Hello?

Hello.

Hi, Audrey

This is Audrey.

How are you doing?

Pretty good. Can you hear me just...?

How are you?

Pretty good.

I’m in a Starbucks, actually. That’s why the Internet is not very good.

I want to just let you know that there is now a possibility for me to leave New York City a day later, the night of 23rd. I don’t whether you still have any time slot that day, but there is now a possibility.

I’m arriving on the 22nd in the evening. On the 23rd, I have a dinner in the evening, but I can do breakfast, if that’s OK with you.

That sounds awesome. I will let my colleagues know.

I can do breakfast. OK, great. That’ll be fantastic. That’d be wonderful. I’ll see you on the 23rd?

This is just a possibility because they have to change the airline tickets. We’re now just collecting the possible meetings on that day to justify the one extra day of stay.

Breakfast would work for you, right?

I can understand. Do you have time now so I can...?

Yeah, I do have time now, so we can still chat.

Just in case. Basically, I’ve been doing a lot of work in Taipei and Taiwan with the Shin Kong Life Foundation. Two days ago, I was reading a google alert on Taiwan and something just popped up on my email saying that there’s a Taiwanese delegation going to the UN.

During the UNGA. That’s right.

I said, "I need to talk to them." Then I spoke to the Shin Kong Life Foundation in Taiwan. I said, "I don’t know if these guys know what we’ve been doing with you." They said, "Oh, my god. Please, we will do everything so you can to meet them." I said, "I’m going to try."

Just a very quick background. I run a tech company in the UK, but recently, I founded an organization called iamtheCODE.

Yeah, I’ve read all the online materials. You can assume that I’ve read all that.

[laughs] You know? OK. Then basically, what we’re trying to do in Taiwan is, this Shin Kong Life Foundation, they’ve been absolutely great. I was there for five days. They organized so many meetings.

I meet the people in government. They were excited. They really welcome me very, very nicely. I told them i will come back to Taiwan. Two things we discussed. They wanted us to come back in Taipei to meet other partners. Then the second thing they wanted us to do is to help them with our curriculum and computers.

We have a very nice content. We have a very nice curriculum around the SDGs, over 1,200 lesson plans, totally based on the SDGs challenges, tracks, and all of that.

That’s great.

What we wanted to do, really, was to get some funding to develop this further with made in Taiwan products. The Shin Kong Life Foundation, they connected us with a lady there who has got a foundation.

She’s very interested in helping iamtheCODE. We were advise to meet with you. Our advisor said: "Maybe when you speak to the delegation, you can talk to them about how you can develop the curriculum even further with the Taiwanese backup."

I wanted to meet you just to really give you some ideas of how we can work together. We have a very nice plan to...We’re going to be the first organization working with you to bring this into Taiwan. The hackathon was amazing.

We had some young people, some old people. They loved it for two days, but unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time. Now, everybody wants us to come back. I think this will be very, very good for made in Taiwan, and really focus on the SDGs. I wanted to meet you for that.

Certainly. Before I served in the cabinet as the digital minister two years ago, I am in the K to 12 curriculum development committee. We have a new K to 12 curriculum that’s going to roll out next year, with computational thinking, design thinking, media literacy, critical thinking, and so on as the root of it.

I’ll be very happy to talk over that over breakfast, because I think this is totally in line with the social innovation plan that I’m heading at the moment. We have a four-year, about $300 million USD plan in Taiwan to do basically three things:

First, using SDG as the common index for all the social innovations that’s happening in Taiwan, so that can help. As you said, made in Taiwan. The second thing is then to enlist the university social responsibility programs, the USR programs, as well as the K to 12 new curriculum to make SDG as part of the education curriculum in a very deep way.

That’s amazing.

Computational thinking, democratization of AI, and so on. The third thing is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is now part of the plan, which is why I’m the delegate this year, as opposed to last year. We’ll make sure that our Ministry of Foreign Affairs people will be there as well.

We’re shifting our foreign assistance policies from funding specific parties, people, or whatever to funding the governance, the digital opportunity to a system, rather than particular factions.

Wow. That’s amazing.

I think this very much will align to your mission.

It’s so great. It’s so fantastic. The other thing also we do, you just touched on it, is the pre-21 framework, the 21st century learning skills. We align this with the SDGs now. It’s really fantastic. Also, one of the things we can also look into, I don’t know.

African countries, they really like Taiwan, but it’s a bit of a deep dive. I think content, let’s say we find a way of working together. This content could be spread out across Africa, in the Middle East, and in many, many countries. The reach is massive.

We just partnered with the Duke of York Organisation. We’ve been working with him to develop this amazing platform called idea.org.uk. It is a badge system. It’s very easy to translate in Taiwanese as well. It’s free content. We are their partner and can use the content with you, you can have your own badge, it’s very easy for me to talk to them on your behalf. The content is beautiful. We have a blockchain badge so a young girl or a young boy sitting down in Taipei, in Senegal, or in Brazil can learn about blockchain in about two weeks.

They can even build their own tech solutions. It’s all free. All the content is free. All they need is a little funding to run the activities physically, but also to give this to people. I think, like you said, it’s very timely.

I’m happy to make the connection with them. When you come in London, you can even have Skype with the lady at the Palace. They’re amazing. It’s really great. They’re giving this content to all the commonwealth countries. I don’t know if you know, there are 52.

It’s all free, and so now, we are using this content in our hackathons, boot camps, workshops, breakfasts for businesses, making sure businesses are aligned with the SDGs, and to educate them about them.

Also, give them some ideas of how to implement them in their companies. It’s really fantastic.

Just as a clarifying question, the curriculum about SDG you talked about, is this part of the I Am the Code, or it is separate?

Yes. It’s part of the I Am the Code. What happened is, many organizations didn’t have any curriculum, tracks, or challenges. We then designed our own. We’ve been trying to get funding for this for a very long time to actually put it into a very CRM system, a very nice, downloadable place.

Actually, our idea was to put it on the Raspberry Pi, because we have our own computer kit, which is like a DIY kit where children can put together and learn how to code.

I know, yes.

Many of them participated in the One Laptop Per Child program, way back when. The collaborative spreadsheet in the one OLPC XO, called SocialCalc, I personally contributed. We were very in line with the work that you’re doing.

The One Laptop Per Child hasn’t been popular enough. It’s actually very dead now in many, many countries. What we did is we learned from the mistakes of all these organization in the past. When they came to Africa and many marginalized communities...

Our primary targets are the marginalized community. It’s people who don’t have access. The reason why they failed is because they didn’t have any curriculum like we did.

That’s exactly right.

They also didn’t have any content. It was just like, "OK, let’s give an African child a laptop." It was like a press stunt for them.

Right.

Then they wasted a lot of money in government, because the African government, you guys are so advanced compared to us. They didn’t understand that actually, you need to have a very clear curriculum of content, the teachers, and the community, so they failed.

Then I went to many African countries. I saw the laptop being piled up in places. I was so sad. Then I came back home. I said, "OK, I’m going to do something." I didn’t go to school. I personally had to teach myself how to code seven languages myself.

Then I decided to use the skills, the way I learned. I designed my own learning. Then decided that we’re going to do something very cheap, very simple for everybody around the world. You can learn how to code from Nepal to Afghanistan very easily.

The next phase for me right now is to, because I’ve been working on the UN issues for over 15 years now. MDGs. I supported Kofi Annan for 3 years on climate change and adaptation. I also supported the SDGs task force and focused on engagement for marginalized communities.

I didn’t want the SDGs to be just like a high level thing at the UN. How do we get young girls from Senegal, from Taipei, from all around the world, to participate in the conversation advancing the SDGs?

Taiwan was in my mind and I was honoured to be invited by the Shin Kong Life Foundation. They sponsor the hackathon and paid for my travel to come. They were really impressed. They showed all the work to their board. They were all happy.

It will be made in Taiwan, but at the same time, being used all around the world. We will be the first team to do this. I wanted to give that opportunity to Taiwan. Mrs. Wu, she’s a very nice lady. She’s been pushing and helping us to make sure this is made in Taiwan. She likes Taiwan. [laughs]

"We have to do it in Taiwan. We have to do it in Taiwan." She’s pushing for this to happen in Taiwan. I’m happy to do that there as well. That’s where we are right now.

Thank you for the context and background. I think we’re very, very much aligned in the work that we’re doing. Concretely speaking, I have a column in the Business Weekly magazine in Taiwan where we use to raise awareness on various social innovations.

We have previously raised awareness on another open coding platform, the MIT Media Lab self-driving tricycles. They are self-driving cars, but actually, tricycles are very safe. We also did hackathons in the social innovation lab.

There’s various civic technologies, communities that we engage very deeply so that people can, because you’re a CIC, right?

Yeah.

Structured for social innovation.

Yeah, a lab for innovation.

Then I think this is quite an attractive project for Taiwanese engineers, both software and hardware engineers.

I agree. No, it’s fantastic. When I went to the National Institute of Technology, it was like my mind blew. I wanted to stay there so much. I was like, "Oh, my god. This is the right place." I was so excited. I met lots of entrepreneurs working on 3D printing, they took my 3D image. It was cool.

My meeting, including face-to-face meetings, usually have a condition of what we call radical transparency, meaning that we will make a transcript of our conversation. You can edit it for 10 days afterwards, after which we publish it to the Internet.

Everybody, after they google for your name or whatever, it will show up.

I think this works for you as well as it works for me, because we both want to get the messages out?

Yes. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for your time as well.

I’ll see you on the 23rd. I will speak to your team, and we organize it.

I will let you know. How early can you begin the conversation, like 8:00, 8:30?

Yeah, I’m easy. I usually go running in the morning. It’s no problem for me.

Not a problem for you.

Whatever’s better for you. No worries.

I will let me team know, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Thank you so much.

Cheers.

Thank you, Audrey. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, bye-bye.