Grayson M. Shor: I met with Chen the other day. She had promised me, she said that you would be wearing a Sustainable Development Goals pin.

Audrey Tang: And a SDGs T shirt.

Grayson M. Shor: And a T shirt. She didn’t say the T shirt though. I’m surprised about that one.

Audrey Tang: You want a T shirt?

Grayson M. Shor: I won’t say no to that.

Audrey Tang: And stickers. The full plate. [laughs]

Grayson M. Shor: I’m happy to see the strong representation of the SDGs as I’m right there with you on that.

Audrey Tang: I have the SDGs on everything, literally.

Grayson M. Shor: Wow.

Grayson M. Shor: That’s amazing.

Shih Ta Ching: Thanks, Audrey, for meeting Grayson today. I’m just introducing. Elaine is our new economic section intern.

Audrey Tang: Hi!

Shih Ta Ching: Every year, AIT, we do recruiting some interns from Taiwan, also from the US at certain point. It helps in further engagement US Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: For a few months?

Shih Ta Ching: For a term. Actually, end of June. She will be helping us on many issues together, some public engagement like this one. It’s a very good chance for even Elaine to meet Audrey, to understand the platform of public participation.

Audrey Tang: Nice to make your acquaintance.

Grayson M. Shor: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: You have my card. [laughs]

Grayson M. Shor: Literally everything you...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, literally.

Shih Ta Ching: The card I had was a previous version. I should have one...

Audrey Tang: There is SDGs on the flip side also.

Shih Ta Ching: Thank you.

Grayson M. Shor: I like it. It’s pretty cool.

Shih Ta Ching: The one I had was still on the PDIS, a black and white one.

Audrey Tang: We converted...

Shih Ta Ching: Oh, converted...

Audrey Tang: ... [laughs] to the SDGs.

Shih Ta Ching: Oh, it’s still PDIS over there.

Audrey Tang: We’re still PDIS. We just converted to this new universal spirituality. [laughs]

Grayson M. Shor: Amazing.

Audrey Tang: How can I help?

Shih Ta Ching: I think before that, it’s just taking the opportunity because I’m on job duty for AIT. We’ve been aware of this Uber case for these MOTC’s issues. On the public debate platform...

Audrey Tang: The Join platform.

Shih Ta Ching: On Join...

Audrey Tang: There is a petition, and there is a regulatory preview.

Shih Ta Ching: It seems to be that Uber’s case has attracted most of the discussion.

Audrey Tang: It’s very heated.

Shih Ta Ching: It’s almost breaking the record.

Audrey Tang: Not quite, I think marriage equality still beats it in terms of comments...

Shih Ta Ching: Of course. What I’m saying is that we’ve been seeing this issue for a while. We’ve been very appreciating for, Audrey, you have creating the platform for discussion. It helps in a lot of public debates.

Audrey Tang: We learned a lot of very good points from both the rental car companies and the drivers working for rental car companies, and also the diversified taxi drivers, on the public platform. I think it’s really good to have everybody’s ideas on the table.

Shih Ta Ching: Is there possibility like this platform, the ideas, how the MOTC can take part in listening to those opinions?

Audrey Tang: They are, actually. They are summarizing everything posted on the platform. There will be a public reply, I think, if the petition gets over 5,000 counter signatures.

Audrey Tang: There will have to be a point by point reply that outlines the direction for people currently working for rental car companies, people currently self employing in taxi service, like how this regulatory change will affect everyone and also how they will be able to switch to a perhaps even more profitable line of business after the regulatory change.

Shih Ta Ching: Overall, what we have seen is on one hand you have Taiwan’s trying to attract more international investment and open...

Audrey Tang: Uber’s been really actually helping the Ministry for Science and Technology, for example.

Shih Ta Ching: They have Uber for Taiwan project.

Audrey Tang: They have the AI fellowship program. As far I understand, they’re also in the talks to join the LEAP project and other important projects. While we are positioning ourselves to be a AI innovation island, of course, Uber is a very valuable partner.

Shih Ta Ching: We just basically don’t want to lose Uber on Taiwan’s market.

Audrey Tang: They’re already working with taxis. [laughs]

Shih Ta Ching: They are basically very compliant, the Uber...

Audrey Tang: There is a Uber Taxi option that I actually...There is a lot of visibility on this issue, but not particularly because Uber positioned itself as a rental car company. It’s not.

Audrey Tang: It’s mostly about how rental car companies view their relationship with Uber as being impacted by the shifting of the regulation to be more of a municipal deciding how for the minimum hours, the minimum time of the operation.

Shih Ta Ching: That one hour.

Audrey Tang: That will be up to the municipality. When Uber and the MOTC had a legal case, the court ruled it’s up for the municipals to enforce the rules.

Audrey Tang: With the regulatory preview, each municipality can set its own rules, too. That will largely be determined at the municipal level.

Shih Ta Ching: Back to what I just...

Grayson M. Shor: [laughs]

Shih Ta Ching: ...talked to Grayson in the car, that you have such a wonderful development for Taiwan’s overall government and also internationally how government can be more open and innovative, embracing innovation. Grayson is our Boren fellow. I will let him introducing himself later. Most importantly, he will be staying in Taiwan for a year for this fellowship.

Shih Ta Ching: The idea is definitely welcome for anything that further strengthen US Taiwan relationship. He’s basically asking about a lot of issues, circular economy, environmental protection, from digital transformation, all these things, that’s totally. That’s why we’re coming in today for your office hour. We’re seeing that clinic time. We’re trying to have the best of consulting your ideas.

Grayson M. Shor: Just a short introduction about myself. First, I thank you for taking the time to meet with us today. I think it’s very cool, beyond the SDGs, but also have that you have office hours. That’s very forward thinking of you, so amazing.

Grayson M. Shor: My name’s Grayson Shor, as I mentioned earlier. I’m originally from California, and I’ve until recently been living in Washington, D.C. the past few years and working for the State Department. I’m on hiatus right now from the State Department as this Boren fellow.

Grayson M. Shor: Essentially, out here both to increase my Mandarin, but then also, equally as important, study and understand circular economy and environmental issues in Taiwan and in Greater Asia, with the ultimate goal of returning back to State after this year, picking up my job again there.

Grayson M. Shor: Trying to promote circular economy initiatives from within the US government, but also with our partners and friends out here in Asia as well, chiefly Taiwan. I think Taiwan is, I would say, within the top two leaders of the world as it relates to circular economy.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we recycle even glasses. [laughs]

Grayson M. Shor: That’s amazing. The more stuff I learn, the more I’m in awe, especially being from California myself and Southern California, where we pride ourselves on our social openness, our environmental consciousness. The International Earth Day started in Santa Barbara, my hometown.

Grayson M. Shor: Growing up there and understanding environmental issues, these things have always been central to me. Now, being here in Taiwan just pushing on to about three and a half weeks now, the conversations that I’ve had with great folks, what I’ve seen first hand, and from my research before and now, it’s blown my mind the stuff that Taiwan can share with the world.

Grayson M. Shor: During my time here, there’s a few goals that I have. One is to further study and understand what the digital and the physical innovations that Taiwan has as it relates to environmental issues and the circular economy.

Grayson M. Shor: Two is to promote those stories whether it be through things such as podcasts or through articles, blogs, but it all being free, open source information. I should mention a key for it being open source, too. My background, training wise and education, is also as a geospatial analyst, Open Street Map and all that. I’m all for open source.

Audrey Tang: Have you met with the local OSM folks? They’re really active.

Grayson M. Shor: I’m meeting on them on the eighth.

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome.

Grayson M. Shor: At the Mozilla Center.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, the Mozilla Community Space. That’s great.

Grayson M. Shor: I’m excited for that. It seems like the OSM community is strong here in that sense.

Grayson M. Shor: Those two goals, and then also to figure out ways that the US can better collaborate, whether it be from the government perspective, but also from a business perspective and NGOs’ perspectives with Taiwan on promoting circular economy not only just here in Taiwan, not just in Asia, but internationally.

Grayson M. Shor: Take the example from your shirt and from your card and everything, to meet these Sustainable Development Goals requires not just one country or one small community...

Audrey Tang: It’s a global partnership, that’s right.

Grayson M. Shor: Exactly. I’m hoping that, with this conversation, you can give me...I have a variety of questions. Just to start it off, kind of a broad question, but I’m hoping you could give me a holistic picture of, understanding of digital innovation here in Taiwan. What do you think are the challenges and opportunities moving forward?

Audrey Tang: I’ll give you the five minute version of that. [laughs]

Grayson M. Shor: I know it’s a broad question there, but I feel like I’m asking the right person.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we pride ourself as being one of the four WEF super innovators, along with the US, Germany, and Switzerland. In Taiwan, it’s very important when we talk about digital, we’re not talking just about ICT. We’re not just talking about technology, but rather we bring the technology to the people’s citizen spaces.

Audrey Tang: You can probably have some glimpse of that stepping into the Social Innovation Lab here. The soccer field is actually a testimony [laughs] to the social innovation.

Audrey Tang: They were drawn by people with Down’s syndrome, with trisomy differences. Instead of seeing them as lesser groups in the society, actually they see the world through geometric means, whereas we see it through abstraction, textual, or number. They can paint something, like a Van Gogh painting, that brings creativity out of people.

Audrey Tang: My office hour here, every Wednesday, 10:00 to 10:00, is also meant to make the context of policymaking more visible. We use digital to amplify the process of speaking and listening, instead of replacing it by asking the people to come to technology. We don’t do that. We bring technology to people.

Audrey Tang: If you had arrived a few weeks earlier you would see those self driving tricycles roaming around the Social Innovation Lab. It’s been three times that they visit here.

Audrey Tang: They’re called persuasive electric vehicles, or PEVs. They’re open source, so when people don’t like the fact that they look like cyclops and it tenses up when it reaches a situation where it cannot tell what to do, now people tinker it, because it’s open hardware, open source.

Audrey Tang: Those self driving tricycles fit into the various workflows that people have when buying flowers in the nearby flowers market or whatever, always with a aim of co creating the norms of how to integrate these creatures. Like co domesticate with the society instead of having random people, random IT dictating what the local people have to do, which is the same approach we took with Uber, actually, with a public consultation.

Audrey Tang: The point here being we turned something that is always a rhetoric between the digital haves and digital have nots, between the innovative economies and the people whose job is replaced by automation, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: There’s a social tension implicit when we talk about digital transformation, but we don’t ask that kind of question. We ask instead. We have different forces at play, but what kind of common values do we have despite the different positions that we have on a certain regard.

Audrey Tang: We create a space for people to show their innovation, and often they lead the regulations. The regulation didn’t anticipate self driving vehicles or whatever emerging technologies of the day.

Audrey Tang: We focus on creating a space for people to lawfully break the law to experiment with what we call sandboxes. Essentially anyone, if they can convince a municipality that a certain social need is fulfilled by breaking an existing regulation somewhat, then they get a period, like one year or half a year, to experiment.

Audrey Tang: Once these require a law change, because regulation cannot challenge laws, we also actively work with legislators to open up sandboxes, like in fintech, in self driving vehicles, in 5G, in whatever, so that people can lawfully challenge any law for a year.

Audrey Tang: For example, our self driving vehicle. It is the only one in the world that allows for those trimodal hybrid, because it’s owned by the Ministry of Economy, not transportation. For the MOEA it’s all the same, so as long as it can fulfill a transportation need, then you’re free to try it for a year.

Audrey Tang: Then if the MPs decide to step in, then it can take up to four years to create the law, but meanwhile the experiment still runs. It’s like a limited time monopoly for the innovators. Everybody else is still illegal and they’re legal. Once the MPs are OK with it, or the MOTC is OK with it, of course competitors enter the market.

Audrey Tang: This is a way for the innovation in this society to lead the regulators so that we don’t have to regulate something we don’t have firsthand experience of. That’s the main idea. If you can take one idea, that is the main idea. It’s called regulatory co creation. So far so good? [laughs]

Grayson M. Shor: If I can ask a question on this.

Audrey Tang: Please do.

Grayson M. Shor: For the regulatory co creation, is it a domestic Taiwan program? Who can apply to be in that program? Could it be anybody, or only Taiwanese people?

Audrey Tang: It could be anybody. Actually, the fintech one is relatively common. The UK started, Singapore adopted, and so on, mostly to make the finance people and the tech people look at each other, work together. We extended it to pretty much anything.

Audrey Tang: What’s important here is that people see it as of social value, of solving a local social problem. Instead of randomly advocating for one technology over the other, we can say, "OK."

Audrey Tang: In, for example, 5G anyone can apply, if you are a not for profit indefinitely, if you are for profit then for a year, to try out a particular form of 5G deployment before scaling it out worldwide. You don’t have to be a Taiwanese citizen to do so.

Grayson M. Shor: I like that it’s open to everyone.

Audrey Tang: How do we determine what the local society needs? We do it through a regional innovation system where I regularly tour around Taiwan, roughly every two weeks, if not more, because the office hour does have its limitation.

Audrey Tang: If you live in Taipei or you’re living part of the Taiwan that has access to high speed rails, of course that’s easier for you meet me, but otherwise I will come and meet you, whether it’s the Pescadores Islands, Kinmen, or HengChun.

Audrey Tang: I tour around, and anyone can summon me through a 5,0000 people petition, as well, on the joint platform. We would travel there and meet with the stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: All the national ministries, there’s 12 of them, join in this program. They are actually here in the Social Innovation Lab. Through bi way telepresence the local people can see the ministries, the central government, and central government can hear the whole story.

Audrey Tang: Because everything is open, people tend to actually speak only objective truth, unlike one to one lobbying. What this means is that as long as there’s rough consensus, we don’t need a fine consensus of what the local people need, we share the basic facts. Like the TESAS database. It’s called T E S A S.

Audrey Tang: TESAS is a new system recently released by the national development council that lays out all the pertinent factual information about any particular county or township and whether they have a declining population, whether they have access to healthcare, whatever. The social and economic database.

Audrey Tang: Based on those facts anyone can share their feelings. Whenever there is rough consensus among all the different stakeholders the central government, instead of asking them to submit a long proposal, they can join the regional revitalization plan and co create the policy needed for that particular place.

Audrey Tang: It’s based on the central government’s public service colocating into their home and working in a teleworking fashion. Whenever we need to do a quick poll using the polis system that we’re also working with AIT on, we can quickly get a rough consensus.

Audrey Tang: We can see people mostly agree on most of the things with most of their neighbors. There are some divisive issues, but we table those, and then we roll out regulations and policies that take care of what the most people feel most strongly about.

Audrey Tang: If you focus only on mainstream and social media sometimes all people see is these divisive issues, but there’s actually tons of things that we can roll out. That’s how the innovation occurs, by showing it to everyone, then scaling it, and working with the civil society, who fills in the innovations needed before the government can allocate a budget for the next year.

Audrey Tang: For air pollution there’s many people who run a, what we call, air box, which is less than US$100, and measure the atmospheric PM2.5 and whatever.

Audrey Tang: What the government’s role is, instead of beating them, we join them, which is very rare in Asia. [laughs] If they ask, for example, in the industrial parks and areas where it’s less likely for them to go in an install the air boxes, we actually do it through out EPA program and hang it on the lampposts.

Audrey Tang: Or if they want to tell the domestic versus across the street pollution they want a measurement device here, but it’s impossible for the civil society to set up that. We are working with the wind turbine power plant companies so we can tell them to hook the air boxes there.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we’re complimentary to the civil society offerings of the air box project. If you want to know more details it’s all in the collective intelligence program, ci.taiwan.gov.tw.

Audrey Tang: We have a English one page summary for pretty much anything. It all ends with taiwan.gov.tw. There’s CI for civil IoT. There’s AI for artificial intelligence. There’s SI for social innovation. There’s SMART for Smart Taiwan. There’s BIO for the biomedical, and so on and so forth. It all ends in taiwan.gov.tw.

Grayson M. Shor: Is there an environment one, overarching, or is it mixed in with...?

Audrey Tang: We actually already have a 永續會, a sustainability council. We’re also considering to fold part of that into the SI, the social innovation part, because the social innovation is all encompassing, while our 永續會 is more environmental based. Our social entrepreneurship program, for example, actually focus on the economy part of sustaintable development.

Audrey Tang: We’re now making a map that maps all the CSR, all the universities’ social responsibility, the USR, and also the social entrepreneurship, the sustainability council, and so on, into a shared map that you can see from all over Taiwan based on the 17 goals as the index. It’s going to be online in a couple of months, and I’ll share that with you once it’s done.

Audrey Tang: In a nutshell, when we talk about digital we talk about 17.18, 17.17, and 17.6, which means that we make each part of the society trust each other more based on reliable data.

Audrey Tang: Like for the air box example, we also worked with universities to develop blockchains so that when they upload their numbers into the national high speed computing center it’s snapshooted and checked into the blockchain so people can trust the government to not alter their numbers. That builds trust, and once there’s trust there’s effective partnership.

Audrey Tang: Based on the civil IoT, for example, we have a annual Presidential Hackathon where we ask the people to solve the society problem based on this data. For example, last year there’s a AI team that used the SCADA data for the water pipelines to detect leakage early, and with a 70 percent accuracy.

Audrey Tang: It was a really good team. We spent three months mentoring them with the Taiwan Water Corporation, and three months after they won the Taiwan Presidential Hackathon, one of the five winning teams. There’s no monetary reward. The reward is we will do whatever it takes to integrate it into the public service for the next year, and that’s it.

Audrey Tang: Once they won that and got that presidential promise, they actually moved to Wellington, because New Zealand invited them to solve the new water shortage problem caused by climate change in Wellington. They worked very closely with Wellington Water Company for three more months. That’s the kind of partnership we’re looking.

Audrey Tang: The idea is always open innovation, like OpenStreetMap. Instead of a colonizing behavior, like some other jurisdictions, we always co create in the commons.

Audrey Tang: When people ask me the job description of digital minister I always respond with a poem that says when we see the Internet of things, turn it into Internet beings. When we see virtual reality, let’s make it a shared reality.

Audrey Tang: When we see machine learning we turn it into collaborative learning. Whenever we see user experience, let’s make it about human experience. Whenever people tells me that the singularity is near, and I say always remember the plurality is here. That’s it.

Grayson M. Shor: Amazing. I feel like I need to give a standing ovation.

Audrey Tang: That’s the 10 minute version.

Grayson M. Shor: I’m very impressed. A ton of information there, especially with digging into these websites that you mentioned, and the TESAS platform, as well. I’m curious, across all of these the theme seems to be, yes, innovation, but also open source, data sharing, data integrity, and transparency as it relates to...

Audrey Tang: These goals.

Grayson M. Shor: To these goals, exactly. A central part of, as I view it, the circular economy, maybe the basis of it all, is design how do we design our products better to use less resources, but also to better use the resources that are already in use now.

Grayson M. Shor: I’m curious, how do you view this system or this structure being able to be utilized to better promote the design of technologic products, but also manufactured products, as well?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. There’s design thinking, which is what everyone can get a basic awareness of, and there’s design design, which is service design, product design. That is part of the circular economy ethos. Design thinking is more like the whole SDGs, whereas product and service design is more focused on the 9th and the 12th.

Audrey Tang: This part is one of the industrial innovation plan of the presidential priorities, the so called five plus two. Circular economy is one.

Grayson M. Shor: You’re five times two?

Audrey Tang: [laughs] No, it’s five plus two. It’s always been five plus two. The five times two is a running joke because there’s many other supporting plans to support the industrial innovations, but the industrial innovation we talked about, it is always the five plus two.

Audrey Tang: In the five plus two there’s one dedicated to the circular economy. It basically is based on the conservation of both the energy and the substance, and making apparent the flows to everyone who makes this part of their work.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan we’re focusing on a few things. The agricultural one is more obvious. There’s many people focusing on turning agricultural waste into either electricity, better products, or alternative forms of all sort of different materials for design, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Sustainable design in terms of agricultural reuse has always been a strong suit in Taiwan, but there’s many others that are less apparent. For example, there’s a startup that’s working on turning oceanic plastic waste back into fuel. They barter it with the fishes people so that the fishes people don’t have to discard the plastic waste. They can barter it partly into fuel.

Audrey Tang: They’re badly in need of regulatory adjustment because they can’t oversea become a oil selling company, but if we make that case work, it’s very encouraging for things pushing forward.

Audrey Tang: Also, one of the largest charities in Taiwan, the DA.AI group is also a social enterprise. They call themselves DA.AI, no relationship with artificial intelligence...yet. [laughs] The DA.AI Tech Company also focuses on, for example, the fabrics, because we recycle...

Grayson M. Shor: Recycling.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, and they make second time recycling also into sunglasses and things like that. There’s a huge system of people doing basic recycling, but there’s also a recent trend of upcycling.

Audrey Tang: Our five plus two plan, because it’s called industrial innovation, is mostly focused on the upcycling part to make sure that people recognize the value and make it into the value chain of something that is desired, not just needed by the customers.

Audrey Tang: That’s the smaller part. The larger part of sustainability by design, the joint platform actually plays a role.

Audrey Tang: There’s a young high school student, 15 years old, a couple years ago went to the petition platform, petitioned for the banning of plastic straws in takeout drinks, which is a very sensitive topic, the bubble tea being a national identity drink. [laughs] We finally made some progress.

Audrey Tang: Even when they cannot yet participate in referendums or votes, the teenagers, they are the best promoters of sustainability, the general awareness of the sustainable goals. They can find all those sea turtle pictures and other effective campaign materials to generally change the society’s view on the plastic straws.

Audrey Tang: Now we’re rolling out a plan that you cannot, for indoor dining and whatever, use plastic straws for drinks. It’s a important step for it. There’s many civics teachers. There’s many people in this year’s new curriculum in all the different levels.

Audrey Tang: The 1st, the 7th, and the 10th grade we start to integrate SDGs and sustainabilities into the curriculum itself. It’s not as a class, but rather as a character or general awareness that people can really make a difference, both by themselves, and also by petitioning and other forms of continuous democracy, as we call it.

Audrey Tang: That’s a larger a design thinking by collectively find how might we questions to move forward as a society. It’s less industrial innovation, but it’s still very much in tune of the society’s view on sustainability.

Grayson M. Shor: Holistic approach?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Grayson M. Shor: You jumped the gun there a little bit on my next question, which was about education, because, yes, I agree, manufacturing is focusing on maybe 2 of the 17 of these SDGs.

Grayson M. Shor: Maybe, if you could, elaborate a little bit further on, specifically, education. What do you view, within Taiwan, what is changing? What has changed over the generations, and what do you think needs to change further?

Grayson M. Shor: I’ll underpin that question with saying the conversation I had with Greenpeace, basically we had come to the joint conclusion that why Taiwan is the leader in environmental protection, innovation, all that across all of Asia and the leader in the world has a lot to do with Taiwan’s awakening to environmental issues, and having that ingrained in education for over 20 years.

Grayson M. Shor: I’m curious, what role do you see education playing? I’m curious as specifically digital issues going forward.

Audrey Tang: Every Wednesday we share dinner with the vTaiwan Meetup here. One of the very active participant is actually the executive director of the Homemakers Association, which was one of the oldest environmental awareness group.

Audrey Tang: They would go on to form the Homemakers Union and Co op to change the popular awareness by changing consumer behavior by running a very successful consumer co op. Full disclosure, my mom was a co founder of the association [laughs] , so I was raised literally in this awareness campaigns.

Audrey Tang: That intervention, by focusing on not just consumer rights, but consumer making a choice through their purchase is really the key of flipping the whole generation’s view by making consumption intentional. That has been what really worked and really affected a whole generation.

Audrey Tang: I still remember when I was six years old, there’s no habit of recycling whatsoever anywhere in Taiwan. It’s just those 20 years that change a lot. What’s happening now is that people are getting used to the idea of upcycling, that environmental protection doesn’t mean necessarily worse products.

Audrey Tang: Recycled products not necessarily worse. Also, that it’s not necessarily a personal sacrifice if you decide to work for environmental protection. It could build a great career. There’s more role models now coming from both the social entrepreneurship side and also from the, what we call B Corp. I’m sure you have that in the US also, benefit corporation side.

Audrey Tang: Both companies that are not just satisfied with doing CSR but they turned CSR into a strategy, into business development. In the past couple of years, we have what we call a buying power award to award, especially company that integrate sustainability and social environmental value into their supply chain. Not just a CSR campaign but rather make sure that all within their supply chain.

Audrey Tang: For example, people worry about carbon neutrality which is one of the indicator into that one. It has a very large room to catch up on. [laughs] If they make such a conscious choice and make their supply chain procurements, we count that toward our listing.

Audrey Tang: I, personally, give out awards if they make supply chain adjustments over a certain amount like one million Taiwan dollars for the past year. We’re moving it to three million now because it’s getting too easy to get an award from me, I guess. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any case, we’re promoting this kind of conscious supply chain changes. Whereas the previous two decades it’s mostly about consumer awareness, now it’s also supply chain awareness, business development awareness, and so on. We’re moving more and more toward the ESG governance part.

Grayson M. Shor: What would you say are some specific examples of this in action in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: We were in close collaboration with a platform called SE Insights, Social Entrepreneurship Insights and also Mpost, M P O S T. If you look at SE Insight and Mpost, they both have SDGs as a theme. If you go to the theme, you can see a lot of SDGs.

Audrey Tang: If you navigate through, for example, the 12th, then you might see a...What do they call pig farms? People to raise pigs and to do almost full recycling of the waste into electricity, of the blockchain based accountability.

Audrey Tang: Of course, they’re still slightly more expensive on the market but they offer a full auditability from the food that they feed all the way to the whole butchering process and things like that. It’s literally transparent. If you visit the shampoo factory, the factory is just downstairs. If you look at the second floor where people is walking about, you can see the entire process.

Audrey Tang: It’s also on blockchain. It’s a really good demonstration of how a company who used to specialize only in food for consumption of the pigs and other animals gradually moving upward the value chain to build a whole system. Also, to make sure that, fingers crossed, if Taiwan doesn’t hit by a certain virus, [laughs] it can also be international branding.

Grayson M. Shor: What would you say, from everything that you’ve seen, that Taiwan has most potential to export to the rest of the world, whether it be a social innovation or a technical innovation?

Audrey Tang: I think the governance model is one of the thing that we’re exporting very actively. We held workshops, me personally, with the civic communities in Tokyo, and also Toronto, and New York City. Our colleagues has held workshops in Madrid, Barcelona, the UK, and everywhere. In that sense, it’s a little bit like Estonia.

Audrey Tang: Estonia figured out a platform. It worked pretty well. They export first to their Nordic neighbors but then, gradually, to a lot of other municipalities and eventually countrysides based on the EID system and E residency system that they developed.

Audrey Tang: What we’re developing here with all those consensus making algorithms, platforms, e petition, and so on, Taiwan has a unique critical mass of being a really small one and a half hours by high speed rails from the north to the south, but then 23 million people and all very well educated, and also, almost 90 percent on the Internet actively. That means that we tend to worry less about the digital gap.

Audrey Tang: We worry more about linguistic inclusion, ethnic inclusion, cognitive model inclusion like the case with people with trisomy differences and things like that. Once we figure out a innovation platform, it’s usually very easy for other municipalities to take parts of it and then run a office hour, or a virtual consultation, or the kind of e petition platform and integrating into the supply chain.

Audrey Tang: It’s piecemeal but once you’ve saw that how it fits all together in Taiwan, you can choose exactly the part that you need and then co create the part that you have to invent by yourself. This whole spectrum innovation as compared to our neighboring economies such as Singapore, which does really well on one or two of these skills but has less to say about, say, agricultural sustainability.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan offers a lab to make it all happen. We also attract the oversea company who take advantage of the regulatory co creation system and proof that something really works in Taiwan and then scaling out to the rest of the...We’re probably going to see that in 5G deployment as well.

Grayson M. Shor: Again, where great minds think alike, the next question was going to be why Taiwan? You’ve kind of answered that here. To play almost a devil’s advocate, to ask about the challenges facing Taiwan.

Grayson M. Shor: Going with the example that we were talking about earlier with Uber. With Uber being a company focused on technology innovation but facing the political issues that’s been happening over the past couple of years here, what are the challenges that are face innovation in Taiwan today?

Audrey Tang: The Uber case is a particularly good case. It’s literally the first one that we used the AI based conversation. It’s not only the polis platform. That’s one of the more prominent vetoing cases. Airbnb is the next high profile one. We also deployed this.

Audrey Tang: By the time Airbnb was deliberated, Airbnb sent an email to all their Taiwan members to ask them to come to be Taiwan and support the party line of the Airbnb. Because this is a open ended survey, it’s not just a binary one or two, or yes or no. If that was the case, the mobilization might have worked.

Audrey Tang: Actually, only one third of people, after they saw all this overview of their people’s voices, really supported Airbnb’s party line. The other two third want some self regulation out of Airbnb as well, despite being Airbnb members. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The same with Uber, many Uber car drivers at the time being mobilized to vote here, actually said, "We really want insurance and we really want freedom of working in a competitive landscape on par with taxi," instead of in a way that is kind of legal gray area, and so on.

Audrey Tang: The insurance, the registration, and also the taxation, these are just broad consensus, they’re what we call rough consensus, despite that many people were mobilized by the platform economy companies. The veto would then move on to create a guideline to adjust to platform economies. That guideline has helped to regulate the sharing of private parking spaces using new technology.

Audrey Tang: It is a app controlled block so the car cannot drive in. Once you use an app to make a payment, then it lowers down and you can park. It’s a really cheap device. Then we co create a regulation so that, if people share their private parking space on average by eight hours every day over the span of the month, then they don’t have to pay the same taxes as a professional parking lot.

Audrey Tang: They’re essentially sharing their vacant parking space and therefore contributing to a net positive of the society. On the other hand, we want to discourage hoarding and essentially running illegal parking spaces by distributing the parking lots. Anything above that would have to be taxed. That is a rough consensus. It’s already the case.

Audrey Tang: That’s one of the first sandbox platforms that’s running by the national development council that is established, I think, last January. Many other platform economy cases were resolved on the NDC platform. You can look it up in law.ndc.gov.tw. Of course, many other sandboxes then followed.

Audrey Tang: The main challenge first is that some people still don’t know that there are these platforms now, that they can go and get a ruling very quickly and summon a co creation meeting. A second challenge is that the legislative part. These sandbox laws are really new. We don’t have yet the cases that warrant a law change that came out of the sandbox process.

Audrey Tang: We have lot of good cases that adjust the regulation, a law change, not yet. We will have to wait for another year or two to present to the world the successful law changes not just regulation changes that’s born out of this sandbox idea.

Grayson M. Shor: It sounds like some of the stuff that D4SG did for social innovation.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Grayson M. Shor: Are you going to be at their demo day next month as well? That’s on the 20th.

Audrey Tang: Yes. The D4SG people prototyped the Presidential Hackathon system but on the municipal level.

Grayson M. Shor: CK.

Audrey Tang: Yes. For last year’s Presidential Hackathon, CK was one of the main brains behind the activity last year. This year, he, of course, is joined by the wider civic technology community. He is still one of the most important people in running the international part of the Presidential Hackathon.

Grayson M. Shor: To limit myself, I know I’ll be short on time a little bit, too. I want to be conscious and respectful of your time. Two last questions for you. Energy. Energy is needed to drive a lot of these things. I’m curious with there being maybe some issues over the past couple of years with decommissioning nuclear power plants or where wind turbines can be placed or they can’t be placed, basically a NIMBY issue, Not In My Back Yard.

Audrey Tang: Wind turbines has less of that issue. We had more of that issue with solar panels at first. With the newest technology in reducing the pollution and increasing the cohabitation with agriculture products and so on, we’re now less worried about the solar part. It used to be a issue. I want to share this picture. This is a Taiwan focused reinterpretation of the SDGs.

Audrey Tang: We need to take care of the industrial innovation. Then, if there’s not life long learning plan and if people learn to build skills not capacities, then they will suffer loss of dignity when innovation comes. This is for the general awareness of environmental sustainability and resiliency.

Audrey Tang: That leads to the more civic participation of not running for MPs way of still influencing the politics and the civil society. That, coupled with the aging population and the declining population in the regional, it also needs to be augmented by assistive intelligence, also known as AIs.

Audrey Tang: Also, people’s general awareness that the health is a long term process and the preventative medicine, telemedicine, and everything is the whole picture. What I’m getting to is that, regarding to your question of energy policy, it is within this framework.

Audrey Tang: When we look at the indigenous people building their own power grid, this is within the social value not just for monetary value of their self sovereign over their energy supplies and things like that. As is evaluated through these five lines not just on economy level.

Grayson M. Shor: Would you say within these five examples or focuses here as well, I know that, for example, TaiSugar is eco village, eco based and then the focus on Shih in creating a circular economy district there.

Audrey Tang: The 大林蒲 project.

Grayson M. Shor: The 大林蒲, exactly. Do you have any general thoughts about those? Do you think those are sustainable? Do you think it’s a good path going forward to focus on establishing some maybe small villages or small pockets to test this out? Do you think it should be more dispersed? I’m basically curious what your general thoughts are on these projects?

Audrey Tang: Devolution is the general plan here. We call it regional innovation because we know that the local people really knows the most about how to move forward. They may not always have the resources or the knowledge. That’s what the university social responsibility program is for. That’s why the regional revitalization platform is for.

Audrey Tang: It’s basically the initiative has to start with the local people and not in a top down way, not in a dictatorship way. That is the overarching thing. The more initiative comes out of the local population, the more sustainable it becomes. The more it is reliant on central government five year plans with reimbursements, the less sustainable it becomes. [laughs] That’s the overarching summary.

Grayson M. Shor: Interesting. Last question for you, too. What haven’t we asked you today that you think is important for us to know?

Audrey Tang: First, all these assets are Creative Common Zero, meaning that the T shirt itself is in the public domain. If you want a copy of the T shirt, I can bring you one [laughs] if they still have stock here. That’s very important because by showing in photographs with this T shirt, it brings almost spiritual awareness out of people.

Audrey Tang: If I attend a meeting of all the CEOs and whatever, it prompts them to think about social environmental impact. If I attend a local environmental group gathering, it prompts them to think about sustainable business models for their work, and so on and so forth.

Audrey Tang: This holistic picture image is a regulative thought that, if people hold those patterns in their minds, it prompts a long term thinking that Taiwan, in the political landscape, really needs. If we think in a inter generational, cross generational way, then a lot of the tension that’s born out of people growing up with dictatorship and people born with democracy can dissolve itself.

Audrey Tang: The main social tension in Taiwan now is between the two generations that lived with drastically different political systems and different habits. By focusing on co creation and sustainability, that’s something that both generations can agree on.

Grayson M. Shor: Amazing. May I ask one last question here?

Audrey Tang: Of course. We still have 10 minutes.

Grayson M. Shor: Awesome. Perfect. Extended producer responsibility, EPR. Taiwan has a strong focus on this from what I’ve researched. Focusing on an example of plastics and the plastic bottles, to name one of the many categories in EPR. From what you were just saying, do you think that EPR with innovations and if things go as planned or at least hoped as we were just mentioning...

Audrey Tang: If we were just talking about plastic bags, that is very well implemented.

Grayson M. Shor: Expanding even beyond plastic bags, everything from consumer goods, to inputs or outputs, manufacturing, whatever it may be at that point.

Audrey Tang: There’s two things. One is some brands choosing to use that as a differentiator of their product. That, I think, is going pretty well in Taiwan. There’s dedicated outlets. There’s dedicated places. There’s dedicated communities. Still, the homemaker insignia still plays a large part there.

Audrey Tang: If you’re talking about a plastic straw ban like thing, which is all encompassing, then it depends on industry to industry. There’s no quick answer to that. Basically, the municipalities, because of the evolution, is reluctant to be too progressive.

Audrey Tang: If their citizens don’t yet demand a certain thing to be under EPR, they don’t tend to be too progressive. That’s the case with municipalities. The central government, the supreme court, [laughs] many other organs have a incentive of bringing the society forward.

Audrey Tang: The local township, and counties, and municipalities are less so, which is why we always focus on education. If we get the basic education right, then in due time, like six years, there will be a particular demand for these things to be implemented.

Grayson M. Shor: I completely agree with that. It seems like, again, almost, I was mentioning with the conversation with the folks at Greenpeace, it all comes back to education.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, to awareness.

Grayson M. Shor: To general awareness as well. Totally agree. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you sharing your insights, your thoughts on this. It sounds like you’re doing some amazing work on all of these topics as well. It sounds like also, as it would be for anybody, you have your hands full as well as these are some great challenges.

Grayson M. Shor: Certainly hope to, as a member of the global community focusing on promoting not only the SDGs but also the topics that we talked about today, I look forward to working with you and hopefully supporting you to some extent as well.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Grayson M. Shor: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.