 Now, where would you be? And I do have my answer for this one, since I got to pick the question before. I would probably say that I would be on some island in the middle of nowhere, because that sounds pretty good right now. What about you, Audrey? Well, I have this, I've seen this mug on the internet that says, and I quote, I don't need therapy, I just need to go to Taiwan. So I guess I prefer to remain right where I am. You cheated that answer, you just say where you're at. Zoe, what about you? I'd probably have to say Charleston, South Carolina. I have a lot of family there, so when it's all safe to go and hang out with them, also the beach is great, so can't beat that. St. Helalayas, Canada, California, Hawaii, yes, New York. You know, it's really painful, I'm here in New York, and all of my family and friends back home in Australia, there is no pandemic there. They solved it a little bit like Taiwan, and here we are. Is that where you'd like to be, Jim? It's also summer, they've got a tennis tournament called the Australian Open happening. Wow, they're just doing the most. Yes, I see Georgia, do you mean the state in the US or the country? Greece, yes. Oh, cool. Cancun, yes. I'm seeing like sharp contrast, like people either want to be at beaches or they want to be somewhere super cold, so. Forest, I'm seeing a lot of forest answers. Yeah, Japan, Alaska, Thailand. Awesome, all great answers. Well, since RISE is a global program, Josh Mars, we made people joining from these places that you guys wish you were at, which is pretty cool, honestly. But anyway, we can go ahead and get started. Zoe's gonna frame up the night, but I guess for Audrey, going to frame up the morning, whatever your time zone is. So take it away. That's right, it's 8 and 30 in the morning. Oh, sorry about my dog, there he goes. But yeah, thank you all so much for joining us this evening or I guess morning for you, Audrey. On behalf of Civic Sunplugging RISE, just wanna thank you all so much for hopping on. We're gonna be having two segments. So first, we'll be having an Ask Me Anything with the incredible Audrey Ting. And secondly, we're gonna be having an info session about RISE, which is this incredible scholarship program. Gary has pinned the link in the comments over there, so please go and check that out and make sure to stay to the end because we'll be helping you walk through your application. But first, let's introduce our incredible guest, Audrey. Audrey Ting is the digital minister of Taiwan where they have led numerous initiatives under the mantra of fast, fair, fun, including the G0V project, making democracy accessible and participatory. Recently, thanks to Audrey's work and the resilience of Taiwan's democracy, Taiwan has had a drastic boost in the global rankings for democracy from 31st to 11th. Audrey, anything we should add there for your intro? Yeah, sure. The GovZero initiative, our G0V, is of course important for the civic tech, but for the government side, we also have this very cute spoke stock, a Shiba Inu, the name Song Chai, who explains everything from physical distancing when you're indoor, keep three of them away from one another, wear a mask, or if you're outdoor, keep two of them away and wear a mask, but why wear a mask? Wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands. So this is my public service announcement. I'm sad that we didn't think of that. Yes, that is the cutest public service announcement for COVID I have ever seen. Yes, that makes social distancing seem easy, but I guess we can go ahead and dive right into the questions here. So obviously, Audrey, you work a lot with democracy, work a lot with technology, and there have been a lot of kind of questions about where we see the future of democracy and technology going. So I'd love to just ask you, where do you see the intersection of democracy and technology going around the world? What you mean democracy is a type of technology. When we talk about technology, we tend to think about industrial use of natural sciences, but democracy is also a set of technologies that's the application of social scientists, meaning that, for example, in Taiwan, we're not content with only uploading three bits per person every four years, which is called voting, by the way. But also, day-to-day democracy, for example, initiatives like petitioning on the internet. In Taiwan, we have a national participation portal joined the GOV, the TW, that engages more than 10 million people that's roughly half of our population. And so more than one quarter of the petitions there were from people who are not even 18 years old. So the young adults and the young people have a gender setting power way before they have the right to vote and they have successfully petitioned for. For example, banning the plastic straws in our national identity drink the bubble tea, among many other things. And so because of this, people see democracy as something that they can participate, not just through petitions, but also through presidential hackathon, which is bringing a good idea that you have and work across sectors. For example, using an app to encourage people to drink more from refillable bottles instead of from plastic bottles. And that was a hit. It's like Pokemon Go. You can complete missions just by checking in to those water refilling spots and so on. And once you get a trophy, five of those from our president each year, then the trophy is a micro projector when turned on. It shows our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-Wen, handing your trophy, promising that whatever you did in the past three months will become national policy with all the budget and personnel required within the next 12 months. So that's presidential power as a form of hackathon award. And there's many other ways to participate through participatory budgeting, referenda, sandboxes and so on. So what I'm trying to get at is that it's not just about voting and it's about a co-creation of new mechanisms to get people's common values out of various positions and that you can engage on a day-to-day fashion. Yeah, I love what you said about democracy being a, it's a type of technology in and of itself and it definitely looks like the US has quite a ways to go before we can get to that point of really integrating traditional technology and democracy. A big thing I know a lot of us were in the midst of this pandemic. A lot of countries have handled it very differently but Taiwan has had a really incredible response with the use of technology. And so we had somebody who registered wondering if you think that this idea of a digital-based pandemic response would work in other countries, from third-world countries to first-world countries and also where you got the idea from. Well, as I mentioned the Shiba Inu, the cute spoke stock really doesn't need a lot of broadband access or something. It works perfectly well in low bandwidth situations. And the other two digital interventions that play the most part actually also requires very basic infrastructure. For example, there is this daily press conference from our medical officers led by Minister Chen Shizhong, the Minister of Health and Welfare. And again, this could be broadcasted by radio, by television, by any sort of, of course we use live stream, but it doesn't really depend on the internet. And the other important part, the toll free number 1922, where anyone who see anything new about the COVID situation can call and receive the explanation and answers from the scientist and if they bring something that the call center people and the scientist doesn't have a answer to. For example, last April, there was a young boy who called saying, you're rationing out mask, but all I get is pink medical mask. All my, the boys in my class, all of them have blue mask and I don't want to wear pink to school. What to do? And the scientist doesn't know how to answer that. So he got escalated immediately to the Central Epidemic Command Center and the very next day, the next 2 p.m. in the daily press conference, the press officers suggested that all the medical officers were pink medical mask and they continue to do that for a number of weeks and trending bronze and things like that, all colored their brand pink. So pink became the most hip color and the boy become the most hip boy in the class where only he has the color that the heroes wear. And the minister said pink panther was this childhood hero or something. So also heroes hero wear. So all this requires innovation, co-creation, but it doesn't require any sort of like broadband as human right as we have here. You can as easily put it together with regular television, radio and also trophy number through landlines. Yeah, that is so adorable that he didn't want to wear pink and then he made it cool across all of Taiwan. That is super, super cool. And so I know a lot of our, we have CFLs here and rise applicants and a lot of kids here who are super interested to just hear more about your Go Zero project and also the fact that you share every single conversation you have that has a crazy level of transparency of a government official. And so I think a lot of us are just wondering what inspired you to start both of these initiatives and where do you see government transparency going? And what do you wanna see? Yeah, I learned about this idea of rough consensus and radical transparency when I was 15 years old. I was 1996. Taiwan just had its first presidential election and I told my, the middle school's principal, Principal Du Heiping, saying that I don't want to go to school anymore because I discovered this new thing called the Wario Web and the knowledge is being created there and it's at least 10 years ahead from my textbooks in the middle school which are all out of date anyway. And then the head of the school read my email correspondence with some researchers and thought about one minute and said, okay, from tomorrow you don't have to go to school anymore and she covers for me meaning that she fixed the record but in any case, so that I don't get fined by compulsory education. So, and after that I joined this fabulous internet community is still around, it's called internet society and makes the protocols, the kind of the core, the constitution laws of the internet and the idea of the internet society is that of radical transparency because we don't in internet governance have a navy or a army or anything. We can't force any telecom operator or any jurisdiction to connect to the internet. So we have to work with everyone, take all the sides, making sure that there is common value out of the various different positions so that the internet remains a common public good or public infrastructure in the digital era and so that's how I got into the internet style, politics and it will not be another five years until I actually get to vote in a representation of democracy system. So to me, I mean, this high bandwidth radical transparency-based legitimacy is my native mode of operation. So when we occupied the parliament in 2014, instead of demonstrating as protesters, we demonstrated as demoers, meaning that we showed the half a million people in Australia and many more online how to deliberate, listen at scale so that we can come to shared values across the very controversial trade agreement at the time with Beijing and we succeeded and occupied with the success. The head of parliament took our consensus and then all the public servants are suddenly very much willing to learn how to work with the internet community not just for the people, with the people. And so that's how I become first a reverse mentor to a minister and now the digital minister. So that's the kind of short story of how GovZero gets involved in everyday politics. Yes, I know we had some questions earlier kind of referencing kind of like the US pandemic response which I think is, you could easily describe as kind of the opposite of what Taiwan has done over the last 10 months here. And so we have a couple of people kind of asking like, how do you think the US can adapt into this new space? How can we get more people willing to wear masks? It seems like that was a very easy thing to do in Taiwan but something that we've definitely had a lot more controversy around. So what do you think made Taiwan ready or more ready, I guess I should say, for the pandemic and how do other countries catch up with that? Yeah, well, I mean, we were inoculated as a society. Everyone in some above 30 years old remember 2003 when SARS or SARS 1.0 as I call it now when SARS 1.0 hit Taiwan, we had to lock down an entire hospital and announced the municipal government was saying different things from the central government. There was a mask shortage and all the chaotic things that happened around the world, this like happens in Taiwan on a smaller scale in 2003. I think one of the things that we did write though is that in 2004, the constitutional court, the total legislature saying that's the chaotic response, the sudden barricading of the hospital would be unconstitutional if not for the fact none of us have any experience with SARS, right? So we need, while the memory is still fresh, institutionalized, for example, the PPEs, how to communicate correctly about masks and how to make the central epidemic command center at the daily press conference, the 1.022, all of these are authorized by the legislature in 2004 in preparation of the next version of SARS as we saw in COVID-19. So, and one of the insight we learned in 2003 was that if you say you wear a mask to protect the elderly, then people who don't live with the elderly don't wear a mask. If you say wear a mask to show respect to the medical workers, well, people who don't know any medical workers don't wear a mask. But if you say like the cute dog says, and I show it on the very beginning, if you say wear a mask to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands, then this is a message that appeals entirely to rational self-interest. Even if there's no one around, you will still wear a mask because where it protects you against your own unwashed hands and it connects it with hand sanitation because without hand sanitation, wearing a mask doesn't do much anyway, right? So this sort of idea was spreading which appeals to rational self-interest makes this message viral, meaning that people will voluntarily share with their friends and families. And if you build it as something as altruistic is much harder to spread. Yeah, that is awesome. I'll say we have a really good question from Caleb here asking, I'll just read it. How would you suggest young people on a smaller level apply some of the open source, you know, democratic practices you've helped pilot on a larger level in Taiwan? Yeah, this is an excellent question. So in Taiwan, many children are now working with their schools to design their school curricula because in the past couple of years we've switched to a curriculum that has a lot of freedom in it instead of emphasizing memorization or like the so-called the correct answer or any top-down sort of learning we've switched to a more like Finland like a way of curriculum where we don't teach for example, media literacy anymore or data literacy anymore because literacy assume you are a reader or a viewer. We teach instead media competence, data competence mean that you are a producer because in Taiwan broadband is a human right. So no matter how remote the child is they are guaranteed to have access to 10 megabits per second of bandwidth both ways at just $16 per month for unlimited data. If they don't it's my fault personally. And so because we've achieved more than 99% of coverage in terms of residents there is a very strong will to fact-check the presidential debates for example which is a great way to learn about media competence in the newsroom, how the newsroom works and so on. And it's fun, right? When you are fact-checking all the three presidential candidates in their platforms and their debates and so on and it's imbues in you a network to the amateur and finally to a professional journalist and everyone learns a little bit more journalism as part of this fact-checking and there's many other things to do as well. There's many primary schoolers that work with the environment sensing that's climate science with the very inexpensive tool called the air box and it's less than $100 each and there's literally thousands of them each measuring the PM 2.5 that's air quality and sharing it to a distributed ledger mentioned by academia Seneca, the Taiwan National Academy. And what this does as visualized by the Gulf Zero map is that it showed people exactly how the mobile sources the immobile sources, the various sources of pollution and also from overseas can affect the everyday feeling of air and quality and so together the primary schoolers identify the kind of gaps where there's no citizen-sized scientists for example in industrial parks it's impossible for them to break and enter industrial parks to get the air sensors there. So they petition then work with the environmental protection agency here and the EPA agreed and work with the municipality because it turns out we own the lamp. The government owns the lamp in those industrial parks. So we took their design installed on the lamps and all together contribute to climate science. And so that's something that any primary schooler can do in a day or two work just to set up an air box. And so it's all about identifying the sustainable goal there's 17 sustainable goals that you care about and then link to communities that care about those goals and then just make something happen. And before long the government will take notice of it. Wow, that is incredible. We have this a really good question about incorporating internet into government. I know that there have been a lot of pushes in the US that we should start voting on our phones and all this stuff to make those government systems more accessible but there's been a lot of pushback. Is I think this person is just wondering how have you encountered any difficulties incorporating the internet and technology so intrinsically like so woven throughout government? And then what I guess recommendations would you have for other countries that inevitably will have to follow the same path? Yeah, I would definitely start with broadband as a human right because if there's no broadband as human rights then any advance that we make on digital democracy will be almost by definition excluding the people who do not have broadband access who can only download video but couldn't share through video conferences as we are doing so now, right? So broadband as human right definitely the first step. And the next step is to make sure that people understand what's actually happening in the government and we in the national participation portal is not just that we the people like petition portal the same portal also shows all the upcoming regulatory drafts like regulation.gov in the US and also shows all the national budgets neatly visualized so you can have a real conversation with the public servants in response to any particular budget item that you want more information from. There's no equivalent of that in the US. And so once there's a whole life cycle of a policy from ideation to the drafts to the budget to the execution implementation and of course it will of course always have something to improve so you can go back to the petition to the ideation. Once this life cycle is experienced by the local people for a couple of times then people understand democracy is something that they can participate in their spare time. But if this is just about to voting in one of those points in the life cycle with no prior consultation nor post accountability then it feels very much empty because you don't know how those votes will be used. So a full life cycle visualization that is also very important. Yes. And I think we have a really great question that kind of follows along with that that broadband should be a human right. People should have access to the internet and that it's a great tool to help advance democracy but at the same time can really tear it down. And I think in the U.S. especially we've seen the effects of internet and social media on affecting our democratic system. So I think what the students asking is should information be regulated? Yeah, but by social media I think we have very different ideas of social media in mind because in the U.S. I understand a lot of public discussion takes place in infrastructure maintained by the private sector for the purpose of selling addictive advertisements and entertainment. And this is very much akin to have a public debate or deliberation not in a public park, not in a museum or library or a town hall but rather in a I don't know nightclub that sells addictive drinks, right. So basically the social media becomes anti-social because it wasn't designed for public deliberation. It's designed for addictiveness for selling advertisements and so on. When in Taiwan we as say social media we think of the social sector run media platforms and by social sector I mean something like people's co-ops the collaborative project out of the academia for example the National Taiwan University a bunch of students have been running a site pet project that's entirely not for profit that has no advertisers nor shareholders really. And it's called the PTT is the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit that has no obligation to shareholders or advertisers but rather just governed by the people who participate and it's open source by the way you can find the source code on GitHub. So it is on PTT instead of on Facebook or Instagram that's the Dr. Lee Wenliang's message around the end of 2019 that says and I quote there are seven new SARS cases that gets first reposted on the PTT by a young doctor with the name No More Pipe and people just start uploading her message and triaging the message to say that it actually looks legit that it looks like a real SARS case is happening again and this in turn makes it possible for us to start health inspection for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day the first day of 2020 but imagine if this is strong amidst those divisive anti-social polarized views in a more anti-social corner of the private sector run social media then chances are that it will not be discovered or triaged that efficiently and that quickly. And so I think the main point I want to get across is that anti-social media and pro-social media are both social media but the true social media that can serve as a digital public infrastructure like your local parks and libraries need to be run by the social sector with a deliberate empowerment by the public sector saying that we are going to run our town hall there instead of on the nearby nightclub. Wow, that's awesome. I'm going to pass it off to Madison because I know she has a couple of questions too. Yeah, so we all know that Audrey is very experienced in technology but now we're going to talk about a topic that was touched on a little bit earlier which is education. Something that Audrey also knows a lot about. So it's kind of clear to people that there's a stigma against students taking an untraditional education path whatever that means for different students. Many see it as a sign of low intelligence or even a lack of ability but in your case, as we touched on a little bit already it was the exact opposite. So maybe it would be cool if you could talk a little bit more about what led you to leave the education system of Taiwan and to follow that up, how would you design the education system to be more adaptable to those alternative paths? Yeah, I think in Taiwan we've had more than 10 years, a decade of what we call the experimental education system and system allows up to 10% of students in Taiwan nowadays also covers the higher education as well but previously only on the basic education level up to 18 years old to basically write up their own curriculum and say that I want to study it with my family, with my friends, with this institution that's definitely not a school and things like that. And as long as it looks legit to the municipal review board then they can just go ahead and follow that curriculum. And so enjoy the same rights and the responsibilities of any children of the same age. And so because of this there's less of a stigma when you have literally like 10% of people just adopting their own curricula. So we see them and by them I say also us, I guess because I'm also a schooler. I see experimental education people as more like the research arm to the basic education curricula. And after 10 years of research we figured out something that works really well for the Taiwanese society. For example, the emphasis on autonomy interaction on the common good and these are what motivates people. And there's also alternate education that focus more on road memorization and so on but with assistive intelligence it's less convincing to the Taiwanese society now. And so after 10 years of like a swarm of experimental education methods we picked the ones that did work and write it into the basic education curriculum so that nowadays even in a basic education you still have hours of capital projects of like learning across different generations across different disciplines across different places and so on. And so anyone who wants the curriculum to change a little bit can work with their school-based curriculum committee without writing their encyclical itself. And now the alternative education community after getting merged right there they started as a fork of the basic education after that got gets merged now shifted to an even more radical experimentation for example, using an entire city as a campus instead of having any particular campus of the indigenous nations doesn't learn Mandarin or English from the very beginning but start with their own language and so on. So like even more daring experiments to the curriculum but I think this general research versus development relationship is the relationship that can ease a lot of this stigma. Absolutely and it makes me wonder because I think about the metric system we use in the US especially to measure like how students are learning so that's great standardized tests and I'm sure that the traditional like standardized system in Taiwan is similar. So I'd like to hear more about how those metrics change for a lot of the experimental education that you've heard about and in the future how can we create metrics that both allow people freedom to choose their education path but also ensure that they're actually learning and becoming prepared for the next one. This is a great question. In Taiwan we've abolished all the metrics that's based on individual to individual competition which used to be the thing when I was a child but we did away with that all together. So people would not feel pressured relative to their classmate can actually start to form co-creation teams with their classmates and that's one of the main impetus to the curriculum reform a couple years ago that took effect a couple years ago. And the other thing is that on a higher education we're now focusing on the kind of day-to-day journeys of the people in their basic education so that when you're applying for example for a university now more than half of the consideration will be by the actual project that you have contributed and this is what we call PBL or purpose-based learning that is to say if you can determine your capstone project's purpose usually with the help of the Sustainable Development Goals because there's like a very clear target of 169 target across the 17 global goals which serves as a great framework of how much a common purpose your personal project has been contributing to the world and using that as a common criteria is much more easy for the university to assemble the student who have completed all sorts of different portfolios together so that they can achieve something larger during their undergrad study as part of for example the university social responsibility program or USR in Taiwan which allows people to earn credits or even finish a graduate level diploma solely by solving something that is of common value to the local environment or social developments and so I think the SDGs is a really good example and that's why we always frame every workout that I do even my job description in terms of the 17 global goals. See I love that because it's not just about project-based learning being able to create a project it's purpose-based learning like the project has to have purpose and so I love that and Rohan asked an interesting question here says Taiwan's economy is diversified but how would a plan like this work for developing countries I'm guessing in terms of education? Well I mean Taiwan was a developing country not too long ago certainly when I was a child and we only become the developed country in WTO I think a couple years back and only this year we become a full democracy right so we still remember how it was when Taiwan was a developing country and I think in Taiwan's trajectory of development in our constitution we put in our constitutional amendments three things the state needs to guarantee universal healthcare, universal education especially at basic education level and universal communication that includes of course broadband as a human rights and having these three promises that forms our kind of socialist core everything else is on the capitalist core this dual core constitution really makes sure that when people want to diversify their interests and so on there is a safety net because they could be assured that both their grandparents or their grandchildren will enjoy pretty good health and education and communication rights while they can pursue their different ideas of design of society changing innovations and so on and if they fail loudly and quickly and then people thank them for it because then it drives the society forward so have a good safety net I think this is really important also important to build solidarity across people who like believe in different positions because if you have a good safety net then people can always go back and say hey we nevertheless managed to agree for example like family value is important despite one side saying that the traditional families need to be respected and one side says the marriage equality need to be addressed and so we went together and co-created this social innovation called marrying the bylaws but not the in-laws so in Taiwan went to same sex people wed they wed as individuals but their families don't form kinship relationships and so that makes to both sides happy or at least like happier and that's how we get to the first country in Asia to legalize marriage equality without leaving a large gap a large resentment in the society so I think that's also thanks to the communication broadband as a human rights of people across all generations can feel safe to express their views and contributes to this final like implementation of this social innovation absolutely and what you said about how interconnected everything is really struck me because it's not just like an isolated good education system it's an overall flourishing democracy because like you said people aren't going to want to take risks with their education or their career if they don't feel like they have that safety net and the support and so that kind of goes on to another question in line with education so I mean right now there is an overwhelming number of career choices and many of us struggle knowing what the right path is I know that a lot of the audience members probably resonate with that as well and it seems as though you knew what you wanted to do and go into tech early on so what helped you find that perfect fit yeah I think that's because I was very much into mathematics but I really do not like math that's to say hand-based calculations and so when I discovered that computers can well compute for me it's like what Steve Jobs called a bicycle of the mind right I still control the direction but now I can do much more with my with my mind on the mathematical concepts instead of being bogged down by the calculations and later on I also discovered the internet as I mentioned on the internet I don't have to do everything by myself right I can just find something that has worked 80% to my imagined purpose and I just fulfill the other 20% and then share it again to the community so that they can pick it up and develop it again and so basically a internet-based community is what I would suggest because that makes sure that you don't feel alone even if you are the only person in your neighborhood caring about I don't democracy as a technology then by joining civics unplugged you can find like-minded people who care about things in pretty much the same angle and with that in mind you can then feel free to explore whichever implication that this idea brings you and always knowing that whatever you learned successful or not will be of broad use and benefits to your community and so internet-based community I think is the main answer because I engage the community as early as when I was 12 so I've never felt alone and I always feel supported no matter how many turns that I make in my so-called career because I'm really a slash so at the moment at Digital Minister the TW slash board member Radical Exchange I was co-founding something with the Vitalik buttering and trying out on the Ethereum community and slash for example board member in the Digital Future Society which thinks how to apply time communication to the future of assistive intelligence collective intelligence and so on so anything that I feel interested in I just add another slash too much of description and that's also something that's only possible because of the internet community that's I engage with Yes, Audrey you're preaching to the choir in terms of digital first communities rise and see you or both first of its kind digital communities for young people I know that for me it completely changed my life plan in terms of my education and what I want to do in the future so totally resonate with that and I think that's so key as well and so another question a participant wanted to know obviously you are the Digital Minister of Taiwan you've had a lot of success in technology so people want to know is there a secret to being successful in technology what helped you become so successful at a young age Yeah, the secret is you're always successful if you bring technology to the people and you're rarely successful when you ask people to adapt to technology and so this is what I mean by assistive intelligence assistive technologies because if you are a technologist you have two different ways to think about things like AI you can think assistively meaning that you design something like my eyeglass good example the person who designed the eyeglass really doesn't have any control how I use my eyeglass and it's lying to me meaning that I want to see better it helps me see better and it's accountable meaning that if it fails in some way I can repair it myself or I can bring it to another person who can repair it without asking permission or even knowledge from the original designer of this particular class but imagine if instead of assistive technology they chose the authoritarian technology way then the eyeglass will probably see what I see and pop up an advertisement for 10 seconds when they deem that I see something interesting and if it fails I'll probably have to pay like 10 000 dollars in the license fee before even attempting to reverse engineering the source code and things like that so they may have control but actually it goes against most of the time with the personal rationality of interest of the person using the eyeglass and so before long the eyeglass will not be used I'm not saying anything about any particular brand but what I'm trying to say is that if it's aligned to the people if you design in a way with humility empowering your fellow citizens instead of treating them merely as users as some other industry that treats its customers users then you will work always successfully because the things that doesn't work in the actual field people will be able to then fix it to reappropriate your technology and on an appropriate way that's what we call appropriate technology and you will learn from the people who remix your technology and it's all in all a good community but if you keep to the authoritarian path then you have to make all the decisions and human are human beings you can't really anticipate all the use cases and therefore it's much harder to succeed absolutely and to relate back to what you were talking about earlier with democracy as a technology that seems me part of the secret why Taiwan's democracy has been just so flourishing it's because it follows kind of like what you said like the secret makes it about the people and I just think that that's super cool I had never thought about it like that so yeah and then another question the audience is composed of 15 to 17 year olds from around the world as we've mentioned so we want to know what advice would you give to 15 year old Audrey? yeah well 15 year old I'm already dropped out of the middle school and already started my first company co-founded it and so I think my main recommendation to the 15 year old Audrey is that even though your English is pretty bad at the time it's not a problem just start traveling around the world because people don't care about pronunciations about the accents people don't care about the grammatical errors right if you just say what's on your mind people figure it out anyway that's how the world works because my English wasn't that good to begin with I waited until when I was 25 years old to start touring the globe to basically couch serve like 20 CDs in a very short time of two years and I was like very self-conscious about my English ability but then I discovered it's not a problem at all this is not something that you need to score a perfect score in order to to communicate with your fellow homo-sabians or fellow human beings a little bit of grasp of vocabulary can can be quite sufficient and so that would be my main suggestion absolutely and I think that is all the questions we have Audrey I know that you are very busy so seriously thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us and thank you all for submitting your questions before the event and now now we are going to transition to talking more about rise so Audrey if you stick around I don't know you're busy thank you for the great questions and have a good local time everyone live long and prosper bye bye