and with this we're taking the kind of cross-sectoral partnership the social innovation based approach and applying it not only in the administration's work which is what the social innovation lab is about but also in other branches in the government also so for example the legislature is now thinking about ways to make sure that people can participate in the lawmaking process not just in the rulemaking process using the same almost gamified way that they can understand more as part of their for example capstone projects in their high schools or in their universities and there's also a commitment as part of our referendum process our central election committee just announced that this year not only they will introduce a electronic counter signature system to augment the paper based one but they will also double down on the deliberation process that makes sure that people share the common values despite they bringing up the like pro and con referendum topics so we can all agree on the common values before going into the referendum station to make choices those way or another and so on and so I think I'm really heartened that this ideas of common values out of different positions and innovation based on the common values is now taken up to other parts of the democratic process instead of just limiting our conversations about voting which is essentially just three bits per person every four years we're now increasing the bit rates of democracy and turning democracy into a type of technology a social technology to come to think about it is also social innovation thank you so much for your time today minister Tang it's been a complete pleasure absolute pleasure to hear about what's happening in Taiwan and some of those leading practices around government innovation social innovation and the SDGs thank you thank you a really good question I really enjoyed this conversation left low and prosper thank you so much my guest today has been minister Audrey Tang digital minister of Taiwan thank you all for listening and I hope this has given you some inspiration and a fresh outlook on how we can innovate to collaborate and work together on the SDGs for a better world