On micro-level research, when we collected field data in Beipu Township (北埔鎮), a rural area, we interviewed the actors of a micro enterprise which has no “employees.” A couple runs the business. Two of them consider this as a full-time job and sell books and small gifts as products. Owing to the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, very few tourists traveled to Beipu, which impacted on this store’s business. They closed the bookstore during COVID-19. During this period, they applied for the subsidies for conducting a cultural project and invited their customers to study and survey the plants which could be served as wild vegetables in the Beipu area.
This case shows the importance of the factors for resilience. In rural society, although they are small scale. they still show their resilience, thinking and action. They collected local natural resources, co-created, published a booklet and hosted Beipu first green market of local wild vegetables. This field study touched our researchers’ heart, expanded our resilience knowledge, and offered a chance of engagement scholarship (接地型學術).
From academics, we are also inspired by “Lessons from nature: Enhancing the adaptable potential of service ecosystems (Lusch et al., 2016)”. Our research team decided to design and co-created a curation and workshop with Beipu’s rural community. In field study, we identified that local wild vegetables embody the abstraction of “Resilience” and embody the “resilience” concept. We could learn resilience from nature together with our research participants and our interviewees of Blue Megapie Book Store (藍鵲書房), Little Hill House of Nature Garden (小山屋自然農園), The working group of wild vegetable notebook on Route Three, Taiwan (臺三線節氣野菜誌協作社群).
We hosted a two days’ workshop on Dec. 27-28, 2021. In this workshop we invited students from NTHU, rural entrepreneurs and practitioners from agri-food industry to help Beipu to recognise wild vegetables, to sort out the resilient characteristics of wild vegetables, to assist the community in designing wild vegetable tourism paths, We curated the exhibition based on the outputs from the workshop from Dec. 25, 2021 to Jan. 10, 2022 with the title “Learn resilience from nature: the adaptability of wild vegetables in Beipu” (一起向大自然學韌性 : 北埔野菜的適應力). This initiative of workshop and exhibition engaged the actor networks in a rural township for us to identify how they cooperated to achieve resilience. Moreover, we would like to take this actor network as the sand box and test bed to develop resilience-oriented service innovation.
We are developing a peer-to-peer information system with multi-agent coordination capabilities in order to facilitate actors to communicate and collaborate with others in the service system to synchronize the actions responding to the disruption of service routines. The Resilience Academy has been proposed to the academic, industries, and communities trying to form the community of practice in resilience. The formed knowledge networks will be embedded on the established P2P (peer-to-peer) information system and incentrified by the t-coin, the value unit of knowledge exchange realized by decentralized blockchain technology.
Comments