Lily Hsu: Good evening, everyone. Welcome to TECO. I’m the head of this office. My name is Lily. In view of such an unconventional setting and the very relaxing atmosphere, so I will try to avoid all those protocols.

Lily Hsu: Just to welcome you all to this office and to tonight’s event. I want to first thank our co-sponsors, the World Youth Alliance.

Lily Hsu: When I mention about your organization, would the members of those organization wave to each other, so we will know who’s coming, who’s joining us? The World Youth Alliance.

Lily Hsu: Young Professionals in Foreign Policy.

Lily Hsu: And Taiwanese American Professionals.

Lily Hsu: If you are the others, where are you from?

Lily Hsu: Anyway, welcome. Welcome to tonight’s event. I also want to thank Ms. Isabel Perez of United Nations Focal Point of the Sustainable Development Solution Network Youths for kindly agreed to be our moderator tonight.

Lily Hsu: Maybe they’re from the UN Focal Point of Sustainable Development Alliance? No? OK.

Lily Hsu: Here is a little bit serious part. As United Nations just began a new session of its General Assembly this week, we are very pleased to have delegations from Taiwan to share from communities here our aspiration to participate in the United Nations, and the work we’ve been doing in line with the work of the United Nations, especially our implementation of the sustainable development goals, SDGs.

Lily Hsu: Just three days ago, our Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection Administration was here to report on the progress we’ve been making since we first announced our Voluntary National Review -- thank you very much -- VNR, last September.

Lily Hsu: Following the visit of the Deputy Minister of the EPA, we are very pleased and honored to have Taiwan’s first digital minister, Minister Audrey Tang...

Lily Hsu: ...to share her thoughts with young professionals in the Greater New York area. Now, some of you may be aware, the United Nations Secretary General just announced that he will launch Youth 2030 Project next Monday to engage the youth more.

Lily Hsu: We think it is an opportune time for us to have tonight’s forum with Minister Tang. It’s really a very difficult job to describe Minister Tang. She’s many things. She’s just been named among the top 20 of the world’s 100 most influential people in digital government by Apolitical, a global platform for policymakers and public servants.

Lily Hsu: She’s, of course, our first digital minister, but in her own words, she’s working with the government, not for the government.

Lily Hsu: Her portfolio covers social enterprises, youth affairs, open government, digital governance, and many, many more. One thing I’d like to point out, she’s passionate about promoting SDGs through technology.

Lily Hsu: We are really, really very happy to have her with us today. I also want to share with you, in her own words, what she’s been doing. She believes that by using technology creatively, humanity can facilitate deep and fair conversations, form collective consensus, and deliver solutions we can all live with.

Lily Hsu: I think we have a lot...

Lily Hsu: ...to talk about later, but before that, I would also like to take this opportunity to introduce members of our parliament, who traveled all the way from Taiwan to join us tonight. Legislator Ching-yi Lin.

Lily Hsu: Legislator Lee Li-feng.

Lily Hsu: And Legislator Chen Man-li.

Lily Hsu: We have one more missing, but he will join us later, lest you think all the members of our parliament are women.

Lily Hsu: We do have men.

Lily Hsu: OK. Now, they all have long been engaging in youth, gender, and social welfares, and they all play important roles in promoting and strengthening our civil society. We are honored to have them here tonight.

Lily Hsu: Please allow me to invite Legislator Lin to say a few words on behalf of our delegation. Thank you.

Lin Ching-yi: Thank you, Ambassador Hsu. I am so honored to be here to join today’s forum. It’s so happy to see so many young people together here to discuss about the social innovation sustainable development goals.

Lin Ching-yi: I think just as 19 years old today, Taiwan experienced a very severe earthquake. After that, even the earthquake destroyed many, many counties of Taiwan, we still rebuild after this trial. It is very similar with Taiwan’s condition.

Lin Ching-yi: We are in a very difficult condition in international participations. I think Taiwanese, we all has used to facing all the challenge. We have used to do the best job for the international society. Actually, I think we always could find our way to participate in the international world, to participate.

Lin Ching-yi: This is a very important job for them with the SDG. Last year, I and my colleagues, we set up the SDG advisory council in parliament. We tried to set up a pan-forum to join the government, the parliament, and our social, our populations to more focus on what Taiwan could do in SDG.

Lin Ching-yi: I think on the 2030 agenda for SDG is a common language, most common language in further the case. Taiwan shouldn’t, and I think couldn’t, be excluded in this important dialogue. All Taiwanese, we could, we want, and we would to be a member in these very important issues in SDG.

Lin Ching-yi: We’d love to share our experience, and we’d love to become a partner in these important actions. I’m very happy we could join here to share the different thinkings. I think we could work together in the future. Thank you very much.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Thank you so much for such inspiring words, and welcome, everyone. It’s really a pleasure and an honor to be with all of you this evening, discussing really, my field of expertise, which is SDGs and youth, with, I think, someone who embodies what youth can do, both in the present and in the future.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: I think this is really important. We have to know that young people are not only the future of society, but they are also the present. This is what we are going to discuss, per the sustainable development goals.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Now, I would like to start with one question first. It is, how many of you know what the sustainable development goals are?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Sort of, more or less, right? OK. You know, wonderful. For those who know, would you say, are they really, really, really important? Are they, “OK,” like, it’s something that it’s there, why not? Or not important at all, like, “We don’t care”?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Very, very important. All right, OK. More or less.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: OK, we have a good crowd. OK, nice, then. Not important at all, anyone say this? OK, all right. We are on the same page, then. That’s really good.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: First of all, of course, I want to acknowledge the institutions and organizations that are a part of this event. Of course, TECO, thank you very much for organizing this wonderful event here this evening. Also, the World Youth Alliance. Now, I’m really biased for the World Youth Alliance, because I’m a member of this organization.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: I’ve collaborated with this organization extensively, and they’re doing extraordinary work. Maybe I would like to invite Lord Pomperada to say a few words about the World Youth Alliance.

Lord Pomperada: Thank you, Isabel, Ambassador Hsu. The World Youth Alliance is very glad and excited to be part of this event tonight. We’re a global youth organization composed of young people from over 160 countries around the world.

Lord Pomperada: Our main mission is to promote the dignity of the person, and to promote collaboration among young people from developed and developing countries. We do this through different programs, through cultural programs, educational programs, and advocacy programs.

Lord Pomperada: We also work under the UN Economic and Social Council. It’s a lot of different policies to promote, again, human dignity, the family, and the voice of young people. We would like to thank TECO, Ambassador Hsu, and Minister Tang for having this event tonight.

Lord Pomperada: We’re very excited, and we look forward to meeting all of you tonight. Thank you very much.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: I believe also Colin Wolfgang from YPFP is here.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Wonderful, so YPFP...

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: ...would you like to say some words about it?

Colin Wolfgang: Thank you so much. YPFP is extremely thrilled to be a part of this tonight. We are a membership organization of about 20,000 individuals across the globe and across a number of branches that tries to also promote networking and the sharing of ideas.

Colin Wolfgang: Basically, creating a space for young individuals that have an interest in international relations. I encourage all of you to take a look at our website, ypfp.org. Thank you to Minister Tang and everybody else here who’s put this wonderful event together. We’re trilled to be a part of it.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Thank you so much. I believe also Kevin Wong is here. Kevin Wong comes from the organization, TAP. Probably, you can tell us a little bit more about the organization.

Kevin Wong: I’m from TAP New York, the Taiwanese American Professionals of New York. SDGs are not our field of expertise, but we are excited to be a part of this, and to learn. TAP New York, we are the largest Taiwanese American interest group here in New York with over 6,000 members.

Kevin Wong: Our goal is to foster the Taiwanese American community here in this area through events and programming, such as hiking, happy hours, networking, or a speaker series. We throw over 100 events a year for our 6,000 members.

Kevin Wong: If you’d like to learn more, join us, or partner with us, do come find us over at the registration table. Thank you guys. Thank you so much.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Wonderful. Thank you so much. I’d like to start this conversation with the same question I asked the audience. Why the SDGs? Why are they important?

Audrey Tang: It used to be that when I explained about the work that I do in the cabinet, I have to use very difficult words, like collaborative governance, or whatever. Whoever know what that means? Or evidence-based feedback mechanisms and crowdsourcing of ideas, and so on.

Audrey Tang: These words just mean very different things to many different people. It’s very difficult to actually get the idea across that we’re not just running a questionnaire. We’re not just throwing out some surveys.

Audrey Tang: We’re actually radically changing how the different sectors access the innovation, the people. Nowadays, with the SDGs, I can just say, “I’m working 17.18, 17.17, and 17.6,” and then it’s just easy.

Audrey Tang: Then people can just look at the targets, the indicators, and basically go on this wonderful website, which is the SDG Network, and see exactly where, how, and which countries are working on which SDGs, and how they have been meeting the goals, or helping each other to meet the goals.

Audrey Tang: For me, first and foremost, it makes a common language, common vocabulary, of people like me who are doing these kind of work, but introduce it in an international context in a way that is accessible to everyone, and everyone agree that these kind of goals doesn’t cancel each other out. It just reinforce each other, all the 17.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: I think you just pointed out the interdependence of these goals. We cannot achieve just SDG 1, just SDG 2. We need to achieve the 17 of these goals. These are the 17 sustainable development goals, and each of the 169 targets, as you mentioned very well.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: What is the role of youth in all this? Do we have a role as young people in the implementation of the SDGs?

Audrey Tang: Considering that we’ll be around, more likely, in 2030...

Audrey Tang: ...I think we’re an important stakeholder group. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Also, I think young people naturally, we live in the connected world. I’m, I think, the last generation in Taiwan who remember the martial law, the last generation who remember before the modem, before the Internet.

Audrey Tang: People younger than me are all digital natives, essentially, and democracy natives in Taiwan. People raised in that environment naturally think in a way that is collaborative, that are not by itself a singular, linear progression of economic achievement only, or whatever other older philosophies of the last century and the industrial era.

Audrey Tang: This indeed is the spirit of the sustainable goals. These are not done by just a bunch of people. They are done by consulting millions of people around the world, around the globe, in a very open fashion. Around, I think, a million people answered the question, what is the kind of world you would like to see in 2030?

Audrey Tang: Basically, the major groups, the different stakeholder groups, eventually coalesced into those 17 different struts that, as you said very well, reinforce each other. I think that young people naturally, when we’re digital natives, we get the idea that there is this system.

Audrey Tang: This is wholly, you cannot attack it just by one another angle or another angle. You have to make it in a way that is really collaborative. That kind of thinking, I think, is native to people who are born with the World Wide Web, are born with this idea that knowledge is in Wikipedia or in a network-like formation.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s up to us young people to show everybody in the world how it is like to organize our actions and organize our knowledge in such a way that is inherently networked, instead of linear, bureaucratic, or top-down.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: I believe these networks can help them, groups acting locally, as you were saying, would have then an international influence, because of whatever’s happening in Taiwan, whatever’s happening in any other place. It really can impact what’s...

Audrey Tang: I think the main distinction, idea, is that whereas maybe one person feeling that climate change is really important, and it can affect the way they live, and things like that, they may be in a larger country, where there’s a larger landmass, and they’re just part of a smaller group of people.

Audrey Tang: The idea of SDGs, if you join the channel as a team, and then you get interface with all the people who think that this is a priority, this is important. You get to join the major groups, all the different networks around that particular goal, so that you never feel alone in your country or neighborhood in caring about such issues.

Audrey Tang: This applies equally to any of those 17 goals.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Also, that goes within the concept of sustainable development. A lot of times, when we think about sustainable development, we just think of the environment. Almost automatically, that’s the initial relation that we do.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: It also involves society. It also involves economies, growth, economic growth, with social possibility, and of course, preserving the environment. These three parts are very interconnected in each of the goals.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: As you said very well, someone might be interested in SDG 1, but you can collaborate with someone who’s interested in SDG 2. What do you think are the values that youth leadership brings, that young people bring?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: You said this idea of the technology, that we’re going to explore in-depth. What else do those young leaders bring to the table?

Audrey Tang: Also, I think we’re simply more naive. We don’t have this indoctrinated idea of what works and what doesn’t work. Indeed, these emergent issues are so complex that nobody can say that they know it has always worked like this for a thousand years, or continued to work.

Audrey Tang: Especially around climate change, it doesn’t work like that. Again, all these systems are so complex nowadays that I think it just only makes sense to try out novel approaches, to get some organized action, and maybe fail spectacularly and openly, and let everybody learn from each other’s experience.

Audrey Tang: We have more room to try. We have less preconfigured ideas of how things can work. Therefore, the partnership for the goals is more likely for people who have no preconceptions of how to solve such ambitious goal.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Absolutely. Also, we were mentioning, we’re going to be around for the next 23 years, so we better take care for what’s happening, for the actions that we’re taking right now.

Audrey Tang: We’ll also allow other people to remain around.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: That’s quite important. Let’s focus on technology, since we have a technological expert here. How can technology shape the completion of the SDGs, and specifically, what is Taiwan doing in this regard?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Before I delve into these visuals, I would like to invite all of you who have Internet connectivity on your phone, on your laptop, or whatever to join us in conversation in this website. It’s called slido.com, S-L-I-D-O-dot-com.

Audrey Tang: When you’re on this website, you can enter the numbers, 00921, without the pound sign, and click join. Once you’re in this platform, this is an anonymous chatroom. You can declare your nickname or your real name, but you can also ask questions anonymously.

Audrey Tang: I’ve found that the best questions are the ones that are asked anonymously, the most challenging ones. Also, you can upvote each other’s questions. Isabel, we were just talking about this, we would strongly prefer if you, after your question, put a small parenthesis and indicate the number of which SDG goal your question relates to.

Audrey Tang: For example, if you want to ask about education, you can say (4). If you forget which number stands for what, you can look it up there. [laughs] Basically, the design here is that as I go on in my presentation, you can just have conversation among yourselves here.

Audrey Tang: There we go. Of the 17 goals, what do you see as the top or the most urgent priority of Taiwan? For each and every question that’s upvoted here, I will occasionally revisit and highlight one of these questions, and then just let you crowdsource via the chat app. Does that work for you?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Absolutely. I think it’s a great idea that you are posting questions from apps. We can resolve them later on. Then you said there were already some question to already get started?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Let me just quickly say we’re supporting the SDGs in my capacity as the digital minister just by building available data sharing, reliable data, encouraging friendly partnerships, and make sure everybody has access to innovation.

Audrey Tang: Those are very abstract words, so I will just show you some pretty pictures. Here is my office in Taipei City, in what we call the Social Innovation Lab. This space is unique in that it is co-created by a hundred or so social innovators.

Audrey Tang: These soccer fields were drawn by people with Down’s syndrome. It turns out, they are excellent artists, better than I am. Basically, the idea here is that this is a space co-created, co-owned, by all the different people working on social innovation, on using technology and new configurations for social good. It opens until 11:00 PM every day.

Audrey Tang: Every Wednesday, I’m here. It’s my office hour from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM. Anyone can come to talk to me, like rough speakers, or people working on social work, and whatever. My only requirement is that a conversation with me publish its full transcript online 10 days after each meeting.

Audrey Tang: This is the idea of what we call radical transparency. The reason why radical transparency helps sustainable development is that it enables people to see, instead of...People working on environmental issues sometimes see people working on economic development as somewhat opposing their values.

Audrey Tang: We can use many other examples as well. It used to be that the different government agencies are like the knots here in the two sides of a rope. For example, the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Economy. They talk to different stakeholders.

Audrey Tang: The government imagined itself in the last century as the organizer and as the arbiter of the different social interests. That model, as we talked about, is bankrupt as of this century, because people don’t need to wait for the government to organize.

Audrey Tang: Just with the right hashtag, tens of thousands of people can just organize among themselves. With all the emerging issues, it’s impossible to have one ministry and one agency for each one, anyway. We change our world to be that open space.

Audrey Tang: Inside the space, we keep asking, even the different positions, are there common values that is shared by people? More and more, the SDGs are the common values that are shared by people, regardless of whether they come from an environmental, business, or a governance, or a social starting point.

Audrey Tang: Given the common interest and common value, the next thing is to ask for innovations. What are some ideas that can improve those common values without leaving anyone behind? The radical transparency helps, because it lets people discover what other people are also there, solving the same social and environmental issues.

Audrey Tang: I know, for example, every other Tuesday to the rural areas, to the indigenous areas, to talk with the people there, and also teleconference with people working more in Greenland with the 12 different ministries related to social innovation who are on the right-hand side.

Audrey Tang: They visit every couple Tuesday to the Social Innovation Lab in this large room through my eyes, through telepresence, see what it is like in the rural islands, in the indigenous areas, in the different parts of society, what kind of innovation they are now creating, what kind of innovation they need.

Audrey Tang: When we hear about innovation, it actually solves their local issues. We just index them using SDGs, and ask everybody working on some problem to join forces together so that they can discover each other.

Audrey Tang: There’s mutual discoverability just by the way of the digital communication pools and natural tendency to keep a complete report. We just publish online. I think it’s one of the most powerful way we can do to share how is it like socially, how is it like environmentally, and how is it like, of how people feel about things.

Audrey Tang: Without getting into too much detail, basically, I think digital has the potential to represent each stakeholder as they were staking their case, as they were talking about their innovation, and so on, without waiting for people to represent them, their representatives.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Wonderful. What can you say of the young people that we have here? How can they get involved in these issues or support these initiatives?

Audrey Tang: We have lots of interesting people. For example, these are from the MIT Media Lab people. They just came to our Social Innovation Lab saying, “We have these self-driving autonomous vehicles that happens to be transports.”

Audrey Tang: They say, “They’re very safe. Even if they run into buildings, they drive very slowly.”

Audrey Tang: What they want is basically, they have a same right of road as a pedestrian. They’re seen as mostly harmless when mingling with people, and these kinds of new issues of things. Then people want to know what does the city, the citizens, the society, the people in the Jianguo flower market, receive these new AI beings?

Audrey Tang: How do we co-domesticate each other? How do we have a view of how they view the world? How do they express emotions, intention, and things like that? Just by creating a field for this kind of experimentation, any of your innovation has the chance to improve in a social way to be a social innovation.

Audrey Tang: Meaning that it solves a real social problem. Maybe it solved the problem of the elderly going to Jianguo flower market, buying a lot of pots of flowers, and they really need something to carry it for them.

Audrey Tang: By the end of it, they can also hop on it, and it will just drive them home. [laughs] It will just go somewhere else. Or it can also crowdsource, for example, from the nearby college students in the hackathons and so on. Some people painted faces. Some people painted, using AR, VR technology, let people enter into the world of these beings, and see the world from their perspective.

Audrey Tang: I think it is for the people and with the people at the same time, so that when we create spaces like this, and you are working on any sort of innovation, you are all very much welcome to test in this field, so we can learn together.

Audrey Tang: Also, find out which social issue, environmental issues, that this is solving. Again, back to the idea of SDGs, to find the potential stakeholders that can add value to your projects.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Everyone that’s here that is related to technology, you take note of this. One of the questions regarding this around technology is that, obviously, Social Innovation. How many other initiatives are within this realm, and what are these objects in the short, medium, and long term?

Audrey Tang: The plan that I’m in charge of is called...Wow, there’s 11 questions already. Wow.

Audrey Tang: How many people are really active? The plan that I’m in charge with is called the Taiwan Social Innovation Action Plan. This is actually a different plan, compared to our voluntary national report, or our Sustainable Development Council.

Audrey Tang: Deputy Minister Thomas Chan talked about our National Sustainable Development Network, which is more about our commitment as a government to the goals. For example, shifting to renewable energy. For example, making sure that K-12 education, broadband access is available to all, and those very infrastructure things.

Audrey Tang: The Social Innovation Plan, on the other hand, is all about amplifying the messages of the sustainability development work in the civil society, of the co-ops, of the nonprofits, of the companies, of all the different parts of the social sector that are nevertheless contributing to sustainable development without having the government mandating them doing it.

Audrey Tang: Government’s relationship with the community in the Social Innovation Plan is rather that of a platform, to amplify the message, and find the venture philanthropy people, the impact investment people, other people solving and tackling these issues worldwide and so on, viewing our connections.

Audrey Tang: Our main idea so far is basically to, for example, we changed the company act so that a company used to be only for-profit in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Starting this year, they can declare their social and environmental purpose, write it in the company charter, publish the company charter using electronic signatures, and to list themselves among the registries of either benefit corporations, social enterprises, Yunus-style social businesses or whatever, and discover each other, and that’s focusing on the same social and environmental issue.

Audrey Tang: Again, our role in the Social Innovation Plan is threefold. First, using SDG as the common index. Second, in the basic and higher education, make sure they use the capstone projects and so on. Student learn to solve those sustainable development as part of their education instead of waiting until they graduate.

Audrey Tang: Finally, working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to amplify the messages of our domestic social innovation people, and then amplify this through the SDG channels worldwide.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Can you give us some examples of this particular social innovation?

Audrey Tang: I have already talked about this self-driving stuff, but I will use another example that is less self-driving. First, I would like to honor the longstanding tradition of the people working on sustainable development and social innovation even before these loanwords were important to the Taiwan vocabulary.

Audrey Tang: They’ve been doing this for sometimes 20 or 30 years now, sometimes even before the lifting of the martial law, in the forms as co-ops, or as the foundations, nonprofits, or as companies. I want to honor them, because the young people who started working on social innovation, tackling, for example, business about equality of access, of people maybe in wheelchairs with disabilities, and so on.

Audrey Tang: They have to make a living in Taiwan. There’s many young designers in Taiwan who work in the Social Innovation Lab, just transforming how the society perceives these people in wheelchairs. All the visual assets you see here are done by this design creative agency called Agoood, in conjunction with people with Down’s syndrome in the Children’s Arts Foundation.

Audrey Tang: It turns out they are excellent artists. I don’t know whether you know the “Dialogue in the Dark.” It is a kind of conversation in the dark, facilitated with people with seeing the disabilities. They are actually the the superior, the alpha in that environment.

Audrey Tang: After a few hours, we will feel very comfortable. They feel very confident. These kind of social design people just look systematically at each vulnerable population, and try to find a way to turn them into office in their place.

Audrey Tang: For people, street vendors in wheelchairs, they did an analysis saying, I will just translate really quickly, that people don’t buy from them mostly, because first, they don’t have a business proposal or a pitch.

Audrey Tang: People don’t know how the money will flow. Also, their customer relationship is repetitive. If they keep telling you the same thing, maybe you will not buy from them the next time. Finally, the goods that they carry, the supply chain management is also not that great.

Audrey Tang: Compared to a grocery store or whatever, they don’t carry a price advantage. Then they start working with all the different people working in different SDGs, and to combine into partnerships by getting a better training, a better relationship management, and by just changing the wheelchair into a mobile station.

Audrey Tang: Then by working with the city, for example, on fair trade coffee or fair trade tea, or things like that, to help them to differentiate their product. The most interesting thing, of course, is that they did this as a crowdfunding campaign that is actually a crowdsourcing campaign.

Audrey Tang: All they have is the sketch of a mobile station. They’re waiting on one of the national crowdfunding campaigns. They set a goal, very quickly exceeded the goal. Once you donate something into the crowdfunding campaign, you don’t want to see it fail.

Audrey Tang: It is actually a crowdsourcing campaign, where people just offered ideas like these people, they can also be WiFi stations. If your phone runs out of electricity, they can quickly charge for you, while getting some fair trade coffee.

Audrey Tang: Also, when it rains, people will notice that there’s some place for foldable umbrella there. Maybe they could be umbrella station, and so on. Just by even crowdsourcing in this way, people start to think of them as valuable business development partners, start to think of them as last mile service delivery partners.

Audrey Tang: Lo and behold, people don’t think of them as vulnerable people anymore. People start to integrate them into the society in this equal opportunity access. That, I think, is one of the main idea of reduce inequalities, is just to not see them as always vulnerable, but rather in a way that just reintroduce into the society in a very valuable position.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Really? That’s really empowering the people.

Audrey Tang: That’s the idea behind it.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Absolutely. One question that you should be concerned with this is that these advances are usually gathered, or are usually taking place, in a specific city or in the capital. Usually, they don’t take place in rural areas, let’s say. It’s harder to get those.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Now, you said that it was important to incorporate other cities, other rural areas.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. We just go to other people in other rural areas.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: What efforts are you doing in order to expand the Social Innovation Lab?

Audrey Tang: The Social Innovation Lab, in essence, it used to be the Taiwan Air Force Base. Basically, people just come here and gather. Because every Wednesday, I’m here, they just propose that we change the place.

Audrey Tang: It is very much an evolving place, because it has to be open until midnight, and so it does. People wanted a kitchen, a resident chef, so we have a resident chef. It is unlike many other government-run incubation spaces or “maker spaces.”

Audrey Tang: Really, it is truly something that’s co-created with the community. We have an SOP, a standard operation procedure, of how to do co-creation now. Starting next year, we are working deliberately with people in the counties of maybe 50k to 100k of population.

Audrey Tang: Start revitalizing their places that has maybe the same area, but there was just no culture, to revitalize that as a gathering place of the social innovators locally. We want to aim for that as part of the Regional Revitalization Plan, called 地方創生.

Audrey Tang: This kind of gathering place is one of the key areas where we get the local people to have its own identity, its own gathering place, and for the young people there to have a safe, equal space to explore their different machinations for their community.

Audrey Tang: We expect to have dozens, if not more, of these social innovation lab starting next year to gradually roll out in all the different counties.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: A lot of times, as you just pointed out, the SDG implementation has to happen at all levels, and especially at the local level, community level, and the city level. How can cities play a role in implementations? Of course, those smart cities sometimes helps out. What is the role that cities can play?

Audrey Tang: Usually, when I hear smart city, I just think cities as a living lab. They have the critical mass of people, and they have usually higher connectivity than townships and so on, or rural areas. When people come up with an idea, they usually can find people more sympathizing with your radically new invention or innovation in the city level.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have this home rule idea of the city gets to make their own policies, regulations, as long as the national regulation does not override them. Nowadays, we’re working with the legislators here to introduce a series of sandbox regulations and laws that allows the cities to make exceptions in order to further a social good.

Audrey Tang: For example, this January, we have a platform economy regulation that allows cities to experiment, for example, shared parking spaces in our private parking lots. You can just use a single gadget with an app, and then it turns into a part-time parking lot to solve the parking issue, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It’s a platform economy. For a think tank, for example, we have a lot of people working on distributed ledgers and things like that to introduce, for example, a community currency for time banks. These are all very hip ideas in Taiwan that may or may not break some laws.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we’ve convinced the Minister of Finance that anyone can apply for a year of experimentation to prove the worth of their idea to the entire society while breaking some laws.

Audrey Tang: It’s a systematic, risked-apt way of lawbreaking. Finally, at the end of this year, we expect to pass the UV sandbox, which again, is by conjunction with a local need. Some places really need a ship that doubles as a car. Some places really need vertical takeoff and landing.

Audrey Tang: Basically, it’s the first UV sandbox law in the world, I think, that does distinguish between the different modalities. People can just experiment for a year. If the society thinks it’s a good idea locally in the city, then they can expand out, and we can make the regulation apply to the entire country.

Audrey Tang: If it’s not a good idea, where we think the experiment were not for the benefit for everyone, then next time, just try a different approach. If it’s a good idea, it gets to expand itself in this model for the second year.

Audrey Tang: Now, if it’s just a regulation change that you’re proposing -- a patch, a fork, an amendment -- that you’re trying to sandbox, we just change after 60 days of public debate. It requires a law change. The legislator here may need more time to deliberate. The experiments, by our design, can stand to up to four years, while the legislators are debating it.

Audrey Tang: People can continue to use the living lab in the city, and once it continue to accumulate more data, sharing more best cases, best practice examples, and so on, with other cities, and once the legislators think, “OK, this is generally for the good of the people,” then law will change, and a new kind of service will be born.

Audrey Tang: Other cities, other counties, and so on can enjoy the parts of the sandbox that emerge to be really for the social good, and also not to go prematurely into some hyped new technology that is nevertheless to the detriment to the environment or society.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Truly, cities are laboratories for living experiments. I think that’s quite an important idea. What are the priorities of the SDG implementations for Taiwan in the next years? Are there ones, SDGs that are more urgent? We say that often...

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Are there any priorities for the SDGs?

Audrey Tang: Yes. That’s a Slido question. Personally, I’m partial. You already know my answers, right? [laughs] I think that’s because in Taiwan at the moment, because we’re experimenting with a lot of new democratic forums, we’re going to have the first meaningful referendums at the end of this year. We have e-petition. We have participatory budgeting. We have all sorts of new democratic inventions.

Audrey Tang: As a result of that, the collaboration or partnership between sectors is somewhat, there’s some tension in people just introducing referendums, and introducing all sort of different ideas without properly translating or collaborating across sectors, across ideologies, across counties and cities to introduce their ideas.

Audrey Tang: For people to see that it is possible to join forces, to find common ground, to find common value. The partnership for the goals, using the same evidence, the same data, I think that is one of the most important, if not the most important, goal in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I’m just going to use one concrete example, otherwise I’m talking with too much layers, too many layers of abstract opinion. Sorry, I keep coming back to the Occupy parliament, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

Audrey Tang: I want to talk about this idea of people really caring about air quality. They set up all these very inexpensive air boxes in their homes, in their schools, in their balconies, to measure PM2.5 and other important air quality metric.

Audrey Tang: They did this without involvement of government. They just gathered around, did it themselves. There’s more than 2,000 such sensors of air and various water quality as part of civic designs. First, it shows to us that people really care about it a lot.

Audrey Tang: Second, it creates a legitimacy crisis. When the Environmental Protection Agency’s number are different from the number that you personally have set up, even though the equipment there is not as precise as the EPA one, people are going to trust their own numbers, rather than the EPA numbers.

Audrey Tang: We have lots of theories of how human activity corresponds to air quality. Not all professors agree on each other’s theories. Sometimes, some of them have more prediction power. We don’t know if that’s because whether the data they use are better or whether the models they use are better.

Audrey Tang: We cannot really do science without the enhanced availability of reliable data. One of the main thing we did this year is to set up what we call the Civil IoT Project. I’m sorry that this hasn’t been translated into English yet.

Audrey Tang: We have one website for each major cross-ministerial project, with SI for social innovation, CI Taiwan for Civil IoT, AI Taiwan, Bio Taiwan, Smart Taiwan, and so on. They all share taiwan.gov.tw as the postfix.

Audrey Tang: In Civil IoT, what we do is international super community center, provide the room for the data aggregation of all the different sources of environmental data, of air quality meteorology, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We have spent a lot of time to make sure that all these data are in an available form, using the internationally common standards, such as SensorThings, and to make sure that anyone who would want to do analysis can just upload their code to this National Center for High-performance Computing.

Audrey Tang: They can just be a K-12 student. They can just be a junior high school student, and they still have the same access to analyze how people’s activities correlate into environmental issues and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Now, with the same data that everybody can agree upon, we can finally start to have a real conversation around policies, around economic activity, around education for climate change, and things like that. This common evidence base, I think, is required for Taiwan in our current stage of democracy.

Audrey Tang: In order to move forward, we have to have the same evidence, the same facts, before sharing our feelings.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Also, you want to be able to use this common language, for everyone?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right, yes.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: So everyone can apply to and aspire to. I think it’s also quite important, first of all, is to know what is the background of some of the people here? Maybe we can address some of the questions that they have for different sectors, and how those can interrelate to technology, how they can interrelate with social innovation.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Let’s go a little bit. Let’s see, for instance, who is business here, the business sector? All right, nice. What about law, how many lawyers are out? Good. Do we have any artists? I’m a pianist, so I’m biased up here. OK, good. Wonderful.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Do we have anyone in the technology sector? We were talking about technology. OK, some people. Science?

Audience Member: Teachers.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Teachers, there we go, education. Very important for SDG 4. There we go, guys. Thank you for it. What else? What other backgrounds we have here?

Audience Member: Philosophy.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Philosophy?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Extremely important. As you can see, the SDGs are relevant for any of the occupations that we have, for any of the backgrounds that we have. One of the keys, I think I’m going to say, is this collaboration with different sectors, and the partnership for the goals, which is SDG 17.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: It’s quite important for the effective implementation of the SDGs. Let’s go to some of the audience questions now. Let’s see.

Audrey Tang: How would technology benefit the poor, who have relatively little access to it? This is very important, because I worked with Apple for six years before joining the government, or working with the Taiwan government.

Audrey Tang: Basically, the idea of technology as assistive, or as I work in the government, assistive civic technology, I think, is a very different viewpoint from many other people’s idea of technology as a linear progression kind of thing.

Audrey Tang: For us, the best technology are not the ones that are most trendy, or most hyped, or things like that, but rather technologies that are created with the stakeholders, with the people. Last week, I was just in Edinburgh, attending the Social Enterprise World Forum.

Audrey Tang: I moderated this Tech For Good panel, where we invite people working in the poorest areas. I think one of my speakers from Botswana, working on hearing aid for people with hearing disabilities. They co-designed these hearing aid with people there, according to their need, according to their actual place.

Audrey Tang: One of the first product they delivered was called Solar. It’s Solar, because over there, they get a lot of sunlight. Instead of many other hearing aid, which sells for a price, but the battery is going to cost much more over a long time, they just built a rechargeable one, just using solar energy, and basically make it as low intense as possible.

Audrey Tang: They make sure that the people there are educated in basic electronics. Not just in how to assemble these things, but actually the theories behind it, so that they can do the modification themselves.

Audrey Tang: That’s where empowered person who drew this design here found that it’s because they’ve been using sign language all their life, their hand-eye coordination is better than 99 percent of us, of us, of other people.

Audrey Tang: They can assemble, tweak, and hack the electronics in a very creative fashion to just fit their actual use. Then they translated this electronics course that’s a six-month course from sign language in Africa into sign language in Brazil, and brought these into São Paulo and to do sign language with a transcript and knowledge, so that they can do a different build of the Solar ear data.

Audrey Tang: Then eventually, around the world. Basically, when we think about inequality, about people, it’s not just about giving them the right technology to lift them out of their situation, but also empower them so they also feel that, “Well, I can be the future of electronics using sign language. That’s something unique to me.”

Audrey Tang: People who don’t have these kind of conditions, this kind of life experience, cannot teach other people with the same life conditions. I think that just empowerment through civic assistive technologies is one of the best answer for us working in the tech sector to answer for people who are living in less advantaged areas.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Wonderful. Let’s go to the next one, then. Biggest strength and weakness?

Audrey Tang: In terms of industry development and empowerment, I think that the strengths, really, is in our geography. As I talk about in this shape, we can see that from the north-most to the south-most of Taiwan, it’s relatively compact for an island of 23 million people.

Audrey Tang: The travel using high speed rails is just an hour and a half or so. It is basically a geography of a larger municipal area, but with a critical mass of a lot of people along that coast. I think this creates a unique situation, where for example, what Dr. Tsai Ing-wen said, her campaign platform, one of them is broadband is human right.

Audrey Tang: Many other presidents say that, but in Taiwan, we actually deliver. Now, this year, if in any of these points, you don’t have a broadband connection, it is our fault. Broadband really is a human right in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That is partly because of geography, but also because we really care about really reduce the inequalities whenever there’s new technology, like AI, distributed ledger, or whatever we introduce. We take meticulous efforts to make sure that everybody everywhere in Taiwan in the K-12 education level get the same access to the same tools to the same empowerment of technologies.

Audrey Tang: I think that kind of emphasis on equality, on equal opportunity, is one of the strongest things that Taiwan has to offer in addition to the previous incentives that has been going on for decades. It’s also something that we also export to many of our allies in friendly countries.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan can really learn from the entrepreneurship culture here in that maybe people’s expectation of what constitutes risk is very different. In Taiwan, when people go to entrepreneurship, sometimes their parents expect them to have a higher than 50 percent of chance of succeeding before consenting them into doing entrepreneurship, social or otherwise.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, here, five percent is pretty high. [laughs] Generally, the risk-averse culture, I think, is our largest weakness. That is also what we’re now fixing using, for example, the Asia Silicon Valley Plan, which basically we just introduce all these spectacular failures, but also the lessons they learned.

Audrey Tang: Feeding back into the ecosystem to make sure people see that with software nowadays, and with the open hardware, open innovation toolkit, the cost of failing is not as high as 30 years ago, 50 years ago.

Audrey Tang: It’s OK for young people to “fail” -- actually, good -- for four or five times before they settle on a product-market fit, on a mission fit with the society. Just by managing the expectation of their parents’ generation, we now show that it’s OK to risk, and it’s OK to fail.

Audrey Tang: The ecosystem will actually appreciate their contribution, even they enter a sandbox, and after one year, found it’s not a good match. That is not something that loses them face, so to speak. It is actually something that increase the face, the reputation, of the person.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Actually, what other advice do you have for young people here, to become social entrepreneurs? One of them don’t be afraid, right? Businesses, you might fail once.

Audrey Tang: You might fail five times.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Or five.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: What are the other advices that you would give young people here?

Audrey Tang: The other thing I think is very important is to be humble and listen to the stakeholders. All the different Tech For Good social entrepreneurs, be it in Edinburgh, or back in Taiwan, when I personally coach the different cohorts that we bring from the Social Innovation Lab, everybody who had an idea of how to save these people just failed spectacularly.

Audrey Tang: People who are just there to listen, to be stupid, to be educated by the people, they all succeeded. They made very good friends, at least with these people. I think my main advice is just to be humble, and to live and listen, and just be with the people you think you are helping.

Audrey Tang: Most of the time, they will help you more, but at least you will become a more complete person, just by living and listening to them.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: We must always focus on that mission, never lose that mission...

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: ...that you had at the beginning. It doesn’t matter what failures that you might have. Always persevere for that mission. Let’s go to the next one.

Audrey Tang: That’s 17. In the context that the PRC is still influential in APAC, how does Taiwan cooperate with members of the ASEAN alliance and other neighbors on SDG goals? Very happily. Basically, I would like to talk about another, which is the digital innovation idea.

Audrey Tang: We have this idea of what we call the presidential hackathon. I’m trying to open a page. It may or may not actually open. This is a hackathon in the sense of people not sleeping for a couple days or three days, but rather a very long journey of three months.

Audrey Tang: It is a president social innovation hackathon. There’s an English version as well, but it’s not loading. Anyway, the idea, very simply put, is that you can look at each and every of the SDG goals that was promised by the original presidential campaign of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen.

Audrey Tang: You can say, “Hey, I can do better,” propose a pitch, and form a cross-sectoral alliance to use data, use technology, or use any of those cutting edge things to make the society better. The winning teams get a trophy and no monetary award.

Audrey Tang: All their award is that we promise to integrate your idea into the mainstream public service next year. The president’s office will personally be the PM for your idea, to integrate your idea back into the public service.

Audrey Tang: Everyone is in it for social impact, environmental impact. Nobody’s in it for the prize money, although the trophy is very beautiful as well.

Audrey Tang: In any case, one of the winning teams I want to highlight is from the Taiwan Water Corporation. What their proposal is, basically, they have a lot of water pipes. Actually, they manage the longest water pipe in the world for water operations.

Audrey Tang: Most of them are leaking without them knowing or know it. They have a team of people who just go around Taiwan every year, have a tour of Taiwan, and listen using these kind of amplifying devices of where the water pipes are leaking.

Audrey Tang: This is difficult and trivial. It’s that type of work. It’s difficult in that it requires local training, but it’s trivial in the sense that most of the time, you’re just listening if there’s leaks. How about we save these people’s time by using machine learning to predict which, using the basic tools of water pressure and water flow analysis, how likely there is for a leak to happen?

Audrey Tang: After three months of collaboration with machine learning experts, they developed an algorithm that are like a machine apprentice to those masters. People can save to one-tenth of their time. It used to be they’d have to spend 10 months. Now, they only have to spend one month to find the top leaking points in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Because of this radically time-saving technology for them, they now actually have extra people. One of the good thing about labeling these as social innovation with the SDGs is that they get discovered by other countries.

Audrey Tang: People in New Zealand said, “Hey, we have an accelerator program, and we discovered that you’re doing this. We didn’t used to suffer from water shortage, but now we do, because of climate change. Why don’t you come to our accelerator program for three more months, and then we just provide all the basic water data?”

Audrey Tang: Now, they’re still in New Zealand, solving the water leakage problem for them. This kind of trust is a long-term trust. It takes a lot of trust in one another to handle, specify ideas-based datas to the Taiwan Water Corporation.

Audrey Tang: Also, the Taiwan Water Corporation have to trust across the sectors for the people versed in machine learning to come and help alleviate their problems and solve their challenges. It’s more trust all around. The longer this kind of collaboration goes, the better the trust gets from people from all the different sides of the Pacific, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Just by having these kind of cross-sectoral collaboration, by publishing very loudly in English the winning entries by index, and then with the SDGs, we naturally form collaboration and coalitions with people suffering from the same sort of environmental issues, and can contribute to our innovation consulting.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Yeah, and also replicating the solution worldwide. It definitely is knowledge sharing, is knowing from each other, learning...

Audrey Tang: That’s entirely right.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: That’s extremely, extremely important. Sometimes, it’s not so well-known that these solutions can be helpful.

Audrey Tang: Right. We have a word for it. It’s called 暖實力. It’s called warm power. Instead of hard and soft power, sharp power, or whatever, we would call this warm power.

Audrey Tang: It may take a while to warm up, but once it’s warmed up, it can really help the people across the very different backgrounds, cultural, and ethnic situations to really feel empathy with each other. That, I think, is key to democracy.

Audrey Tang: Has any country done a good job so far empowering their youth in participating and driving the SDGs? I think this is more of an Isabel question. [laughs] Which country do would you like to highlight?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: I think we’re experiencing at the SDG implementation a new relevance of youth. This is quite important, because we had the MDGs before. One thing that in which I think the SDGs excels in is involvement in youth, and you talked about these surveys that we’re taking worldwide about what are the most important issues?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: That’s specifically for youth, which I think was great, I agree with that. I think the implementation of the SDGs, the 2030 Agenda, it definitely incorporates youth. All the countries are trying to deliver this, incorporating youth. That’s extremely good.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. I would also like to highlight the important work that our youth councilors, the youth advisor group to the administration, is doing. The website may take a while. In this demonstration, this is the first time that we have an administration level above all the different ministries board of young people who advise the premiere and the ministers.

Audrey Tang: I think these 35 people are remarkably broad in what they care about, in what they propose, and what they advise us to do. I would also like to highlight the fact that most of their ideas are drawn from the common SDG vocabulary.

Audrey Tang: Many of their proposals explicitly listed the UN resolutions around SDGs, around the rise of the young people, and so on. This is not just about their personal self-interest. This is actually about culture, about international diplomacy, about empowerment, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have too much time to go into their proposal details, but I think it is very good that we have a very mature way for young people to participate in a systematic way, the national policy forming and policy building, and have a radically transparent record of their proposals, and how they get integrated into mainstream policymaking and politics.

Audrey Tang: I think because we are going to have a mayoral election at the end of this year, many of the mayoral candidates and so on are now promising a very similar structure in their cities as well. They’ll be conforming more nuanced way for the national policy to impact the people in the cities, instead of just waiting for the national councilors to voice for them.

Audrey Tang: The young people in the local city can also voice their concern in a peer-to-peer fashion instead of in the old hierarchical power kind of way. I think this is also very important that young people are used to working in this kind of networked, peer-to-peer way, as opposed to national, city level, precinct level, this kind of way.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Usually, when it’s cities that young people have several careers and access in politics.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: That should be a big concern of young people. Sometimes, one of the main proposals with youth councils is more access to politics.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: It’s not just at the regional level, but it’s also at the local level. They can have their voice raised.

Audrey Tang: We definitely hope that more cities after this election adopt this same dashboard, which is open source, anyway, so they can take it and run with it. The idea is that they can show very clearly which proposal from the youth council actually gets implemented, what gets implemented partially, what time that it gets implemented.

Audrey Tang: There’s already three proposals related SDGs at the moment that I can see here. For the more futuristic, speculative part of it, at least there could be an ongoing discussion with people who propose it. I’m looking the unconditional universal basic income.

Audrey Tang: Yes, even for the UBI, having this kind of dashboard allows the policymakers, who evaluate the economic feasibility, the social acceptance, and things like that, to have an ongoing discussion in the social object that is this proposal, rather than just people reading it through the news and so on.

Audrey Tang: We have all the people interested in UBI, knowing that it probably won’t get implemented next year, but they can still come to the Social Innovation Lab and host events, and amplify their regional impact.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Nice.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s really, really quite a party. [laughs] Let me see if I can get one of those pictures of people partying in the Social Innovation Lab. That’s the opening. That’s not quite a party. The party is right afterward.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s one like it. Basically, you can see if you are anyone working on social innovation, and you can declare which SDG and which target you are working, then this lab is free of charge for your event. If you cannot, you cannot even pay to get access.

Audrey Tang: This is how we work with everyone to SDG-ize their activities. Then so we have thousands of events and activities, many of them concurrently, at the same time. They did not know that their vertical, actually caring about the same thing as they do.

Audrey Tang: They came, then they met people, and then they formed youthful collaborations and so on, just by virtue of them showing up. This is any typical weekday or weekend in the Social Innovation Lab. It’s just maybe five or more events concurrently happening, each of them SDG-indexed.

Audrey Tang: Then they can see which bills that are in collaboration or in conjunction with their projects.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: That’s also one of the key goals today, also, that you meet other people from other fields. You see that there’s these common goals, these common sustainable development goals, which you can incorporate, in which you can share knowledge.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Definitely, there’s a sort of structure around that, that you also know other people that have the same interest in doing the SDGs. What do you think we can do as New Yorkers?

Audrey Tang: To contribute to SDG? This is also part of the Isabel question.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Oh, here, too. It’s almost like you’re anticipating these quetions.

Audrey Tang: I think personally, just SDG index your work is very important. Just use the hashtag. Many a time, I just see people hashtag SDG 17, and then just discover like-minded people. It is like a virtual chatroom.

Audrey Tang: You can use the hashtag anywhere, in Twitter, in Facebook, in any of those areas, and you will just discover people caring about the same thing as you do. If you’re interested in one particular SDG, I would highly encourage you to read into the targets and indicators, and also the policy context in which they formed.

Audrey Tang: That is where the real deal is. The 17 is really just a memorization device. The actual deal is in the particular goals, particular indicators, and in voluntary national reports. Because here is New York, I would also encourage you to read your voluntary regional report, the voluntary local report that NY specifically wrote for NY itself.

Audrey Tang: Which may have different ideas and educators as compared to the federal one. I don’t know. In Taiwan, we also have the BNR, of course, and people can participate in it using e-participation or through face-to-face deliberation.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, the Regional Recultivation Project is essentially doing an SDG-like ideation consultation mechanism in each town, actually. We also want to know how each town imagine things differently from our voluntary national report.

Audrey Tang: If you’re in Taiwan, I would highly recommend you to just find your nearby news deliberation space, and just participate in the regional revitalization dialogue, which is taking place every couple weeks.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Actually, you were talking about hashtags. Do we have a hashtag for this event, an official hashtag? I encourage all of you to tweet, of course. We know we’re the generation of technology, so we should use it.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Therefore making sure that what we are talking about here doesn’t stay here.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: All right, so, let’s go to...

Audrey Tang: The next one.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: ...is the ideal state of what technology can do. Curious to learn about your view on the opposite end of what social tech can do.

Audrey Tang: It’s good you didn’t pronounce that F-word. I don’t use that word, either.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s an affront to journalism. Both of my parents are journalists, so I don’t use that word. I use misinformation when it’s unintentional. I say disinformation when it’s intentional. That word is just very, very confusing, and it’s not operational definition.

Audrey Tang: Whether it’s disinformation or misinformation, it’s the reality of our time. I would like to share with you how Taiwan deals with disinformation. Taiwan is very unique in that if you go to the Civicus monitor -- I’m certainly not singling out any other country -- we will see that in the Civicus monitor, if you click Asia, and if you click fully open, then the only thing you see is Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: This is not saying that our civic space of expression, of assembly, of freedom -- why is this not showing up? -- but of speech is the best in the world. We’re certainly not, as compared to Nordic, or our New Zealand or Australian friends.

Audrey Tang: In our region, if you go to Civics monitor with a faster Internet connection than I have, click Asia, and click fully open, and then you will see that Taiwan really is the only place that’s very open here. Because of that, we’re constrained in the way that we can use to combat disinformation.

Audrey Tang: We must not sacrifice these very important core freedoms. What we did, actually, is to make sure that in the administration’s front page, there’s a dedicated syndicated feed of all the different clarifications.

Audrey Tang: There’s hundreds of them -- actually, a hundred or so every month or so -- so that whenever we detect a systematic disinformation campaign, propaganda, or whatever going on, within hours, like three hours or four hours, the respective agencies write a real-time clarification.

Audrey Tang: Because the screen we use to read these words are very different from the papers, if you print it on paper, you can balance it physically by having the pro and con, the different angles and so on, showing in the different parts of the paper.

Audrey Tang: Now, with the Internet, that model doesn’t work anymore. People just take one snapshot of one part of the information, and they just become a virus of the mind, memes that just get spread.

Audrey Tang: Instead of a physical balance or an on-paper balance, what we are now achieving is a temporal balance, so that whenever people see a disinformation campaign, they learn to wait for a couple hours, and for the clarification to come out from this page.

Audrey Tang: Instead of just changing this page over and over, people in the civic tech community, they built a lot of very innovative tools. For example, there is this tool called Cofact, which is a g0v project. The Cofact bot essentially is saying anyone can add this Line bot, which is like WhatsApp, as their Line friend.

Audrey Tang: Then whenever you see information that you don’t know whether it’s rumor or not, you can just send it to that bot. That bot will get back with you whether this is actually a rumor, disinformation, or whether it’s true.

Audrey Tang: It’s a fact-checking bot that you can provide for your family channels or whatever, and to have a real conversation with the bot, which basically is how we solved the problem of spam 18 years ago. This is a real, pretty good use for good.

Audrey Tang: There are also fact checkers working for the media forum, to Facebook, to various other forums. It can also correct the misinformation coming from the government. It’s not disinformation, where not intentional, but it could be misinformation coming out from the government.

Audrey Tang: There is a healthy independent checker community across all the different modalities that make sure that whenever people see something that could be a disinformation campaign, they learn to wait for a couple hours, then look through all the clarifications and balanced accounts.

Audrey Tang: “Tech can help to deliver key services, but it can also be inaccessible; age, dollar, disability. How can we use tech to achieve development in a way that includes all?” This is a great question.

Audrey Tang: I think the best way -- again, I’m maybe repeating myself -- the best way is just do the design with the people yourself. There really is no other way, in my knowledge, other than just living with the people with disabilities and with different age, with different economic background.

Audrey Tang: Basically, just fuse the ideas, the tech you have, with their life. More often than not, you will have particular insights that informs the development and design of your work that you cannot get just by surveying people who have a similar background as you do.

Audrey Tang: All the social innovation, it’s not just tech for good, for good’s sake, but also what we say about inclusion drives innovation, in the sense that people with many different background, even neural networks and things like that, they can see a problem with different angles, and basically co-create solutions that works for all.

Audrey Tang: Key to idea is also what we call open access, open innovation, open source, open hardware, and open data. All these open things means that it doesn’t restrict anyone from looking at the idea, looking at something that’s halfway there, and forking it, taking it into a different direction.

Audrey Tang: To do things for themselves, and maybe just contribute their additions to it. Before Wikipedia, nobody really had a strong intuition on how this works like. Now, we have Wikipedia, and we have many other great open source and open content projects, the Creative Commons, things like that. People can start now. Imagine about, for example, WikiHows, about WikiFarm, agriculture, and things like that, about how to build basic, sustainable living quarters together, using nothing but non-patented, non-patent-encumbered, open source technologies, 3D printing, and very accessible technologies.

Audrey Tang: This is also a really good movement in Taiwan, where people just go back to their more rural, farmland, or agricultural places, but still using cutting edge technology to do ag tech, to do things like that, but in a way that is harmonizing with the land, instead of an industrial area, which is more about exploitation and so on. Sustainable farming and things like that.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: You were talking about the educational component. That’s not that one, the next question, but the question after. We’re talking about goal four, and what are your views on how can one’s knowledge can be world-class, can be an inspiration, and can also be very relevant for others?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Particularly here, they’re asking about young Westerners. First of all, we would like to ask you about education in particular. Which initiatives are you going to covering, SDG with them at the primary level, secondary level?

Audrey Tang: Before the joining the cabinet, I served on the K-12 curriculum development board. The new curriculum, which is going to take effect next year, is completely redesigned. It used to be what we call a skill-based education system.

Audrey Tang: Just like many of our East Asian counterparts, it’s about furthering a particular track, specializing in particular skills, training human resources in particular ways, and also -- maybe inadvertently, but also -- foster individual competition among individuals, which I think is one of great drawbacks for teenagers.

Audrey Tang: It’s very toxic to teenage brains, if you just turn them into individual competitors, but I digress. In any case, yes, in our new vertical, what we’re now doing is what we call character, or 素養-based education.

Audrey Tang: Instead of a particular skill that students identify with, we now identify with the characters of autonomy, of curiosity, etc., and learning of communication, of interacting with people with many different backgrounds.

Audrey Tang: Also, the common good, which is a character of basically thinking of each other not as transactional or instrumental, but as in themselves, and also form collaborative values. All those basic three dimensions of nine basic characters are now what the examination system, the education system, the whole system is gearing towards.

Audrey Tang: This is a very different direction, compared to the previous curriculum. In this way, what we’re now introducing to the senior high school level is basically, there could be collective classes. It could be classes that students just want the school to have, and the school can have it.

Audrey Tang: We see more and more senior high schools especially, but also some junior high schools, choosing SDGs as their capstone projects, basically having the student solving a social, environmental, or a sustainable economy issue as their collaborative project.

Audrey Tang: Which they will then have to talk with the community, not just the people in school. Their success and their grade basically depends on how well-integrated their ideas and solutions are with the actual environmental and social issue that they are solving.

Audrey Tang: In the university level, this has already been going on for a couple years now, using what we call the University Social Responsibility Program. The university is, just like CSR, responsible for the social environment around that university.

Audrey Tang: Basically, students complete their undergrad courses by spending a year or two just focused on improving the community around the university. Again, we’re now SDG indexing all the work they’re doing in the USR Project.

Audrey Tang: Also, if they want to be social entrepreneur, they will start project. Starting next year, they’re K-12 projects.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: I think that’s extremely important, because a lot of times, people are trained theoretically. If they can have the chance, just applying that knowledge and practice. I think it’s extremely important, already what you were saying in high school, that these kids have the chance of applying all that knowledge to their communities. That’s truly great work.

Audrey Tang: Just about that particular question, there is now a community called Crossroads. Some people can already know this community. It’s at crossroads.tw. If you are interested in just coming to Taiwan...Yeah, I wrote the endorsement.

Audrey Tang: It could be entrepreneurship visa, it could be a gold card, public participation, the ARC, and it also links to various other communities, whether you are entrepreneur, whether you are interested in startups, whether you are interested in education, in fun, in the night life, whatever, [laughs] there is a link to the respective community for you.

Audrey Tang: This is Crossroads.tw, “Where Taiwan and global communities meet.” I would encourage you to explore all the various subcommunities linked to the Crossroads, and also check whether you want to get in Taiwan using one of our many entrepreneurship and gold card, and very soon, the new economy immigration act. There is bound to be one that fits your profile.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Why should young people go to Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: To realize your social impact. As I said, it’s very rare, especially in Asia, to find a place that encourage you to break the law.

Audrey Tang: Seriously, just look at our regulations, find out the parts that are lacking, and just go to sandbox.org.tw, and a bunch of pro bono lawyers will look at your ideas, and funnel you into the right ministry in order to break the law for the common good. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This really challenges the status quo. Nowadays in Taiwan, we’re seeing this as a good. Once your ideas start to take hold in the Taiwan population, creating really positive social feedback, and having people congratulating you, improving people’s lives, you would not want to leave.

Audrey Tang: You would want to expand your week, deepen your work, and integrate further into the community. We welcome fresh pairs of eyes, hands, and so on to look at the social and environmental issues, and figure out common solutions to them. 10 more minutes? OK.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: There’s one addressing, will Taiwan be able to retain talent compared to other developing countries?

Audrey Tang: It’s not fair to compare with developing countries. I think Taiwan is very good at both importing and exporting talent. There is very healthy circulation of talents, because Taiwan, after all, is geography.

Audrey Tang: More often than that, people have a good innovation here, use the living labs, the sandbox to test it, and then they find a larger place to scale out their innovation. On the other hand, there’s many places where such innovations cannot happen.

Audrey Tang: For example, if you require the own data access, the large civil society space for collaborative crowdfunding or crowdsourcing projects, they also come to Taiwan to have the space as a ground to further grow their idea that was born elsewhere in the world, but really needs Taiwan to amplify its message.

Audrey Tang: Both exists, and we see a very healthy flow of talents from and back. I think particularly this year, we’re seeing a lot of AI talents coming back to Taiwan, partly because, of course, the AILabs. Also, Microsoft set up an AI lab of, I think, 100 or 200 people -- Google, IBM, Nvidia, and so on -- they have all set up AI R&D centers in Taiwan this year.

Audrey Tang: There’s a very strong interest in people learning AI as part of their mission in solving the social and environmental issues, as I said, the water pipes or whatever. People just learn about AI by solving real social and environmental issues as part of their learning.

Audrey Tang: Even if AI is not very mature yet, they can only solve five percent, they still feel that they can improve by the society by five percent, instead of an arbitrary test or arbitrary competition, where you really do something, except scoring more than other competitors.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan is a really good ground if you have an idea and want a fresh pair of eyes to look at it, to improve it in very different angles, to have a living lab to experiment. Then Taiwan will also connect you into the next stage, with series A, series B, or some other stages, where there’s even more ground to scale out the innovation you have reached here in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I think Taiwan is the perfect midpoint, which is I put a dot in the Asia Silicon Valley Plan. Taiwan’s the dot that connects Asia, that connects Silicon Valley. It’s not just Silicon Valley technologies solving Asian problems. It’s also Asia solving problems caused by Silicon Valley technologies.

Audrey Tang: It goes both ways, and Taiwan’s the dot and the hub in between that amplifies solutions, and also honors the people of different traditions that brings their social and common contributions into the mix.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: The next question is about the aging population. I wanted to ask you about this intergenerational dialogue. We started here saying, “Youth, we are the present and the future.” Of course, this is extremely important, youth empowerment.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: We also need to take into account this intergenerational dialogue. Maybe you can offer some insights on how important that is to SDG implementation in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Personally, I call my grandma every Sunday. [laughs] We have intergenerational dialogue, anyway.

Audrey Tang: This is, I think, one of the more interesting thing is that usually, intergenerational familiarity is formed around ideas that are novel to both newer and older generations. Instead of a social entrepreneurship project, I will use something that is more fun, which is this app called Pokémon Go. Some of you may have heard of it.

Audrey Tang: It’s truly addictive when it first came out. We see in Taiwan a lot of grandparents and grandchildren just using their phones, and just looking for Pokémons everywhere. Somehow, you cannot see, say, or tell whether this is the older generation bringing the younger generation out, or whether it’s the younger generation leading the older generation.

Audrey Tang: This thing, this augmented reality thing, is new to both generations. They both have stories to tell, both have experiences to share, maybe around the location, the memories of how this place was 40 years ago, and the young people about the monuments and whatever things, the manga that they have read.

Audrey Tang: Which is also their history and their identity. The middle aged generation can also help by contributing to, for example, driving really slowly, so they can collect as many Pokémons as possible. They have some contributions to this family dialogue.

Audrey Tang: I think this is actually where we drew a lot of inspiration in our original recultivation plan. It’s just to create interesting things, interesting event that are new across all the generations. Everybody feel a need to be there, but without dominating the discussion by having too much experience on anything in particular.

Audrey Tang: It could be augmented reality and mixed reality. It could be all those different, new visual, audio presentation forms and things like that that is novel to every one of us. Just like the sustainable development goals, it’s new to every one of us.

Audrey Tang: It’s new as of 2015 or something. This is where each generation can have meaningful input without dominating the discussion.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: This is fascinating. You say there is this common ground or this common level which all generations, thanks to technology and thanks to the SDGs, can just meet and bring their meaningful experiences.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: One of them this experience, and one is this approach, like, “We are working together, is this a model that really moves the world, and really brings new ideas?” I think that’s really important.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: There are two SDGs that we haven’t talked about, and these are the goal 14 and the goal 15. I would like for you to speak personally on those. I’m very interested in knowing exactly...Well, this question is if the goals are too broad, they could be more focused?

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: There are 169 targets, too. These are a little bit more specific. That’s where we give a little more particular information on each of them. Let’s focus maybe on the SDG 14 and 15, and technology brought to the implementation phase.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Are there any specific plans that Taiwan is moving in this direction?

Audrey Tang: Very much so. I would like just to introduce this wonderful website that is globalgoals.org, so that when you see “Life below water,” it is actually reduce marine pollution, protect and restore ecosystem, reduce ocean acidification, so on, and so forth. Beautiful icons, you can see.

Audrey Tang: These are all very specific. Really, the 14 is just a number to help you remember all these very different and all very important, in their own right, goals. Again, the same for SDG 15. Yeah, I would like to say first that in Taiwan, the reduce marine pollution -- actually, the very first of the SDG 14 -- is on everybody’s mind.

Audrey Tang: For example, there was this huge popular discussion around plastic straws, and how we plan to reduce and eventually ban the use of them in certain indoor settings around national identity drinks, like the bubble tea.

Audrey Tang: Basically, people are motivated by the SDGs to find innovative solutions. Some of them are really naive, like if you take a spaghetti noodle, you can use it as a straw for a while, for up to two hours.

Audrey Tang: It melts away, but it also motivates real innovation, like using agricultural waste products and so on to make into new straws that are nevertheless recyclable, or at least more durable and reusable, and actually leaves little to no carbon footprint.

Audrey Tang: Just by identifying those are the goals -- because a goal doesn’t say how you get there -- we can have real social innovation by essentially co-creating "with" the people, who just swarm toward all the different solutions.

Audrey Tang: It could be environmental solution of having a better habit, of employee relations or environment, even the technological one, just like manufacturing as well. It could be one that’s sort of on the edge.

Audrey Tang: There’s one social entrepreneur in Taiwan working on bartering with people who fish near Taiwan. They fish up a lot of plastic waste. Basically, they turn that into biofuel, and then barter back the biofuel back to dispose.

Audrey Tang: There’s no money exchanging hands. Basically, they pay the fish boats to not discard the plastic waste that they fish back, and instead, just turn it back into fuel so that they can go on their business, and then do more sustainable fishing, loose sense of sustainability.

Audrey Tang: I think this is more, you can see here, as part of voluntary national report. I think the environmental sustainability is really on everybody’s mind in Taiwan when it comes to especially the marine population.

Audrey Tang: When I say population, I mean biodiversity. In the Taiwan sea area, there is 10 percent of the world’s marine species. There’s huge biodiversity. We see ourselves as just stewards to such populations. Human really is not the one privileged species. We need to coexist with the huge biodiversity.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: You mentioned something also very important. You said habits. The usual habits that one can have are extremely important. Sometimes, we don’t think about those, in a way. Governments can help, but we also, I think, need to remember that we have to adapt too as a society.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: We have to change our habits, and we have to be conscious of the actions that we’re doing, and how they relate to the SDGs at an individual level. I believe we’re reaching the end of this conversation. Now, we have a little bit of networking.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: This part is like what you have in the Social Innovation Lab -- to network, to share ideas, to talk about the SDGs, and how we can all cooperate to make them a reality, and a great opportunity also to know each other, and to learn about what each other is doing.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Thank you so much for this conversation. I think it was truly extraordinary.

Isabel Pérez Dobarro: Thank you so much to all of you for coming. I hope you have a wonderful time. Thank you so much.