🌏 During the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders Conference in mid-November, I was invited to talk in the “CEO Dialogues”. In my talk titled “Open Response & Open Recovery”, I explained how Taiwan could improve its economic resilience and accelerate its recovery after the pandemic.

🔢 In order to counter the pandemic, we promoted many social innovations through collaboration between the public and private sectors and open access to data. In addition to sharing these experiences with the world, we are also continuing to explore the ways to improve these practices.

🌱 Over the years, I have met many young people all over Taiwan. They have unique observations and astute perceptions about various social issues. They also have a social mission to actively promote various changes. Starting this year, in addition to further deepening youth participation in the existing mechanisms, we have also created brand new channels, which allowed me to see new possibilities.

🗣️ For example, Let’s Talk, formerly a policy forum, has been transformed into a dialogue platform between youth and the government in recent years. It has become one of the commitments of Taiwan’s participation in the “Open Government Partnership (OGP)”, which has 79 member countries. Starting this year, for the first time, it has been opened to youth participation from beginning to end. For example, for the agenda selection at the beginning of the project, more than 4,000 young people were interviewed through surveys to establish the annual discussion themes of “urban and rural education resource gap” and “reasonable working conditions and rights”. The project was only initiated after that. This can be considered a a pioneering step in government planning, as a departure from the past approach of government-led agenda selection.

🐱 In addition to policy discussions, the digital thought process of youth is also the key to industrial development. Affected by the pandemic, work and life around the world are highly dependent on the Internet, and digital transformation has become the most urgent need of many companies. In response, the “Training x Transformation” project recruits young people who are interested in the four fields of intelligent services, digital marketing, intelligent manufacturing, and artificial intelligence to implement a six-month enterprise digital transformation program. Thus far, there are 26 participating domestic and international enterprises, in fields spanning from technology to traditional industries. In the process, in addition to collaborating with professionals in various fields and discussing development directions, the young people could actually understand existing problems within the company, and then propose specific corporate digital transformation suggestions.

🎓 This approach is quite similar to the “Rescue Action by Youth .gov Project” (RAY Project). RAY is a collaboration between my office and the National Development Council. For two months during the summer vacation, 30 students with different backgrounds including service design, interface design, visual design, and information engineering were invited to collaborate with government officials to improve the user experiences of government websites. Participating agencies include Keelung City Government, the Youth Development Administration of the Ministry of Education, and the TaiwanJobs website of the Ministry of Labor.

🌐 Letting young people directly take action and become an aid to the transformation of governments and enterprises, in my opinion, is the spirit of policymaking behind “open doors” — you can join if you are capable.