That’s right.

I think although I may be seen as advocating for next step of gender mainstreaming of what I call post-gender, that it’s built on a feminist movement and on the gender mainstreaming efforts. I have this whole community that is mainstream in the public servants to support me. It’s not ...

Because of this, we would be lost if not for the agenda dashboard, but now with the gender dashboard, and the entire public service doing that for 12 years when the constitutional ruling and the referendum came in, we immediately settled on the way to legalize marriage equality.

The indicators we watch is very comprehensive, and then we make series of changes based on the raw numbers, so that we can know that with each policy introduced are we empowering women, are we empowering people in disadvantaged positions, or are we contributing to patriarchy or some other kinds ...

They review each and every thing that they write. They correct the misconceptions, and they make new measurements and we put them into the gender statistics dashboard, whenever a new policy happens.

Every public servant is required to fill in those gender impact assessment to every single thing that they do, even unrelated to gender, and have the CSO, the Civil Society leaders independently to review them. Our gender equality committee is designed so they have exactly one more seat than the ...

It’s definitely true that Taiwan is especially inclusive and tolerant. We are, after all, the first Asian country that has marriage equality. This is not a coincidence, because we’ve been for the past 12 years, doing what we call gender impact assessment to every single policy and every single draft ...

It definitely helps to bring this experience to fellow advocates no matter which injustice they’re advocating against.

That is true for other advocates that I met, they may be suffering from some social injustice which I can relate with my experience of vulnerability of discriminated against, of transphobia, and things like that, but also can share how I managed to label those internal states and make them ...

Is greatly extended because we happen to share somewhat similar living experiences, whether your gender, or whether your preferred gender expression, or your gender identity, and so on. Also, even more importantly, it gave me a perspective of intersectionality. Meaning that although I do have my privileged positions, I also ...

Very much so. I think having gone through two puberties, really helped the communication, because my mind has various different lived-in experiences that corresponds to people’s different stages in their adolescence, so it means that my range of understanding just the resolution meaning that the finer detail of emotions, of ...

The first openly transgender minister. Everybody may be transgender too.

Swift is now open governance and used on lots of things beyond the Apple ecosystem, and Microsoft now runs GitHub, of all things. I think the success stories gave us a wide-range of playbook to interact with different levels in the bureaucracy to convince them of the benefits of openness ...

Which at that time, is actually maybe even harder than advocacy in Microsoft, because it really wasn’t in Apple’s DNA at the time. Eventually, the people in the open source movement succeeded on both fronts.

Even when I worked with Apple, it was around the time where Apple seriously considered developing a new programming language called Swift in the open. It means not only opening the software, but also opening the governance, meaning that it really let people participate where the language is going, even ...

We had very different challenges alongside the different 20 years or more of open source movement. First, is just to get the idea out, the advocacy work. Very soon, when we do have some good examples such as Red Hat Linux, and the Mozilla browser, which later on become Firefox ...

Very much so. When I was working with the Silicon Valley companies, I’m not really working for them, right, at exactly the same point it’s like as you said a liaison or as I prefer to call it a branch point between the two bodies, between the movement and the ...

They are all part of this Perl community anyway, so when they want some contractual work, some consultancy work, or internationalization work like bringing their product to a Chinese-speaking community, they will contract my company to do so.

I guess job just found me, because I published over a hundred reusable software components on CPAN, and I got thank you emails from the likes of BBC, or from the likes of the Human Genome Project, and things like that.

That was kind of my domain knowledge anyway, I work in search engine in my first start-up in ‘95, so I just contributed whatever I learned at the time into the CPAN, which is a comprehensive Perl archive network.

I remember first doing just consultancy work, just fixing up documentations, just patching up their issues and one of my first work is to provide Traditional Chinese, to Simplified Chinese translation software.

There was this whole movement of pushing free software for economic not a ethical or social perspective. That’s how I got involved in Silicon Valley, just by talking with my free software friends that they were online, but at the same time, they were beginning to get jobs from traditional ...

To open up its source code, and not for altruistic purposes, but rather for commercial purposes, because it makes it easier to maintain. It makes it easier to look at their cybersecurity profile and have volunteer, essentially users were also abusers, to help making things better, improve on things.

When I was visiting Silicon Valley in ‘90, I think it was ‘98 or something, there was this new movement to convince large corporations like Netscape to open up its source code. That would later on become Firefox.

When I was in Taiwan, I’m already kind of maintainer of many Perl, the computer language of the early Web, many Perl applications and I also contributed a local Perl community on Usenet which is a forum system. In any case, with that experience, I’ve always felt at home at ...

I participated in the free software movement really early on. I happened to be visiting Silicon Valley when the open source movement began. Open source is kind of a rebranding of the free software movement.

You can learn computational thinking without a computer, just like you can design thinking without being a professional designer. That is just a kind of habit of the mind, so that’s how I learned program when I was eight years old, that was 1989.

Of course, after a couple month my parents kind of gave in and bought me a personal computer. I always remember programming without computer. It kind of what we’re saying today is called computational thinking.

We didn’t have computers at the time, so I just took A4 paper and split it in half, and drew on the button half a keyboard, a QWERTY keyboard, and started mock typing it and writing the computer’s responses and so on.

I was pretty good at mathematics, but I really isn’t that good at calculation, it’s never been my forte, so I learned about this machine that can automate all the calculations, but leaving the mathematic, the creative part of mathematics to human beings.

I started programming when I was eight years old, and I started without a program, machine, that is to see I learned programming as mathematics. I just had some programming books on the bookshelf, I think from my uncles, and I just started reading it.

Of course, afterwards, there’s Wikipedia, the Wiki Sources, and the whole open access movement, so nowadays the children don’t have to rely on Gutenberg Project alone, but the time for me was really transformational.

People actually have to type them by hand to digitize everything and published it for everybody to peer review and use without these diligent people working in the volunteering and social sectors, it wouldn’t be even possible for me to have a liberal arts education by my own on the ...

I think that also instilled in me a certain optimism, because I haven’t read the things that written after World War, which tend to be more dystopic and pessimistic. But in any case, what I am getting into, is that without this volunteer social sector, that opens up the classics ...

After that copyright gets extended quite a few times, and we only got a new release of material only in the past couple years. During my kind of self-education, I read a lot of classics but they were all written before the first World War, because everything else is still ...

Certainly, without which I wouldn’t have the education. I remember reading gothic classics from the Gutenberg Project, and the Gutenberg Project, as you may know, digitizes everything, all the classics that’s published before the first World War at the time, because they have fallen out of copyright.

I remember my principal hearing that story and thought about it for a minute and said, “OK, from tomorrow on you don’t have to go to school anymore, and I’ll cover for you.” This is actually very happy story in that instill in me a certain optimism to the flexibility ...

Now they didn’t know that I was 14 years old, they didn’t know that my English was not that good at all. It took me ages to compose that email and so on to them and just a fellow researcher. Because of this, a landscape opens before me instead of ...

Now, I remember distinctly telling my principal at the time that instead of going through the university, college, post-doc, and so on, I actually wrote emails to the leading researchers of that field asking them questions, asking for clarifications and so on, and they all replied very kindly.

Sure. I encountered this website called Archive.org and that’s ARXIV, and it’s a preprint website meaning that people who post their journal papers to the peer review. Before it gets published, they post it to their Internet for people to discuss. Because I was doing a science fair project when ...

Yeah, I just posted you a link by Dumbo Feather magazine and that is one of the more personal ones, again, because we make a transcript and/or record everything. Therefore, the transcript is also in the public domain and you are free to use any of the material there.

Thank you.

Literally.

Yeah. I’m pretty optimistic on that.

If you look at the Californian laws about the de-identification, anonymization, and so on, they are clearly already geared toward EU definitions. You do have a common law system in California that successfully, to a degree, adapted the EU norms. It’s just a matter of time to make parts of ...

Of eventual convergence on the EU and the US views on privacy? Yes.

If you just use this view to view data as something that builds relationship over time, then all the jurisdictional differences, and the USMCA paradigm, and the GDPR paradigm, and so on, eventually converge. It’s just every culture have different norms of how quickly to trust strangers, to which degree, ...

This is something the EU and the US both agree on, and what the PRC rejects, kind of on the axiom level rejects that, that trust needs to be earned by the government from citizens.

How would you know? You would demand explanations, and that means accountability. The accountability framework earns the trust, and if we earn the trust of citizens, citizens make trust back somewhat.

The first thing to recognize is that privacy, if you frame it as an individualistic right, then the EU agenda and the US agenda may look different, but if you frame it as something relational, as in fiduciary – if you hand your private data to your lawyer or something, ...