Audrey Tang: commitment

Transcript context

…What are your skills of rotation and scaling? How do you use them in the government? Yes, scaling means that taking something that used to only happen between two people or three people that’s listening intently and scaling it — using technology to make sure that when I tour around Taiwan, I can still listen intently to people who are social innovators in their indigenous nation or their remote island or rural areas, but at the same time, through the modern technology, which seems like magic at times, people from five municipalities, from 12 central government ministries, can also listen as intently as I am to the stories and the innovations of the local people. And so that scales the listening idea. By rotation, I mean taking all the sides. Whenever there are people of differing positions on an emerging topic — it could be Uber, it could be eSports, it could be 5G, self-driving vehicles, you name it. If I find that I cannot argue from any particular viewpoint, I will book a couple of days to spend time with that community on ethnographic — just hanging out until I rotate my worldview and until I can argue from their viewpoint. That’s called taking all the sides. Why aren’t there more Audrey Tangs in the other governments of the world?…

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