 Terima kasih, Pn. Tang. Terima kasih dan terimakasih untuk dapat duduk di sini. Semoga kita dapat berbincang dengan anda. Semua ini telah dibuat. Kami sepatutnya berbincang. Saya berkongsi beberapa kisah saya. Kamu berkongsi beberapa kisah saya. Tetapi lebih saya melakukan perniagaan kepada anda, lebih saya rasa saya akan suka mengambil sedikit lebih banyak kembali. Dan seperti sangat berkongsi dan menjelaskan anda dan kisah anda dalam perjalanan anda. Dan di sini dan di sini saya akan menjelaskan sedikit. Dan saya juga mahu berkongsi beberapa kisah saya di dalam perniagaan yang saya telah melakukan. Saya bermakna seperti hanya melihat video anda, mencari artikel tentang anda. Saya mahu seperti, membuat perniagaan dengan cepat tentang saya. Ini adalah sebuah video yang terbesar untuk kami. Tetapi saya mahu dapat menjelaskan perniagaan seperti perniagaan saya untuk anda dan perniagaan yang saya suka tentang anda. Dan kemudian, saya akan menjelaskan anda dengan lebih banyak pun yang telah digelaskan. Kemudian saya akan membeli ke dalam pertanyaannya yang Michael yang saya beritahu. Jika anda tidak tanya, jika suara itu terbaik untuk anda, saya fikir akan akan lucu. Terima kasih. Apa-apa saja perkara yang anda teriakkan, ada apa-apa kisah yang anda ada dengan mengapa perniagaan ini akan terjadi atau sebagainya? Well, first of all, I thank you for your consent for this to be a not internal only conversation where I'll publish my side of video but your side of audio as well to the Creative Commons attribution because I do believe that this is more than just a dialogue. I think this is the beginning for people to have a wider understanding appreciation of the areas of common interest, namely the pride and LGBTIQA plus communities current take on not just the geopolitical and the technical but also like socially how we form solidarity across jurisdictions. So I hope that with the public launch, the Creative Commons attribution of this video, I look forward to more remixing and more conversations based on the topics that we explore today. Okay, totally unrelated perspectives may be emerge. For example, I had a very serious interview about like digital democracy and so on, but there was a rap band in Japan called Dos Monos that just took bits and pieces from that interview and remix into a hit rap song, a hip hop song, and that brought the conversation into a very different perspective, a very different audience. Now there's no guarantee that our conversation will be made into a hip hop song, but you know, maybe some other art forms. Yeah, hopefully if they do make a hip hop song, they use your parts and not mine. So yep, we'll see, we'll see. Karen, I think you could be a really good rap star. I know. I don't know about that. Alright, I don't have anything else. Okay, maybe we'll give this a go. We'll see how this goes and then like we, since it's all a recording, we can always pause and retake. Just give me a few seconds. So what's going to happen is our countdown from 5. Karen, you just start with your intro. And then just what we like to do is we normally have the conversation be as natural as possible. We'll just let it flow. If there's any additional questions or things that we want to talk about, we can do it at the end. Otherwise, we'll just let the conversation be, just let it flow as naturally as possible. Can do. Oh, sorry, my hair is not as medium as this. I always like to stand up on its own. I'm sorry. It's fine. It's very independent. Yes, independent. Minister Teng, are you in Taiwan today? Ya. I'm my jet lag brain is in Italy, but physically I'm in Taipei. I'm the second day of my currency return. Oh, dear. Thank you for making time for this. I'm sorry. Oh, I'm the last batch to do seven days. Everyone else after this week do three days. Ah, and when can visitors come because I'm dying to go to Taiwan. If you're okay with three days, you can come right now. If you want to do zero days, maybe I don't know August. Okay, great. Thank you for that. I'll come drop in maybe your weekly chat. Oh, yeah, go ahead. Social Innovation Lab, that's right. Yes. Okay, are we ready? Can we roll TDR and can we roll the cam in the studio? Thank you. Micah, I'm just going to keep you silent. At the point where we cut our unmute you. Let me just switch over to Karen solo frame first. Okay, Karen ready. Let's go for the first take. Don't worry if we need to retake, just take a pause and then we start from the where we maybe the top of the paragraph. Okay, I'll do a quick introduction about myself. Let's just a very quick like two lines and then I'll go into the the bit about Minister Tang. Also feel free to just call me Audrey. There's no need for the right honourable and everything. Just Audrey. Okay. Okay, ready? Let's go for the first take. In five, four, three, two, one. Hi everyone, I'm Karen Teo and as you know, I head up the global business group with the scale team and the global co-exec sponsor for Pride Ed. I am very excited to be here today to talk to Minister Audrey Tang. Now it takes very little to find out a lot about Minister Tang online. I've taken the liberty to put together a few of my favourite discoveries of Audrey. But let me start with pertinent information first. Audrey Tang, if you didn't know, is the digital minister of Taiwan. The first digital minister and as the first and youngest digital minister of Taiwan at age 35, Audrey wrote the JD for that position in the form of a poem to make it relatable and to make it understandable for the general public. Audrey is probably one of most articulate and fun speakers to listen to in the space of public policy, governance and tech for all. In my research, I found that my favourite strategies of Audrey so far is number one, humour over rumour during the pandemic to combat both misinformation and the management of the virus. And Gov Zero, a social innovation initiative to drive government tech improvements. I'm sure we'll hear more from Audrey as we continue talking to her. Not surprising, Audrey, that you've made the list of top 100 global thinkers in 2019. All in all, in my research and observation, Audrey and Audrey's intellect is full of fun surprises and I look forward to learning more about the person behind all this impact and intellect. Audrey, over to you. Hello, Karen, and really happy to be part of Pride Connections. I'm really happy to share my personal journey leading up to the moment. One of my most formative moments occurred when I was four years old, one of my earliest memories. You see, I was born with a heart defect and I overheard the surgeons, my doctors, telling my parents that this kid, that's me, had to live to, I don't know, how many years old in order to get the heart surgery that I need, but the chance, or so the doctor estimates, is just 50-50. Now, since that's my formative memory, I spend the next eight years until I actually got a heart surgery when I was 12 in a kind of shirt in the box. That is to say going to sleep every night without knowing whether I can wake up or not. And that accrued in me a very different world perspective. Basically, I'm motivated to publish before I perish, still to this day. I check every night before I go to sleep whether I've already published everything I can into creative commons for the video recordings and interviews like this one. I ask everything to be in the commons right away instead of having to wait for 70 or 80 years after I pass away and so on because I understand there really is nothing to hold and there is everything to share. So I'm sure that my commitment to radical transparency, free software, civic participation and so on all flew from this very simple idea that someone else can continue and just say vehicle of the kind of very transient vehicle of the knowledge, of the fun, of the social solidarity and so on. It's not about me holding anything but rather me sharing what I have to share. So looking forward to today's sharing. Yes, I'm sure we will hear a lot from you and a lot of your thoughts and sharing and I agree you basically embody the whole sense of living every day like it's your last and that's something that many of us fail to do for ourselves and for society but thanks for that reminder and it's definitely giving me a different insight into you and the way you are today so that's helpful. But let me start since we are talking about how what you went through as a child let me keep us in that early part of your life. Many of us in our pride community at Metta really want to know even more about you. I read that you left school at 14 and then you started your own company in the Silicon Valley a few years later and then you didn't look back. So beyond the age of 12 tell us more about your youth and how it led to who and where you are today. Anyone who inspired you when you were young and how did they do that? Sorry, that was three questions in one but I want to pack as many as possible. Yeah, I attended three kindergarten, six primary schools and just one year of middle school before dropping out so that's ten schools for ten years. I've never had a chance to do what we call a summer work because I'm always switching schools in the summer. So I think this instilled in me a very different pattern a different social pattern in that the physical seems to be very transient, impermanent for me but the virtual is actually more real than real. One of my earliest moments is encountering the idea of programming when I was eight years old. I think it was because two of my uncles worked in information industry one in Acery Computer one in the Institute of Information Industry in Taiwan and they have in our bookshelf lots of programming books. Now I learned about programming languages I think it was first logo and basic and then I didn't have a personal computer that was 1989 so I just drew on paper using a pen to draw keyboard and a pencil to draw the cursor and every day I wake up and erase that pencil mark and type in I think randomized time CLS or something and then just erase the pencil and I think this taught me really computational thinking and programming as a form of an instrument even before my parents finally gave in and just got me some personal computer hours afterwards so this really showed to me that computing as a way of thinking is independent of any particular hardware and it is just a way to kind of outsource part of the thinking part of our brain the automatic part into the machines and then we can focus on the creative and co-creative parts now after I got a personal computer it became my hobby to play some of the educational games available in the demos in the Guanghua market but I didn't purchase any of those commercial software rather I just play it when I visit and then I go back and reverse engineer not really a clean room implement the games so I made a lot of interactive games and those to entertain myself but also to just show my cousins my brother and so on how it is possible to learn about very advanced mathematical concepts in a very gradual way with a tireless teacher that is to say the computer program playing the role of a kind of ambient teacher so pedagogy has always been my inspiration and I think of computer programming and social applications oh, that's a for a young child that thinking is fascinating you know most kids they see something they want something and then they're like ah I don't have it I'll do something else but you actually created your own computer with a piece of paper drew and then reiterated all that but when you did that when you created this paper computer until you finally got a computer what was going through your head did you think that you were playing and it was an imagination or were you actually thinking this is kind of planning for when I actually have that piece of hardware what was going through your young mind probably at the same time I was learning piano but I didn't have regular access to keyboard until a while afterward so to me this is a lot like my piano classes where I study the very abstract notes and then simulate the playing but without actually a piano but by the time I actually got into I think it was weekly my piano classes I get to practice what I have already practiced rather silently of course again after a while we've got piano in our home but I think the point I'm making is that I see programming as a kind of performance that has two parts one is the abstract part that's the notes and the interactive part that's the actual melody and the melody shapes people's interactions in a way that may be pro-social or anti-social but it's the notes, the abstract part that interests me but I don't like mathematics but I don't like math and before I got computer and computer programming I thought to study advanced mathematics required during the learning process do a lot of math and I really don't like that but it turns out computer is really good at symbolic processing so as long as as soon as I get the concept right the technical part, the mechanical part can be taken care of in a much more enjoyable world of mathematics not just math that's calculations I think that's fantastic it's like even the way you run the digital ministry at this point it is you are owning I've seen an interview where you say if you're bandwidth if your internet access is not strong enough that's on me at the same time you open it up to everybody to contribute to it what are some of the core values driven you to take taking the kind of decisions that you take and the choices that you make or even the people you keep around you and the way you work I think really the earliest memory I have of participating in the internet was reading about the earlier internet documents the internet drafts the request for comments that talks about the philosophy of the internet was 1993 I was 12 years old and then I remember very clearly Postel's law from John Postel that says the way to build a robust network in communication is to be conservative in what you do but be liberal in what you accept it's later being referred as the Postel's law the robustness principle I really had a lasting impression on me because I tried to apply it socially as well as you probably have heard I've described myself as sort of a conservative in a sense that I respect the traditions and in Taiwan we've got 20 national languages more than half of which indigenous always their traditions and I don't like the idea of a simple progress in one of the 20 directions to decimate to set back the other 19 traditions I want to feel that I can take all the sides find the common ground and deliver innovations that works together for everyone or at least that everyone can live with and that comes from the early internet protocol philosophy of being very liberal in what I accept that's cool and my work today is we manage like a skilled business which means we manage businesses of all sizes there are some really big ones and there's some like just starting and we're also trying constantly to create processes and programs so that we can add value to all of these different businesses rather than trying to just do one for just the big or the small or the middle size and I do think that understanding this actually comes from from a business standpoint you know we're driven by things like cost and efficiencies of resources so it kind of makes sense but from living as a human being trying to think about how to bring create impact that benefits everybody all the different identities around you I think that can somehow be more challenging I've also seen that you've talked about how your non-binary identity has allowed you to see more perspectives. There's this one quote that maybe you don't mind explaining the quote, we don't think that there's half of the world that's different from us I don't know whether you remember this but it definitely resonated can you explain that a little bit and tell us how the experience of living through can you see this multiple perspectives? Ya, I don't see that myself living through different identities really what I've always pictured in my mind is just a continuous experience now when I say be liberal in what I accept, I don't just mean in a tolerating sense I mean actually if I see someone a stakeholder in a multi stakeholder conversation talking from a place that I just totally don't comprehend so that I cannot even accept mentally what they're saying I always think it's my fault it's on me to spend some time on an ethnographic really hanging out with that group of people until I can sincerely argue their case but I wouldn't say I switched to a different identity during that that would sound very strange but I would say that I joined in their experiences so that there's one more point in common that I can relate to or to build empathy so instead of saying that I identify as this and then I identify as that I usually say I had this experience when I was 20 or I had another experience when I was 25 so you very deliberately create opportunity for these different experiences to in order to create that empathy and understanding Yes, I don't have a fixed label of myself is what I'm saying Yes, I understand I'm very cerebral and also very emotional desire to connect and build the empathy is hard Do you have any advice for people to build those two muscles like you have Ya, I think always start from a place of humor, of fun that relieves the tension and also creates memorable points of reference I always like to say that in April 2020, when a young boy caught the toll free number 1922 of our country epidemic line saying that I'm a young boy you're rationing your mask pink one side, wear pink to school all the boys in my class have navy blue mask the very next day on the daily 2pm conference all the medical officers including the minister Chen Shizhong war pink and Chen Shizhong the minister even said that pink panther was his childhood hero and so the boy became the most hit boy all the fashion brands turned pink for a couple of weeks after that minister Chen became a little bit more transgender just that moment just that 2pm and it's not a huge thing it's not like he thoroughly cross-dress but like him wearing the pink mask saying pink panther much hero really cements a cultural moment in the Taiwanese population and that allowed us to then see mask as something that is a point of pride a point of obeying something of compliance of state power state capacity rather it became a symbol of civic capacity and self expression so I made a point of wearing rainbow mask for quite a while after that wow thank you that's awesome that's such a great story and look obviously all the stories that you shared so far shows how important it is in the work that you do and the work of any public servant or even someone in tech as well with you how do you think and that's why I ask for your advice how do you think your own lived experience has been an asset to developing empathy and developing it constantly any thoughts there? yeah 2 broad brushes of thoughts one is that I'm non binary not just in gender but rather in everything so people know when I became digital master in 2016 that I not just wrote who or not applicable to the gender field in the HR form but I also wrote the same word not applicable to the party affiliation world so people do not see me as part of the ruling party part of the opposition policy or things like that I'm like no matter which party you have I'm happy to stand by you and argue from your point of view to take all the sides as it were of course I would officially endorse a party later on can't stop this party which is a joke party created by YouTubers for pedagogical purposes disbanded a year after but again that puts the humor the shared experience point of reference that dissolves a lot of tensions toward party polarization from outreach into co-creation so that's the first thing it's about being non binary in everything the second about building empathy is simply that people can't be trollish especially on some antisocial social media so no like people can very easily start flam was and so on and I developed a habit of what I call troll hugging basically I would look for personal attacks toward me and on Facebook in particular in the mobile interface there's this latest search API that very easily let me see what latest personal interactions that people have toward me so I can see basically everything that mentions me like in three different languages my name and then if there's of course something constructive I reply and we do co-creation but even when there's pretty toxic personal attacks instead of just reporting it I would look at those 100 words see maybe 4 or 5 words which that can be construed as constructive and then I just ignore everything else and then just focus on the 4 or 5 things that can be taken a little bit out of context to mean something authentic something sincere and then I just reply either direct message or publicly and add that person as a friend and then we start to develop this camaraderie it's both pedagogical in showing everyone it's only the constructive part that get any attention at all but also it's generally like hugging a troll people troll mostly because they feel a kind of frustration that their gripes are not being addressed by the powers that they but when I just focus my attention on the part that are authentic they become very willing to share authentic experiences and many of them actually visit the social innovation lab and we become pretty good acquaintances that's pretty amazing I don't think it's in our in our guidelines if you're trolled online what you do is try to hug the troll that's a really interesting way of addressing people who may not be on the same page as you or are really just there trying to yank your chain a little bit from like trolling online wise people sometimes view trolling as bullying as well other than in the online space for me growing up in its different forms has taken place before I was never like the most popular person in school or the most beautiful or the fastest, strongest etc I've experienced bullying to some extent what about you just this trolling just makes me wonder if you have how did you deal with bullies in your past I think right after I discovered personal computers when I was 8 years old I did get some bullying at school and that was the time when I'm in the gifted class when I was in the second grade and the person that placed in the ranks in terms of written exams always bullied me sometime quite viciously because that if I had died then he would be the first place end of quote so this a pretty intense individual to individual competition going on so I did actually quit school for a couple months on the second semester when I was 8 so he actually became the first in class but in absolute terms that really didn't do him any good but I relatively did improve his standing in family but in all honesty I didn't focus on kind of revenge or anything I spent most of my time reading books from Satya from Piaget, Montessori and so on and I learned about child psychology to learn about how the social structural individual to individual competition and how it shapes a young person's mind because in my mind if I retaliate or if I try to out him as the bully that doesn't solve the structural issue because I may pass away any day than the next class one year younger and the same structure may repeat because this is after all not about the bully or the bully this is about the educational culture at a time in Taiwan after I figured that out and decided that the only way to resolve this is to get the young children each one their own PBL purpose or project based learning so that everyone can be the first in their end of us so that's when I became really interested in pedagogy in educational theory which would also affect my work later on to actually reshape the curriculum of Taiwan circa 2015-16 so that actually this current generation of children do not suffer found the same institutional structural abuse that I used to suffer what are the results like today? it's much better yes yes, definitely Taiwan now is the most vibrant in Asia in terms of alternative experimental education up to 10% of schools can be schools in a very liberal sense like homeschool or group school institutional school that's not following the curriculum but at the same time even for institutional education we've incorporated the same idea of autonomous interaction common good so that people who are 8 years old now do get to choose their own directions and become much more liberal I guess in what they accept and there's far less individual to individual competitions now which is a drastic change actually from our previous East Asian written exam cram based education way so I think if I had not myself experienced that sort of bullying I would not able to contribute meaningfully to the education reforms and very thankful unbelievable that you even as a young person as a young child the instinct is not to fight, the instinct is to let me go and read about this and then let me figure out how to fix this structural problem I really don't think that anyone else out there works like you, things like you functions like you in fact everybody's kind of everyone feels that they are flawed to some extent and I'm sure you with all your broad reading and psychology and understanding of people one of the biggest things that drives behaviour or harm to oneself or to society or to someone else is this sense of insecurity or pain how do you how do you especially in the LGBTQI community, I see a lot of that this inability to embrace oneself and to always authentic what is your advice for the community in this situation in a space like this but I think the safe space that I found in first computer programming and then in the internet society internet culture really is the anchor that kept me first sane and then later on productive because as I mentioned the surrounding environment changes literally every year I do not have a good social anchor on which to build my security my psychological security profile but rather because I understand that online if I publish anything it doesn't go away even if I move to a very different city as long as I remember my passwords I can always just log in back to my internet account and then follow on the same mailing list and so on actually if I don't say I'm just 14 years old most of the researchers I work with at that time just assume I may fellow PhD student so really there's almost no discrimination on the early internet because people were at that time discovering this new thing called a web called a preprint server and so on they're far more interested in actually publishing and doing something together than discriminating against each other so I think I was blessed to engage the early 90s internet culture at that point in life so that I can feel anchored in the safe space we've seen LGBTIQA plus communities anchoring themselves on the internet forums even on the shared realities the so called metaverse that people enjoy to get but I think even in the tech space the only way that I experience in the early 90s this speaks to the same spirit of a safe space independent of the social relationship in the analog world what do you think we can do as you know meta once it's very invested in being one of the many companies out there in building for the metaverse and one of the things that we talked about incessantly is about making sure that we build access for everybody for community and part of it is I'm just wondering as LGBTQI A plus people how do we play a part in building the metaverse so that we can continue to be a place of diversity and inclusion I think it's at the end of the day just to empower people closest to the pain so they can shape their own social norms my earliest social VR experience was in high fidelity I was in Paris and talking to a bunch of middle school and high school students in Taiwan and we're all just wearing these HTC 5 thing in this metaverse but my avatar is deliberately shaped to be the same height as the young children so they don't have to look up to me but rather can relate to me in the kind of playgrounds that we commonly share and it's very important that it's just me and them and our surroundings that get to decide which may or may not make sense to anybody else just like posting and recording a podcast and listening to a podcast can be on very different platforms and it's all decided by the people who have something to say and something to listen this end to end innovation principle I think is very important going forward now I'm not pretending that metaverse can be solved by a simple protocol RSS that I worked on that enable the podcast ecosystem but we need to remember that the internet was shaped like this that end to end innovation really makes sense when the persons in the safes are the only ones that has the final say about rules and interactions that makes sense idealistic makes a lot of sense embrace that and build that future where we can continue to have diversity and inclusion in that space I also want to call out something that I read an article recently about you and you were quoting Anthem the Leonard Cohen song and the lyric is really very beautiful song the way it's written the poetry almost there is a crack in everything do you mind telling us more about what this speaks to perhaps in your opinion to people in our families our communities and our companies and I think also many in Taiwan and around the world too the verse that goes before that was ring the bells that still can ring and forget your perfect offering and then there's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets in that was the verse that cured me of perfectionism I used to be very perfectionist I don't want to publish anything before I polish it but I also am compelled to publish before I sleep and the end result is that I publish in like very fine fragments but the problem of very fine fragments like small haiku and poetry is that really there's very little or others to do you can retweet that or say like but if it's short and pretty complete it's not a building block on the other hand if I just publish a stream of consciousness that has a lot of wrinkles a lot of places that I haven't thought through it may look not perfect but it actually is the beginning of a conversation and that's how the light gets in so I encountered that verse of Lena Cohen translated that to Mandarin and it's been my emotional ever since to remind myself that maybe the best way to contribute to the world is not to publish things that are perfect but to deliberately publish working progress in a way that elicits conversations but also trolling but as fine also hugging the trolling that's so aligned with we think about social innovation and social technologies here at Metta you know many people around the world look to you as an inspiration and as a role model I think a lot of people want to see someone who looks like them, identifies like them in a position of power and influence how do you feel about that and any last words of advice and encouragement to the community at large iya so you mentioned briefly my poetic description I would like to recite that because really I think that's us in the technology world it's very easy for us to focus on the technology and then asking the society to adapt to technology while of course all the technology that got real adoption is not the disruptive ones but rather the ones that fits the norms empowers the local norms so my description goes like this when we see internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it collaborative when we see user experience let's make it about human experience whenever we hear that singularity is near always remember plurality is here so yeah the plurality is here that's my word we don't need to chase the singularity we need to embrace the plurality it's brilliant thank you i still have like a million questions but we'll save that for another time thank you so much it was really great talk with you and i love the old connection plurality peace