Of course, China is not...They have their own game, but they’re not playing with us. I’m playing really hard ball with those guys and they come back again and want me to join.

I said, "Don’t call me, and tell them don’t even call me. Unless this changes, we don’t want to belong. No, we are not a political organization. If you are interested in ICT development, forget politics for a minute, and think about how you’re going to work together."

He said, "Now, China says if you agree to put Taiwan a province of China, then you will let you in." I said, "You tell China, OK, that first of all I resent being bullied, number one. Number two, we don’t want to belong to your organization belong. This is ...

I called him and I said, "Sergei, go find out what’s going on in your old group there." He called me back and said, "I don’t know how to tell you this, but you got to get rid of Taiwan." "Excuse me?"

I had to resubmit, and I knew something was wrong. Finally, I couldn’t get any answer. I kept on calling the office and said, "Listen, you guys invited me. What are you doing?" I found out that one of the guys on the selection committee, former selection committee guys, was ...

I’ve been associated with them for many years, and they said to me, "You need to join ECOSOC. You need to be part of the ECOSOC group," and I said, "Fine." We filled out a long application, and waited a year and they said, "Well, you missed the deadline." "What ...

When we applied, keep in mind that we represent the ICT industry, so the United Nations, when you listen to anything they say, every speech they give has something to do with ICT, because it’s a name on every one of their goals. There’s a factor in it.

Exactly, that’s how it works. We need your help to get the right people in the room.

Then you get better. That’s right.

Yeah. Some countries think this is a great opportunity, so they load the program with local people. What happens is they get killed, and people walk out. What is much better is for you to take the global lead of inviting people to your home and to be able to ...

That’s exactly right, but I think some countries...

Finally, the benefit that you have by doing this is in the past a country would say, "This is great. We’re going to tell everybody what we’re doing, and boy oh boy we’re going bring people in and we’re going to sell products and services." That’s the worst thing you ...

We desperately need to pull the resources together particularly in your office and whatever you can do with us and anyone else that can help and get this message out every way, shape or form. We’ve got a fairly strong program, but more importantly it’s what this program is doing. ...

We were six months behind that...

Even with all that. Based on that scenario that we’re six months behind even doing this...

Let’s say we give them 50 messages. When you pick up the phone and talk to the chief marketing officer at some company anywhere, "Have you ever heard of WCIT?" They have no idea what you’re talking about.

That’s what you got to do, and as you well know you have to hit them from different angles. It’s not a brochure. It’s not a radio program. It’s all the above and even then you’re taking a risk that they will forget. I give an example of I’m encouraging ...

I don’t think so, no. Having done this for many years my...It’s more than theory. It’s based on fact, but unless you hit people about 12 times with a message they’re not going to buy, and even that has to be divided into stages. You need to make them aware, ...

We got 350 ministers we’re putting on this list, and every week we’re going to send out one or two messages to them, and that’s going to be very limited. It’s going to make people aware of Taiwan by the time we’re done in the World Congress, but will it ...

That’s one thing. What we’re doing at WITSA, we have 82 countries, but we’re not taking the chance of thinking these 82 countries is going to bring us 800 people, because we’re mostly in the developing countries. What we just did is we purchased 130,000 email addresses, every CEO, every ...

They don’t know how to do that, that’s great. I’d say they don’t know how to reach to the Philippines, never mind...

Here’s what we’re doing. We have a very limited capability in the project’s office in terms of marketing. I’m not blaming anyone, I’m just saying that the capabilities of the project office is not globally oriented, that they don’t understand how to market globally.

I’m not going to talk about why that’s the case. I am telling you you have 100 days. We need to get this information out to everyone on earth about what we’re going to have here so we sell this thing out and you can be proud of what you ...

I will be frank with you because I don’t know any other way. We need to spread the good word about this event and we need to do it as rapidly as possible. I say you, as a society, is way behind in terms of marketing the event.

WCIT, but at the same time highlight Taiwan as a prime example. We’ve just changed our logo to WCIT 2017, Living the Digital Dream in Taiwan.

Now, my concluding remark is that, where we need your help desperately is we have an event where we’re trying to attract about 2,000 people or more to Taipei for this purpose in terms of moving the ball...

Any of these desperate operations around the world. However, if we were to do our job properly, the power of the benefits of a digital technology and society would eventually erode the dictatorships because of knowledge.

If you take a look at it, and as long as North Korea is North Korea, it’s not going to happen. As long as China is China, it’s not going to happen in terms of the way they’re setting out. They’re not going to allow that development of ICT in ...

When we can rest, and this includes yourself, is when everybody in this world is connected and everybody is benefiting from ICT. The promise of the digital age actually came true. Let me just conclude by saying that there’s no guarantee that that’s going to happen.

The idea is we have now a pretty well-structured approach to having one place every year that the world can go to that they can learn about what’s going on in terms of developing ICT best practices, broadband connectivity, security so that the subject matter doesn’t change a lot. We’re ...

Every year, we create these recommendations from one session to another. We use those recommendations as a platform to begin the next session. This is what we said in 2014, ’15, ’16, ’17.

Exactly. What now? How are we going to get connected to the next generation? Who’s going to do it? How are we doing it? What are the best practices?

Yeah, I understand you.

They can come in, but they better be talking about...

Everybody get together and now talk about how do we get more people connected. Instead of talking about in the past when we talk about broadband connectivity, we’d bring in the standards people talk about how do you standardize.

The World Congress began to focus really in 2014 on a one theme, period. The theme in ’14, ’16, ’17, and from now on, this is as long as I’m in charge, it will be fulfilling the promise of the digital age.

Point is that if you’re 40, you know what to do to get up to 30 and 20. We didn’t have that measurement before. We didn’t have a sense of, "OK, if I did this, I can move up."

We know this, because we see it over and over again. We have prime examples. We have the World Economic Forum produces this Networked Readiness Report. We know the benefits of being at the top of that list. You’re 13 on the list this year.

We didn’t have the focus. As the years went by, we now, as you well know, we have a vision of what this world could look like in a digital world, what a smart city would look like, what a smart classroom would look like, what a smart hospital would ...

For example, in 2010, we were in the midst of a recession. We did the event in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, even though the event was rated the best event in Europe in 2010, it had little to do with moving the ball. It had everything to do with ...

Now, the other thing we do, and the reason I’m here, is we have the honor of producing a World Congress where we now bring the world together. For many years, this was kind of a ship without a direction.

Hopefully, they’ll learn something and say, "This is probably a good thing. Maybe we ought to have a special emphasis on training women in STEM and technology." That’s what we do. We produce papers.

"Do what you need to do. Work with universities and so on to get more women into the workforce, and here’s why," and we list the statistics of what the benefits are. We then turn that over to our member in 82 countries and say, "Take this paper, go sit ...

What we do is we’re creating worth of five to seven major policy papers every year. We call it principal papers. We say, "OK, if the subject is women in IT, we’re not telling you to hire women. We are telling you, based on our experience, that it’s a really ...

What we say is that if you agree that ICT is a good thing and that people can benefit from it, and you’re willing to develop in your country, then you may want to look to best practices from other countries with the industry. We can share those best practices ...

There’s policy papers and policy work that is critical for us to share with governments. As you’re looking at taxation, as you’re looking at regulations, as you’re looking at things, what does the industry say about these things? It’s important to note that we don’t demand anything. We don’t stand ...

If you had to pick the major responsibility that we have is to make sure more people get connected and get more people enjoying the benefits of ICT. Audrey, we have a lot of different ways to promote the message in terms of getting more people connected, but there’s two ...

We’ve grown now, CISA from Taiwan. We’ve grown now to 82 members, 82 countries. We represent about 90 percent of the ICT industry, and that’s a big responsibility, because it’s our job to lead the effort in terms of development of ICT around the globe because we’re the industry.

In the beginning there were, I don’t know, 5, 10, 12 countries that got together and said, "You know, as this thing’s maybe we ought to talk to each other." They formed the World Information Technology and Services Alliance. It’s a bigger alliance, and in order to belong to the ...

The organization grew along the lines of the revolution in technology. We didn’t really start to mushroom until the late ’90s if you look back in history. You find that time where the Internet was coming more pervasive, and more people were getting computers, and it became a household name, ...