Really?

It’s so great. I definitely have a lot of perspectives I saw abroad, Boston’s one example, or even in my travels that I don’t know where to share it or what to do with that.

All day. [laughs] I have to check with my boyfriend, but for sure.

I definitely need to meet Aaron, then.

It’d be great if all these different student clubs knew about these kinds of opportunities.

It was more for socializing.

I went to a different university in Canada. There’s a student chapter. It was a Taiwanese club, but they didn’t have information on how to connect back to Taiwanese government or anything like that.

He’s studying at U of T or he works at U of T?

Does he live here?

Studies?

You’d get a more diverse experience. A lot of people I know want to go back. They don’t know the opportunities, because they don’t have a network.

I was going to suggest that you should do longer style boot camps. Then, for people like me, Taiwanese immigrants, I really care to help, I want to get involved, but I don’t know where to start. It would be very interesting if we could create boot camps and recruited, ...

Oh, OK. Great.

I participated in a lot of hackathons. I also ran some hackathons, and I find that you don’t have enough time to think through the problem, and then people aren’t learning the right tools. They don’t have enough time to learn how to solve a problem right and then they ...

I’m glad you like it too. The other thing I noticed...This is not government-related but when I was there, that was 2014 so it was a while ago, but a lot of the schools run boot camps about entrepreneurship. There’s definitely the hackathons that are weekend events. To me, it’s ...

Oh, I like that.

Yeah. Texting.

But it’s just collecting garbage.

It’s pretty cool stuff. I think it’s cool.

Then the garbage pickup trucks would not obstruct traffic.

Then they figured out a way to do it with Waze, so they partnered with Waze. Have you seen this?

The problem is, Boston traffic can get very congested and you don’t know which garbage you should pick up first. They installed smart garbage bins, so they only pick up the garbage that’s at full capacity.

One example is garbage collection, which sounds simple, but the way they used to collect garbage, which...I think Toronto does it the same way right now, is just someone goes around and collects the garbage with one route. It’s a fixed route.

Yes. It’s a competition. A lot of things they tackled were very small problems, city-level problems, but very smart ways of solving it.

Yeah, empowering them. Other things that the mayor’s office did that I just learned about in class, so I took a class about this as well. They solved a lot of problems that the government couldn’t solve on their own, because they don’t have the technology or the developers or ...

We were like, we need to build a relationship. We need to see that they’re changing their way of life. Senior citizens actually was the best fit for what we were doing. We got iPads put in senior homes and taught them how to use technology. In the end, that’s ...

Then we changed to targeting senior citizens because there’s so many issues with maintaining a relationship. A lot of people we were working with, we would never see them again. [laughs]

It was called Mobilizr, but it’s now called GridRise.

Through that, I met some key people who ran the homeless programs in Boston. They helped me with my non-profit. That was very easy. [laughs]

Actually, anyone can meet with someone from the mayor’s office. You book it. It’s a public calendar. You book a meeting. They talk to you. They learn about what you need. They connect you to someone in the government.

That’s how I got connected to the innovation arm at the mayor’s office. They’re called M-O-N-U-M, Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. A part of what they do is connect the government to private companies, and its citizens. Because I had my own non-profit, I could meet...

Basically, in the US, people get new smartphones all the time. I was collecting used smartphones and redistributing them to the homeless, teaching them how to use smartphones.

I was in Boston. I was starting my own non-profit. The non-profit was...