Could I get a picture of you, by any chance?

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. I think that’s pretty much everything I wanted to ask about.

And to what degree should they be setting up their own organizations? What the benefits are for either/or?

I think a big question I personally had about the establishment of that foundation is to what degree should these companies with huge resources and huge, I guess, academic brainpower, donate their resources and brainpower to organizations that have been around for much longer and have been doing that work ...

I’m just interested because I get the sense that some of these organizations are set up very thoughtfully and some of them maybe do not have as much thought put into them.

Got you. Right.

This is just purely out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation, and that entire...?

Right, traditional nonprofit and the...

Microsoft does this new 2015 civic kind of thing, and Facebook with Internet For All, and all of that. Of all of these corporate organizations, would you say if there is one or any that is doing some kind of research that is actually significant or is actually helpful towards ...

Google does all of that - I want to say it’s a smart city initiative - it’s Sidewalk Labs, right?

I’ll definitely look into that, because it’s something I’ve personally been trying to figure out. These couple years of college is indeed, like which companies out there are really only dipping their toes into civic tech and tech for social impact, and all of that for the brand name, or ...

Interesting.

There’s a whole lot of companies out there talking about doing social impact, when 99 percent of their work is the other direction.

Make a third option. You mentioned Red Hat and Mozilla as being very prominent kind of best-of-both-worlds organizations. Those are two that I’m familiar with. Are there any others that you would say are possibly lesser known, but is also actually the best of both worlds?

Right. One or two.

It is the one, singular narrative.

Yeah.

Right.

Undergrads.

I was wondering if you had any advice or recommendations or things that I should keep in mind as I go through this process.

All the resources that are provided are gearing them towards corporate work and the typical kind of cubicle lifestyle. I’ve been trying to set up some kind of organization at my school that offers more resources and makes tech for some sort of impact work a little bit more accessible.

This might be going a little bit off topic. For context, in my experience, a lot of college students in the US, especially who are in the tech industry or are studying tech-related things, really want to make some kind of impact on the problems that they learn in class.

Thank you. That’s really inspiring in a way. I’m going to take a quick look again.

For sure.

The reason I ask is because I am going to be there this summer, but Mozilla is more of in the future kind of thing. I’m trying to figure out how to get the most I can out of something I’m certain I’m going to be there for, and then ...

I’ll look into it. I have a more direct connection with them, and I want to be able to track people down, physically. Meanwhile, for Mozilla, it’s more emailing people and hoping they will reply.

Is it called the civic tech engagement, or...?

Right. You mentioned that there’s a new department within Microsoft that does this.

I’m trying to think. Mozilla, the organization itself, you’ve spoken about honestly compared to Microsoft, it’s a lot more closer to the community in a lot of ways.

Got it. It’s just right there, kind of in the middle.

Mm-hmm.

Cyber security, information security, I want to say. The connection I had with Mozilla was we were working with data security when it comes to Firefox. I was wondering if any of that has connected to civic tech, or if there isn’t enough with civic tech or going broader tech ...

Would you say there is any interesting questions or projects that are related to the topic of security for both of these companies or both of these organizations?

Oh, yeah.

You mentioned a little bit about Mozilla. I would like to hear more about that, because I have connections to both organizations, but I want to know which ones to specifically ask for.

I realize that in civic tech and I guess the broader field of computational social sciences, all of that, everything’s connected. I was wondering off the top of my head if you know of any significant research or projects going on at Microsoft, specifically.

I’m going to really quickly make sure that I’ve asked about what I’ve wanted to ask about. Something I’m interested in is trying to find connections with the connections I already have.

It definitely sounds like TicTec is a bit more front facing in a lot of ways.

How does it lie on the spectrum of...

Would you say that it’s pretty...?

Have you been to, I want to say it’s called TicTec, or how would you say it?

Right, the core political issues.

For sure.

Right. I definitely am trying to look at the ones that are more critical or the ones that are more introspective.

There’s a gazillion tech-for-social-benefit organizations and conferences in the world. I’ve been looking through a lot of them. Some of them are very self-congratulatory, where everyone shows up and...

While in Taiwan, I’ve seen a lot of conferences and meet-ups that are connected to civic tech pop up. Most of them are very East Asia-focused, for example, or East Asia and Europe. Which I find really interesting, but in terms of what I need to find, I need to ...

I’m trying to think of what else I was going to ask. There’s the cross-cultural piece. Are there any specific names that come to mind either of prominent researchers in the field or conferences that are especially international?

If any more of them comes to mind, definitely send them to me because I want to know how they do it. I think, especially in the US, there’s a whole lot of, "Let’s bridge the gap. Let’s bring the two sides together." It’s always interesting to see what ways ...