Hi guys, welcome back to this channel and if it's your first time to come across this channel, please do me a favor, consider subscribing to this channel and don't forget to hit that notification bell because it will be the only way that will be updated when I upload a new video. In today's video, I want us to try to talk about something. I moved somewhere yesterday and that is the ministry of labor and what I saw actually prompted me to make a video today such that I can share with you guys. It is quite very serious and it is serious for all residents, for all people living in Kata'i, for people who are residing in Kata'i, it may be on a free visa, it may be on a freelancer visa, it may be on a work visa or it may be you are changing from one employment to another. It is something very, very serious. We need to share it out. Remember, it's funny on this channel where we can try to share out a little information that we can try to benefit or we can try to hope our friends or help even ourselves to be updated on what is happening.  Yesterday I was at the ministry of labor and very many people were actually crying and most of the things, most of the reasons why most of these people might have been crying. It might have mean not maybe their problem, maybe not their fault in one or the other but again you can't begin making a judgment before you get to find out the truth of it all. What am I talking about? Did you know the use of a residence permit? That is the kataidi, what we call the residence permit in this country. Remember, I normally talk about a statement that says when we are given visas here it is what you call a privilege and responsibility. When it comes to responsibility, is our part doing normally follow up and find out is my residence permit still valid which is very important. Actually yesterday I was at the ministry of labor but what I saw was really short touching in one or the other and I saw very many people getting stranded and how are they stranded? They are stranded with what you call expired kataidi or expired residence permit for those that know what I'm talking about. How come? What are the three categories of these people that I saw and I tried to make a thorough research? One, they are people that are sponsoring themselves or what you call the freelancer. Remember, there is a person who is supposed to sign on your papers as you go to renew ID and one person I go to interact with he was like he has not seen his sponsor for quite a long period of time now. So meaning that his ID will not be renewed because he needed a signature of his sponsor. So this is a person that was supposed to be deported back to the country or face what you call penalties of 10,000 kataariyal. Just kind of imagine. Then another person that I go to interact with is a person who changed it from one job to another. Always I keep on advising people I get to talk to or people who get to put comments in the comments section. Always advise you and tell you if you change from one job to another, make sure that within the six months you have your kataidi. It is your responsibility. It is your role but it's also the responsibility of the person that the new employer or the person who is recruiting you as the new employer. What is your responsibility? Your responsibility as a person is to fall up. Please fall up for your ID. You need to have a valid kataariidi. You need to have a valid residence permit all the time because you never know what is going to happen to you. You never know. You may be asked for that ID on the way. You do not have the ID. What are you going to do? There is what you call a deportation jail. You will be taken to jail.  So guys, let's take this as our responsibility. If your ID is about to expire, you are in a country, you are in a company where you are on what you call a work visa. One month prior to your expiration of your ID, inform your concerned parties. Let them know about your ID expired. Do not move outside. Do not risk moving outside with an expired ID.  Remember the penalties are so high. Imagine paying 10,000 kataarii for the penalty. Imagine putting you back to your country. This is something serious for people that I am talking to for anyone who is watching this video. And you know you in these Gulf countries. If you know you are in Qatar, please make sure your ID always has to be valid. Because even at night there is random checking. See, IDs are moving around asking for ID. Imagine a situation they are asking ID with you. And you do not have an ID and you are going to say a lot of words. Not even in a metro as to you have your ID. Your ID is expired. You are not going to be allowed to make excuses.  When the law gets you in the fix, there is no ID. There is no ID I cannot talk. There is no ID I must have this. So let it be your responsibility. I was so much touched seeing fellow friends crying. For either something they knew which I cannot judge or for something that they do not know in one word or the other. It might have been the fault of the company or it might have been the fault in one word or the other. Overstays, the penalties for overstaying. Please make sure you jump out of this kind of things. Make sure you don't fall in the trap of these things as you are in a foreign country. Make sure you are up to date all the time. You are up to date with the documents that are required by that country all the time. All the time. I just request you guys, it is your responsibility. It is not the responsibility of the person that gave you the visa. Much as 50% of it may be to him but you also have a role to play by reminding that person to renew your ID. Reminding that person you don't have a cut ID.  You are in the country for 7 months and you do not have an ID. And you keep him quiet. You sit so comfortable.  You do not have an ID. And you move impeccably just on the way you know they know. No one knows you. The Lord does not know you. It is your responsibility as a person. It is your responsibility to make sure you have that ID. Yes, have that ID but make sure it is expiring one month prior to the expiration. Please report that to the concerned person, report that to the concerned people such that you can have that ID printed for you. Hope I'm trying to share it for you guys. For people who have not gone through this situation, may not know what happens. For people who have gone through this situation of deportation, situation of where the CID will meet you and ask you for an ID. And you have a lot of stories to ask, a lot of resource stories to say. You will have a lot of excuses. Imagine. Remember, this is not your country. It is just your privilege they gave you the visa. Make sure you are up to date with all the travel documents. Hope I've tried to share something with you guys. For people who are seen changing from one job to another, where you need your new employer to get for you an ID, to pay up that amount of money to clear up the ID, please make sure you follow up. You should have an ID at least a maximum of six months of you changing the job. That's the gross period. You should have that ID. In the first three months you change to a new employer. You should have that ID with you because it is very important. You don't have an ID. There's a lot of things you cannot access in this Gulf country. In Qatar there are a lot of things that you cannot access if your ID is not valid. Make sure they have you in the system. Make sure you have that ID. Thank you so much for coming back to this channel. And if you're new, please consider supporting this channel. It's the only channel that you get the true information. We are talking about avoiding deportation, avoiding overstefying. Make sure you always have what you call the residence permit with you. Thank you so much. See you again in the next video as we try to discuss more of these interesting tips, more of this interesting information to help us stay safe, to help us look for trouble, to help us avoid looking for trouble or to help us live in these countries in a very good way. Remember, it is makes from the makes creation. Don't forget to subscribe and support.


So I like how open and helpful the community is. People don't realize who are outside the community that there's so much love and bonding inside the community. I joined in as an outsider. I don't know anyone who's brand new to me. What I really, really like is how open they are. They're very open to contributions. How much they value the contributions they're doing. They're open to ideas. They're open to any healthy discussions. You get like-minded folks. You can get answers to your problems. And people think, since it's an open source space, is it trustable? Is it reliable? Will I get help? Actually, you will get all of those things inside the community, not just at the conference, but by the Slack group, through the code base, on the GitHub pages and all that.  There are individual contributors who are doing this apart from the paid job. There are individual contributors who are doing this just out of their own passion for this domain and contributing over the weekends. There are contributors who are coming in from different companies, even some maybe rival companies, and contributing to Selenium as a part of their paid job. But what stays intact is everyone is trying to focus on the greater good that is for Selenium. No one tries to focus on the individual benefits. They try to think what will benefit the community, what will benefit the users, what will benefit the project as a whole. When they realize anyone is contributing actively to Selenium, they encourage everyone to go ensure that changes are reviewed on time, they're landed on time. We sort of make it open to, you know, make them comfortable to contribute, to ask questions, to come talk to us. That sort of openness and the async combination we have going at any point of time, I think I really like that. It lets me be myself, express ideas. And I think they really value that as well. And additionally, I've also seen the Selenium community users. They are very appreciative of the work that is done by the Selenium developers. More often than not, on the issues you see them, they're very happy that we responded, or they'll be more than be willing to help and themselves contribute. So, come join us on one.


Hello and welcome to this session in which we will discuss the tax accounting methods and specifically we're gonna be discussing the accrual method What is the big idea here? Well, the accounting method determines when to recognize the revenues and when to recognize the expenses Why is that important? Well, that's important because the revenues once we recognize it for tax purposes Then it is taxable and the expenses once we recognize it for tax purposes It's deductible deductible means it gives us a tax deduction, which is good Now what is the IRS objective? The IRS they want to us to recognize revenue as soon as possible And they want to delay the expenses because the job of the IRS is to do what is to raise money to the government And how do you raise money?  There are three permissible over all accounting methods, which are the cash basis or cash receipts and cash disbursements Which we already covered the accrual method You should be familiar with the accrual method if you are an accounting student because I'm assuming you took financial accounting You took intermediate accounting and there's the hybrid method, which is a Combination of the accrual and the cash method now as we work through the accrual method We're gonna notice there are many exceptions to the rules and we're gonna work many examples to illustrate those exceptions So let's go ahead and get started in Explaining the accrual method of accounting before we proceed any further I have a public announcement about my company farhat lectures comm Farhat accounting lectures is a supplemental educational tool That's gonna help you with your CPA exam preparation as well as your accounting courses My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions as well as exercises Go ahead start your free trial today Income first, let's look at revenue or income accrual method when do we recognize income or revenue for Under the accrual method. Well, if it's earned, what does that mean? What does it mean you earn the income? It means that all event has occurred to establish the taxpayer right to it It means you did the work and now you can tell the customer you have to pay me I have the right for the payment This is when you have earned it and obviously it has to be reasonably Estimatable in other words, you know exactly the amount that you expect to receive Now bear in mind income cannot be the third beyond the tax year if it's already included in taxpayer applicable Financial statement. What does that mean? It means once you recognize remember we have two sets of books We have gap and we have IRS Once a revenue is recognized for gap once it's recognized for gap. That's it It has to be recognized for the IRS and we're gonna look at an example Also an accrual tax payers amount of income is recognized based on its right to receive the income So what we do is what is your right to receive the income and it's based on that? And let's take a look at this accrual income example unity corporation a calendar year taxpayer uses accrual basis of Accounting it's entitled to 6% of spectrum corporation, which has a physical year of June 30th For that particular year x3 spectrum reported net income of 280,000 once spectrum receives Once spectrum reports net income. We have the right of six percent. We means unity corporation For the following six month, which is December 31st 20 extra net income was 180,000 now remember you unity is a calendar year. So unity's year is 1231 So how much they would recognize for 1231 x3? Well, they could recognize only The 280,000 times 6% They cannot take 180,000 times 6% because that's not final. That's the first six months Remember we are entitled to 6% of their annual income Maybe by the end of the year they will go down. This will go down to zero Because we don't have the right to this income yet because it's dated not finalized the year however, unity would not agree a crew Spectrums profit for the last six months, which ends December 31st because the right of income does not accrue Until the close of the spectrum tax year So you have you can accrue the income once you have the right to it You don't have the right for that yet. Let's look at another example Evergreen enterprises and a cruel taxpayer has provided landscaping services to a client and has the right to receive $80,000 the client signs a notes receivable now. I have to be very careful To evergreen enterprise that has a face value of 80,000 well simply put this notes receivable They promise to pay exactly 80,000. So the face value of that is 80,000 However, it has right now a current fair market value of 75 if you want to sell this note today And why would somebody why would somebody sell the note if you have the note receivable if you have the promise from the client And you don't want to wait for the 80,000 so notes receivable Maybe you can cash this six months later. You can cash it for 80,000, which is the face value But if you want to sell it today, you can only get 75 How much would you include the corporation must include the gross income of 80,000? The amount it has the right to receive rather than the fair value, which is 75 So just make sure you know this about notes receivable. It's how much the right to receive which is 80,000 Not the fair value. Let's talk about advanced payment What's advanced payment is when the customer pays upfront for the services before they receive the service And that's very common. Many businesses. They receive money upfront before they receive the service For an accrual taxpayer, remember you have to perform the service Okay, there's a special deferral method that can be used Here's what it is in the year of receiving the advanced payment the taxpayer reported the amount Reported in the financial statement on the tax return. Remember we have gap and We have IRS when it comes for year one when it comes for year one The the IRS allows you to report whatever you reported for gap to report for IRS now you might be saying That's not generous. Well, that's generous. Why because here's how the IRS works The IRS says you have the money in your hand. Once there's once you receive the payment It doesn't matter whether you perform the service or not. You have the ability To pay and if you have the ability to pay you should pay your taxes, but they have the special rules They would say for year one only for year one only here's what we're gonna do regardless of how much you received We're gonna look at your gap and how much you reported for gap We would allow you to report for IRS. That's only for year one, but when it comes to year two Everything else all the remaining amount you have to You have to report for taxes now for gap that that could go to year three year four year five But IRS would allow it which is kind of they're giving you one year break Which is not fine and the following year the remaining balance of the advanced payment is included in gross income Regardless of how it's reported on gap and let's take a look at an example StarTech is an accrual taxpayer that has adopted the deferral method for advanced payment And they sell high-tech electronics and two-year service contract on the electronics on this on November 1st They sold a 24 month service contract and received $280 for financial reporting purposes Here's what they're gonna do. They're gonna report for x3 $30 for x4 140 and for x5 110 so this is how they are spreading this 280 this is for gap g a AP here's what's gonna happen for IRS Although they receive the money upfront for year x3 They can they can they have the option to only report $30 now if they want to report the full amount The IRS will say go ahead and do it. We're not gonna. We're they're not gonna complain about this, but the IRS says look since You're using the deferral method. We're gonna give you a break in other words You only have to report $30 which is the same amount as wherever you reported for gap However in year x4 you have to report the remaining which is 250 and you have to report this in x4. So this is how it works for federal income tax purposes You would report 30,000 For x3 same as the financial reporting and the remaining and the 250 will be reported in x4 There was always exceptions and here are some exceptions to the prepaid certain type of income prepaid rental income prepaid interest warranty Guaranteed contract insurance premium Those you you cannot have any deferral for them once you receive them you have to report them So in other words just be careful if it's a prepaid rental prepaid interest warranty now here It was a service contract. You have that option But if it says prepaid rental there is no more you can no more defer it just whatever you received that year You have to report because you have the ability to pay remember rental interests those are the big ones warranty or guarantees insurance premium as well, okay and Payment related to financial instruments. They must be recognized in the year They are received no deferral, okay when an accrual taxpayer has the right to an income is disputed So let's assume you have to you have the right to the income But the customer is disputing and the income remains in collected in other words the customer don't want to pay Okay, simply put there's a disagreement between you and the customer Well, typically no income is recognized until the dispute is resolved simply put prior to the settlement You don't have the right to the income yet It has not been fully occurred and that's the assumption to recognize the income You have the right to it since there's a dispute the assumption as well since this There's a dispute will let you wait until that dispute is settled when that's that dispute settled its income Let's switch from income to deductions for deduction. We have this rule all events and economic performance has to be Has to be has to occur so to determine if a liability is treated as an expense or a capital expenditure for an accrual Taxpayer three-part test is applied. The first test is called the all event test The second test is the amount has to be reasonably determined Which is that's always the case whether it's for an expense or a revenue You have to know what's the amount reasonably determined if it's not 100% determined and the third thing is there's an economic Performance test. So what is the all event test? What is this test all event test? It means all the necessary event have have happened for the to confirm the existence of the liability Meaning what meaning the taxpayer legally owes the money to another party simply put Somebody did some work for you. They completed the work and the other party They can ask you for the money because they did the work Well, if that's the case if you are responsible then you have met all event test Now amount can be reasonably estimated. It means you have to kind of be able to know the amount. What about economic performance? economic performance For a liability it depends on the nature of that liability and when we say liability it means liability for an expense For example, if an accrual taxpayer owes money for received services The economic performances is met when the services are provided. So for talking about Services, when do you meet the economic test? Well, when when they provide the service they met their economic test then you are responsible for this now There are many Examples that we can give just they're gonna give you an idea for example Services rendered directly to the taxpayer the taxpayer arranges for equipment repair to be conducted When do you have an expense when the repair work is completed now? The economic performance is satisfied for example services scheduled to be delivered for a specific duration an example Will be a service contract over a period of time for example maintenance or cleaning. How do you recognize the expense? Well, you recognize the expense over the contract period you can separate it by month or somehow Count, you know the amount of the service they provided out of the total but over the contract period you would recognize the expense Let's assume the utilization of the owner's property by the taxpayer simply put you are renting something In other words, you are using someone else's asset Well, if it's rent you distribute over the duration of the use of a rent period. This is when the performance is satisfied Let's assume the taxpayer obtained particular property could be supplies and any property. Well If it supplies when you receive the supplies, this is when the economic performance occur and this is when it's satisfied Therefore you do have an expense. Let's take a look at few examples a calendar year a cruel taxpayer Lightning event court organized a wrestling match held in a company stadium on December 31st, 2020 x3 And what they did they hired clean tax services was hired to clean the stadium for $6,000 But did not actually carry out the work until January 1st, 2020 x4 Okay, so the match took place December 31st 2020 x3 now from a financial accounting perspective You are recognizing the revenue and x3 therefore you need to recognize all the related expenses in 20 x3 however for tax purposes you don't recognize the expense because the They did not did the cleaning until January 1st 20 x4 and you pay them $6,000 on January 3rd. It doesn't matter when you pay them. Okay, but the point is for tax purposes They cannot take the deduction of 6,000 and 20 x3 Because the clean tax service company did not perform. They did not satisfy the economic performance. They did not do the work until January 1st now for financial accounting, you would recognize the expense and 20 x3 to match it with the revenue All the financial accounting rules would require lightning events to accrue the 6,000 cleaning expense and x3 to match it with revenue However, the economic performance test was not met until 20 x4 when cleaning tax performed the service So that's they satisfy the economic performance. Therefore lightning events deduct the expense and 20 x4 Let's take a look at another example Green grow agro core cultivate lands owned by individual the contract between this company and the landlord is for three years And upon the contract expiration and 20 x3 The company agreed to apply organic fertilizers to the farmland Even though all the event test has was satisfied at the end of 20 x3 The company did not provide the organic fertilizer until 20 x4 So they did not satisfy all their obligation until 20 x4 Well, the agreement obligated green grow to supply both property and services because that's the agreement and they did not finish until 20 x4 Therefore the deduction is not allowed until 20 x4 when you fulfill your obligation. This is when you can take the deduction There is this something called two and a half month rule and this is established by Congress to allow For compensation to be deducted even if it's paid Two and a half month after the year end. So you can basically do what you can accrue Compensation expense as long as it's paid but two and a half month of the employer year end It would not be necessary considered the third compensation under those circumstances a cruel taxpayer Can deduct can deduct in the year it was earned by the employee as long as you pay them two and a half months So this is year one as long as you pay Two and a half month by year two. You can take the deduction in year one. This is what we are saying here Okay, however, if the compensation is paid more than two and a half month after year end Then you cannot take the deduction until the year the employee received it and reported as income then you have to wait Let's take a look at an example golden corporation and a cruel taxpayer After all employees a year-end bonus equal to 1% of sales growth compared to the prior year Golden cannot determine the bonus until it finalizes its year-end financial statement. So for year x3 The bonus account the bonus amount in the year in early January and pays the bonuses to employee on February 12 20x4 so they were able to Compute the bonus and pay the bonus February 20x4 Well, since golden pay the 20x3 bonus within two and a half month and February February is two and a half month of year end It takes it can take the compensation in 20x3 tax return now bear in mind the employees would report this income under x4 That's when they received it now. Let's change the scenario a little bit Let's assume in 20x3 They updated their accounting software and found some discrepancies and sale reporting after year-end So the issue Delayed the computation of the 20 year 20x3 bonus until early April of that year 20x4 On April 22nd, they paid the bonus to the employees. Guess what? No deduction in 20x3 at this date By April 22nd, this is two and a half month after December 31st So golden cannot take the deduction in 20x3. They can take it in 20x4 Now the employee will also take the will compute the income will report the income in 20x4 So they both Take the deduction in the income in 20x4 the employee income and x4 the employer that deduction is in x4 There are also something called reoccurring item exceptions. In other words, there are certain expenses That if they reoccur and they meet certain conditions We can accrue them a four conditions are fulfilled the economic performance requirement is Accelerated enabling year-end accrual to be deducted. Okay, this is this is what's called the reoccurring item exception What are those conditions? Well first meeting all event test And determine the liability amount accurately. So you have met that test You have met the economic performance should occur on or before the earlier of the tax return filing date So before you file the date or eight and a half month after the taxable year-end So you have a little bit of time to satisfy the economic performance Also, the item must be reoccurring. It means it's kind of a monthly thing or something that reoccurring on regular basis and if accruing results If accruing it result in better revenue and expense matching Or if the amount is immaterial, so if the amount is immaterial, that's fine And if accruing it's a better matching it matches the expense with the revenue It gives you a better matching as long as these are math You will be able to deduct certain what we call reoccurring expenses. Let's look at an example Nature mark frequently sells good that are currently in stock but won't be shipped for another week Now the all event test for sales is met So they satisfy the sales allowing the recognition of gross revenue income even though the good has not been shipped as of year end But they met all the requirement Now nature mark is responsible for paying for the shipping cost Okay, although the company can reasonably determine the obligation for shipping They did not met this economic performance because they did not ship it. Okay, because they did not physically deliver the goods as of yet Although they did not do it accruing shipping costs on sold item would lead to a better alignment of expense with revenue Now what they say is this well since Shipping is related to the revenue. We recognize revenue. Why not recognize shipping? Well under those reoccurring item exceptions The company can accrue the shipping cost on items sold but not shipped yet under these exceptions Reserves we need to know about reserves the all event in economic performance test restrict the use of reserves for income tax purposes What is reserve? basically This this concept reserve is commonly used for financial accounting to match expenses with revenue What could be an example of it? It could be warranty for example when you make a sale in year one It's assuming you make a sale You if you have warranties related to that sale you would include the warranty For that year as well. You create a reserve says how this is how much warranty or guarantees I'm responsible for and you will expense it in year one. This is what the reserve is too much revenues with expenses Well, those are not allowed for tax purposes However, small banks can utilize bed debt reserve also with the bed that if you have a bed that you cannot accrue You already know this when you talked about that you cannot accrue allowance because that's a form of reserve However banks can reserve Can small banks can utilize a bed debt reserve? also Service-based accrual taxpayer Might be permitted to omit accrual for revenue that seems to be incollectable based on prior experience Indirectly allowing a tax reserve So what happened is this if you perform a few performance service For a client and you don't think you're going to be collecting the money Well, this is it should be unusual you should not be doing this but let's assume That's the case you're taking a chance and you know based on prior experience You cannot collect the money then you don't have to record the revenue Which is in effect in effect Given you a reserve because if you're because they're saying don't account for the revenue It's the same thing as accounting for the revenue then write in it off as a bed debt. It's indirect reserve Let's talk about the hybrid method the hybrid method is a method where you would use both cash And accrual for example You would use the accrual basis for sales and cost of goods sold While using the cash method for other income and expenses And this is what create what we called a hybrid method It means you are using both cash and accrual The code allows this approach as long as the taxpayers income is accurately represented So if the accrual method is used for business expense, it must also be used for business income So if you're using it for expenses, you must include it for income for accrual Let's take a look at hybrid method example A pet care at pet care vet clinic. They offer boarding services veterinary services and pet supply In medicine they sell those and that's part of their inventory an annual sale Sales their annual sales is around four million of which 40 percent sales of pet supplies Which is again what inventory they have inventory Here what they do pet care uses a hybrid method how they employ accrual for sales of supplies And medicine remember this is inventory do the significant impact of inventory on income So for supplies for pet of supplies and medicine they use accrual However for services they report the cash they use the cash method, which is it's acceptable That that's what they want to do now bear in mind what we learned in the cash method A company like pet care they can use the cash method also for their inventory because they are considered a small Company and for a small company you can use the cash method for inventory. Remember we have that exception But they choose to do that if they are doing that then they are using a hybrid method for sales of goods That has that's related to inventory hybrid sales of services It is cash method. What should you do now go to far hat lectures? Look at the additional resources lectures multiple choice through false That's going to help you understand this topic better whether you are an accounting student a cpa candidate or an enrolled agent Good luck study hard and of course stay safe


incredibly fortunate. We want to welcome you all to this event. Audrey Tang is here. Audrey Tang is Taiwan's digital minister in charge of social innovation. Audrey is known for revitalizing the computer languages Pearl, which we all use in Haskell, as well as building the online spreadsheet system EtherCalc in collaboration with Dan Bricklin. In the public sector, Audrey served on Taiwan's National Development Council's Open Data Committee and the 12-year Basic Education Curriculum Committee and led the country's first e-rulemaking project. In the private sector, Audrey worked as a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography and with social text on social interaction design. In the social sector, Audrey actively contributes to GovZero, that's G0V, a vibrant community focusing on creating tools for the civil society with the call to fork the government. I am so delighted and honored to be here tonight with Audrey Tang. Hello, good local time everyone. Good local time from the future. Just a few hours in the future, I guess. So how shall we proceed? I thought that we will begin immediately into the Q&A after the introduction. That's what I've heard from my colleagues, if that's okay with you. That's fine with me. We're here. We're just delighted to have you. I wasn't sure whether or not you had a few words that you wanted to start off with. I mean you have quite a resume or if you just wanted to give us a big shout out about can you connect the first and the last? That is, on the one hand, thinking about Pearl and then thinking about the mechanics of having worked on Pearl, how does that contribute to your ability to do work on GovZero? Do you think in the same way but in a different context or is it just totally a different set of skills? I would say it's the same skill. The motto of Pearl is, and I quote, there's more than one way to do it, unquote, and that means a focus on plurality. Indeed, I learned from Larry Wall, the creator of Pearl, that he had a tweet that says, everybody's talking about a singularity is near. Why don't we focus on the plurality, which is here. And I think this is so excellent so that I turn it into literally my job description as if they dominated around five years ago. And my job description, I think, if you want a few words to begin with, I'll begin with my job description. And it goes like this. When we see the internet of science, let's make it the internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here. So it's all about listening at scale to the plurality. It's about using humor over rumor in a way that's fast, fair, and fun, so that we can overcome, say, the pandemic in Taiwan with no lockdown and overcome the infodermic, again, with no takedown. So this is a fundamentally idea about the government trusting citizens rather than asking a citizen to trust the government. We must first trust the citizen, the plurality. Let me ask you a question. That's a fantastic introduction, especially when hearing heard by American ears in these times. So when you think about like trust, so here, the question isn't even whether or not the government trusts us, but whether or not we trust the government. Do you believe that the philosophy still works? I mean, in some ways, who goes first, right? Yeah, I think the Dao De Jing there's a saying from Lao Zi that says to give no trust is to get no trust. And so the fundamental point about trustworthiness is not about a blind trust like from one abstract organization to another abstract organization, but about this day to day feedback mechanism. For example, and I really only have one slide to show, and this is the very cute Shiba Inu, the name is Song Chai, literally the spoke stock of our Central Epidemic Month Sansa. So every day at 2pm during the height of the pandemic here, everyone tunes in to this conversation between the Minister Chen Shi Zhong and all the journalists who get to ask pretty much everything. And the thing about RCECC press conference is that it's all about asking the commander everything and anything and anything that we did wrong, that we didn't get right. And so one is guaranteed a 24 hour correction, a very fast iteration cycle, and always that's for example, when a young boy back in April last year called the toll free number 1922, even though he's not a journalist. He said, you're rationing out mask, all I get is pink medical mask. All my boy classmates have navy blue ones. And I don't want to wear pink to school. The very next day on 2pm, the commander and all the medical officer regardless gender war pink medical mask. It's a act of gender mainstream for sure. But Minister Chen even said publicly that pink Panther was his childhood hero. So the boy became the most hip boy in the class for only he had a collar that the hero and the hero's hero wear, I guess, for some definition of wear. And so this is trustworthy. This is the real time feedback mechanism. That's just in the last year alone, there's more than 2 million calls to 192 to all answered on an individual basis that makes sure that all the epidemiology experts can talk in the way that shows the trust to the citizens to make use of those signs well and also explain it in a language that transcends disciplines and age groups, for example, our physical distancing rules says that when you're indoor, keep 3 shiwainu's away and outdoor keep 2 of them away. There's many gems like that. Why wear a mask is there to protect you against your own unwashed hand.  Again, this appeals to rational self interest in a way of communication that is humble. That is definitely not top down or lockdown or shut down. Well, we are suddenly opening up the floor to questions. I mean, otherwise I can just keep going on. This is a fascinating conversation, especially talking about the pandemic because the contrast to what we're experiencing here is so radically different. But I also want to bring it into the role of the of the platforms that we have here. So like how do you institute that? How do you institute that philosophy into like social media or into a platform or is it solely to be applied on the relationship between the government and the people? Yeah, I think the current generation of social media, which I sometimes refer to as anti-social media, it doesn't quite do listening as skill that well. I mean, it does broadcasting or speaking as skill so that everybody can speak, but not so much listening across differences. On the other hand, we take the motto, don't hate the media, be the media very seriously. So we built our own pro-social media out of civic technologies, which in Taiwan is essentially the same as government technologies because we work very closely with the free software slash open source communities. And so, for example, one example is that we use this Polis system originally innovated in Seattle, but now it's open source as part of our digital public infrastructure. So at Polis.gov.tw, everyone can resonate or not with any public statements that people make, for example, on the Uber case, which is the inaugural case that we use the Polis technology. And so this is very visual. So I guess I'll have to show a slide anyway. So this is the UberX conversation. And what you see here in the blue circle represents the person using the system. And the clusters are my friends and families who are all over the place that feels differently about the UberX case. Now the thing is that instead of jumping from facts to ideas, Polis is designed to listen to people's feelings. And the interface design is in such a way that each citizen's feelings, like I feel that passenger insurance, they're important. People would disagree or agree with it. And as they do, they move toward me or farther away from me, but there is no reply button. Without a reply button, there's no room for troll to grow. And people take pride in proposing some nuanced ideas that brings other people together, rather than just focusing on the ideological problems. For example, is Uber even a sharing economy, is time sharing sharing? Is it a gig economy? Is it platform economy, which is of course, very nice academically speaking, but it doesn't really get people's feeling together. So people agree to disagree on the more pro social side of social media. They respect each other's ideological differences, but doesn't spend calorie on it. And we get a rough consensus, meaning that people agree with each other's feelings most of the time, actually on registration, not under cutting existing meters on insurance and things like that. And that's why we legalize Uber just in a few months after this consultation. And Uber is now a local taxi in Taiwan, but it elevates the co-ops and existing taxi companies and fleets as well, so that everybody wins or at least doesn't lose in a setting of rough consensus. Now, so we say the binding power, it's only on this sort of digital public infrastructure. We do not use, say Facebook or other parts of the digital realm that are more like frankly speaking, nightlife district nightclubs, selling you alcoholic addictive drinks, private bouncers, and all things like that. We don't use that as town halls or public parks or public libraries. We use public digital infrastructure as digital infrastructure. So you showed me that incredible graph of how sort of a crowd agreeing in general. That's right. Yes. There's this part of me that says, but what is that person at the end, the one guy that's hanging out over there? But these are the statements. It's not people.  I'm sorry. These are the statements. So these are the more ideological statements that each one divides the people into halves, essentially. And if you look at the more anti-social corner of social media, that's what everybody focus on. That's what dreams people calories. But what we are doing is essentially letting people see a reflection of their own statements and sentiments. And they're the more nuanced one that brings people together, like literally bringing people together shows that there's actually much more in common. We share the same value, even though we start from different ideological positions. Academically, it's called overlapping consensus, but it's much more easy if we show it in a way with this need to visualization. So, so what about full expression? Like one of the things when I think of parole as a language is it's not just that it's many ways to represent something. It's also just like one can exhibit a style in parole and another person can have a totally different style. And to what extent, how much how much flexibility do can I get in the in the presentations technologies you're describing? Yeah, I think fundamentally, this is about who sets the agenda for public deliberation. And the design of our Polish platform, even though it's called Polish.gov.tw, it means that all the citizens, including the press who have used it to deliberate anything from the national ID card strategy to like random killing and whether, you know, corporate punishment need to be abolished and whether that will encourage random killing probably not and things like that. And so the agenda setting is done by the social sector, by the people. Our national participation platform joined the GOV.tw, which is like regulation.gov, I guess, because we publish our pre announcements of regulations on it. But very importantly, it connects a participatory budget interface so that people can comment and raise new ideas even after the regulation takes effect. And people can start new initiatives with 5,000 signatures. The ministry need to respond to it on a point by point basis. And so on the whole life cycle, if people have an idea, they can do a full expression on that particular idea and start a new policy conversation without getting any approval from the government. So this is not just GOV.TEC. This is what I refer to as what we call people public private partnership with the people side first with the social sector setting of the agenda. Okay, so this is fantastic. So I want to offer, I want to, I want to understand more and I'm going to do that by asking a kind of contrast point. So if in the United States, if we have a new regulation that we want to, that our government is thinking about, they open up what they call a public comment server and they invite people from the public to tell us what you think so people can respond. And they can say anything they want. And then the government takes all of these comments, digests them and provides a summary at the front end of whatever the regulation will try to answer their questions and so forth. But if I've got this right, the model that you described would look different. It would be instead of them saying this is the new regulation we're going to put it out, they may actually poll questions to understand better what kind of resentment they want to know that the public has. And then as a member of the public, I could then respond to the particular questions in a kind of multiple choice manner or binary manner. And they would get that feedback without the discourse. Is that a fair comparison? Yeah, it is. I think fundamentally this is a combination of two ideas that's previously not connected in policymaking. One is that of a citizen's petition or a citizen's initiative. The US also has we the people, which is the online platform for this sort of petitions, where you basically just collect signatures without much substantial deliberation. And the second part is a weekly survey. But unlike survey that's done by the government by a fixed set of questions, this is survey that is crowdsourced. Each person can share their sentiment for other people to respond to so that the system basically surfaces the rough consensus by a kind of friendly competition of who could raise the point that appeals to people with very different initial positions is a way to listen at scale without people having to do a top down design of survey. And these two independently speaking are done in many parts of local and national governments. The later part is done, for example, through open space technology through citizens assembly and things like that. While the first part is mostly just petitions and a list of names to hand to a counselor or to a legislator or to a minister. But we combine these two together. And the social norm that shapes it is much higher than each particular methodology. Indeed, the UberX conversation wasn't set or started by the government. In 2015, the ministries are still figuring things out. And it's the GovZero or G0V community that decides to talk about UberX, to talk about Airbnb and things like that. So how do you give equality to the voices? So in the example I gave before, if I create a bot, I can distort public opinion because my bot gives me more voice than the person who has to type it in by hand. Can I go on GovZero.dtw and distort the public opinion by using my bot on there? Right. If we look closely while the clusters, which is by K-Means clustering algorithm, measures the diversity and preserves the minority ideas or opinions, it doesn't, what it doesn't do is that it doesn't really care about the same cluster's population. So this 205 may be a small cluster, but it's not because it has 200 people in it. Actually, this one was just less than 200 people. It has a larger area because it measures more diversity. And so if people get a bot in like 500 fake accounts, which is difficult actually, they have to register 500 SIM cards, but suppose they do that, 500 SIM cards all voting the same way. Well, it may actually add a zero to the population count here, but this area doesn't grow a bit. What each statement must do is to convince people across the aisle. And we early hold as agenda the things that reaches this cross-group kind of supermajority. And this in-group coherence is just one factor out of it. And spamming that by voting doesn't really work. So what does it mean to be a voter on GovZero? Is it that I would register with a particular party and therefore the diversity is a measure of the party? Or is it my gender? Is it my race? Is it my income? Or do I register all of those things and the diversity measure is the sum of all these intersectionalities? Because this is a weekly survey. So people could and they did. For example, when we deliberate about the UberX case, the initial demographical questions are, it's actually a personal feeling. So I feel that even if a taxi passes by me, I still reach for my phone and call Uber. So that's one thing about personal feeling. And one is that I have a professional driver's license. I drive for a living. That's another thing. And another thing, yet another thing is that, for example, I take taxis as part of my daily work. I'm a commuter by taxi. That's another one. And as you said, there are also personal feelings about economic preferences, about the places that I live and I live in the metropolitan areas or not. And people who care about diversity on any particular aspect just add that to the weekly survey. But how do they do this? They just write, I aim a taxi driver, enter. And then other people start responding to it. I see. I see. So let me see if I got it right. I want to do one of these. And let's say we were going to do it at Harvard on Harvard's campus. So we would start with the overarching question. People would come to the platform. And that one overarching question, though, has multiple other statements that people are starting about themselves. And that's how we, I say, very clever. That's very clever. That's very clever. I'm so excited talking to you. I may not be giving enough room here for people who have questions. So if you do have a question, just raise your hand and I'll call on you. We do have a question here. And Alice, do you want to ask your question? Yes, thank you. This is a fascinating conversation. My question is regarding this year's theme of the conference, which is resilience and shared experiences. And I wonder if Minister Tang, you can share some of the advice on how we can build resilience from within ourselves and among one another, perhaps drawing inspirations from your personal experience or from the unprecedented experience we have lived through in the past year. Thank you. Thank you. That's an excellent question. Personally speaking, I think what I mean by trusting the citizens also means that we need to be aware, be humble of the shortcomings of our own designs and also to explain in a way that invites co-creation rather than defending any particular policy or personal decisions or things like that. The humility is the main thing that I learned working in the counter-pandemic task force. One very quick example. Last February, February 6th, we wrote out a very interesting policy called real name mass creation. And in which more than 6,000 pharmacies across Taiwan participated and anyone can take their universal health card is an IC card to the nearby pharmacy and get the allotted musks at a very, very cheap price. Now, people don't want to queue in vain. So around that time, a civic hacker, the names how we're all invented away so that you can see which pharmacy are out of mask and which pharmacies still have some so you can go to a place that still have some masks. It's entirely open API powered. So we published every 30 seconds the real time numbers of availability so that people who prefer chatbots and so on can access the same information in a way that's maximally inclusive, more than 100 different tools. But on the day that they launched, many pharmacies independently innovated and did what we call a take a number system. That is to say, instead of handing masks in return of swiping the IC card, they in the morning ask for the IC card and store it in the store and ask the customer to go back in the evening and take those number badges and in exchange to the mask and the IC card while they process the IC card during the lunch break. Now individually, these are to both the map and take a number system, very good innovation. But together, they just explode like Mentos and Coca-Cola. And that's because when you look at the map, you would see this pharmacy didn't sell anything until lunch. And then it sells everything. And so much so that a nearby pharmacy even put a large banner said, don't trust the app, exclamation mark. Now I didn't sleep well that night, but I did go through the public comments and the 1922 feedback from the frontline pharmacies. And there's some real gems in it. If I take away all the exclamation marks. And so the very next day, we apologize publicly, we didn't anticipate it. But because we're on a agile timeline schedule, we say we'll fix it next Thursday by implementing this very good suggestion of on the map, we will show two time slots, one for collecting the number and one for collecting the mask. And that ameliorate a little bit of the problem. And later on, the pharmacy's brainstorm and did something clever, which is just disappearing from the map. Soon as those numbers run out by entering, I received negative 5000 masks. So they kind of hacked the system. And again, we didn't say that they're hacking the system. We said we need to institutionalize that. So we put a button that if they click it, as soon as the numbers run out, they'll disappear from the map for the day. And so just by apologizing very swiftly, but always following it saying, we will implement your work around as a institutionalized response next Thursday. After three such iterations, there's not so much problem anymore. And to me, that's resilience. That is to trust your fellow citizen to come up with better design based on the one design that may not be perfect, but there's a crack in everything. And that's how the light gets in. I have to just ask you a quick question. How agile is it? How fast did you get that system set up? Three days. That's pretty awesome. Look, we have lots of hands up. Let's say, I think Valerie, you were up first. Thank you very much, Minister, for being with us today. We're very excited. So I am curious, being on technology from a government's perspective means a reallocation of power. Who will own the data? Who will be in charge of controlling certain platforms, new platforms? So what strategies have you used to persuade public leaders that might feel that they're losing some power due to these digital transformations? Thank you. The strategy is to have an outside game. The main talking point is that it beats getting the parliament occupied by occupiers, because that's what happened in 2014 when people perceive that there is no citizen control, democratic control over, at that time, it was a trade deal. Then people just occupied the parliament and took the matter to their own hands. Non-violently, I was there facilitating the live streaming. More than 200 different topics were deliberated by more than 20 NGOs, half a million people on the street, many more online. And we did get above consensus for the months, not one less, that gets then ratified by the head of the parliament. But everybody agreed that this is very time consuming. And if we can replicate some of those facilitated open space technology using digital means, then amortized, this is actually less effort and less risk, and also more trust as compared to get all the controversial policies that ends up getting the parliament occupied again. So the short answer is that there has always to be an outside game that threatens direct taking over by democratic and motivated people if the government doesn't respond in time. Thank you. Leone. Thank you. Actually, my first question was already answered, so I'm going to ask a new one. I am from Germany and what you're talking about what has happened in Taiwan and how Taiwan has responded to the pandemic feels very part of the reality that I'm experiencing. So one thing I was wondering, like all of these very advanced digital tools, what does it take that other countries also adopt this model, either tools or also just that model of engagement? Do you have any advice on that? Yes. I think there's two main requirements. One is, as I mentioned, a public infrastructure view on the digital. If the government essentially outsources public discourse to the likes of Facebook and Twitter, there's probably no room for this kind of civic tech to make into the gov tech. So a commitment to broadband as human rights, a commitment to digital competence, not just literacy in the basic education curriculum, all that is needed so that this digital public infrastructure includes people without excluding anyone. Indeed, anywhere in Taiwan, if you don't have 10 megabits per second, both ways for just 16 euros per month, it's my fault, like personally my fault. And so that's the one requirement. The other requirement equally important is for the career public service to be on board. If the career public service understand that this is the way to save them time to increase the mutual trust, and most importantly, to reduce the risk of zig-zacking or flip-flopping, that 49% of people feel that they have lost and suddenly increased by 2%, and the public service have to redo everything again. If they understand this social norm actually increases stability in them doing their public work, then they will support it. And once the career public service takes the initiative, the politicians for them, there really is nothing to lose. How do you get away from power struggles within the career community, within the career civil servant? Yeah, the power struggle is very real. It's always there. And my office, for example, maximizes diversity by inviting volunteer succumbents from any ministry, but each ministry can only send one succumbent at a time. So all the 12 public-facing ministries and councils have sent succumbents to my office, but they must work out loud. Although they still report to their minister, whatever they co-created become in the commons that all the different other ministries can learn from. And so this is deliberately designed in a way that's horizontal leadership. The vertical structures are always there, but within our office, the public digital innovation space, there's simply no room for that because each one offers a very fresh perspective. And it's all by volunteer basis. So to date, the Department of Defense never sent anyone to my office, and I'm fine with that. Jamie, you want to ask your question? Sure. Thank you so much for joining us. It's really an honor to have you with us. Having shared understanding of plural experience, I think, is so important to building societal trust. In your experience, what are some of the most effective ways that you've been able to build shared understanding? Yeah, I think really nothing is more important than taking all the sides. This is my personal practice. Of course, I went personally through two puberty. So in my mind, I don't have this binary category. Like half of the population is somehow more distant from me. To me, it's just a large homo-savians community. And if I find that there's a particular viewpoint that I cannot say it in a way that I personally feel it as important as genuine, I always think it's my problem. And I would then spend a few days with that community, learn a little bit of their culture and language and so on on an ethnographic, or just hanging out with people until I do. And so taking all the sides, the skill of rotation is, I think, as important as the skill of listening or translation. Sachi? Hi, Minister Tai. Thank you so much for joining us. My question is, we live in a world of increasingly complex problems and there's a real strain on multilateral solutions working. And I was wondering, are you a global pessimist or an optimist? I can probably guess which one you are. But why do you think that? And do you have any advice for anyone erring on the pessimistic side? Yeah, I'm a optimist. It's a strange condition, I know, on the most pressing global problems. And my optimism stemmed from the fact that my first political system was the internet governance system that I joined when I was just 14 years out, but across the emails and the mail lists and the working groups, nobody really cared or even know that I'm just 14 years old. And so I feel included into the community. It wouldn't be another few years until even I get my first vote in the traditional low bit rate representation or political system. And so the internet governance is always based on the idea that it's what we call the end to end principle. If you have a good innovation that solves your own problem, and it scales in the sense that some other people maybe in another corner in the world also find it useful, they can fork it, meaning that take it into a different direction. And nobody between the two of you can say whether this is a legit innovation or it's an innovation that should be banned. That was the original design spec of the internet. So because of my experience in internet governance, which is open multi-stake holderism, academically speaking, I do believe that the emerging issues that we are looking at at this moment is all caused by the closer collaboration across stakeholder groups that previously need to go through intermediaries, but now work very closely together anyway. And the externalities, the social environmental problem that stem out of this close collaboration can only be tackled if we also apply the same close collaboration across sector way to work on it. So open multi-stake holderism I think is something that feels very natural to me. And most of my work in introducing this to the more pessimistic corners of this society is just to encourage them to make concrete contributions. It could just be one typo fixed on Wikipedia. I just fixed a typo a week ago on Wikipedia on the Equality Act, the HR5, the article, or One Street in the Urban Street map. And once they start contributing, they will start to feel that it doesn't really take this representative logic, which many people feel that takes too long a time, but rather it could just be a representation of whatever they feel on the moment and the contribution is reflected in the here and now.  You're incredibly humble and very approachable. How do you square the authority that you have with your personality and your openness? Well, today's conference is about women in power. The kind of power that I think I hold is communication power. That is to say we make networks and the power is entirely in the collective intelligence that's at the edges of those networks. So as someone that makes those networks connect to one another, the more authoritarian that I appear, the less bandwidth actually, the different networks that through me connect, enjoy, like I become the bottleneck, so to speak. But by designing myself out or design for resign, if that's a thing, I make maximize the kind of communication that all those different networks, the civic tech network, social entrepreneur, impact investors and so on, that can connect naturally through those open spaces, those mechanisms like the polar system, the joint system, sandboxes, presidential hackathons and so on. Those mechanisms go on, those space go on, but I don't hold authoritarian power by myself. So you don't have to call me the right honorable or something. Well, you hold that honor with us for sure. Maddie. Yeah, hey, thanks so much for this. I'm wondering, because we're students and we're all interested in politics and technology and just everything we've been talking about, what advice you have for aspiring public servants and students like us? To have fun, to optimize for fun. That's my slogan in my pro six days, and that still sounds true. For in my personal experience, the online, anti-social, social media, the divisiveness, the outrage, the hatred, the toxicity, all of that is predicated on this phenomenon that outrage spreads faster than rationality. But humor, fun, spreads faster than outrage. And it's a one-way street. If one is outraged about something, but then think of a clever way to tackle some of the problem so the structural problem doesn't happen again or happen with less likelihood. That's fun, that's co-creation. And once anyone feels this way, there's no going back to feel outrage or hatred or discrimination about the same topic anymore. But if some people start with a very divisive worldview, you can't really convince them based on rationality alone. And this time acute Shiba Inu, pink medical mask, rainbow mask, things like that, trending hashtags, these really helps. So optimize for fun is my main suggestion. That's fantastic advice. I have a question for you as the last question came up. So many of the people at the conference are young students. So when you were seven, did you know that you would be minister tank? Or like, what did, you know, many students feel that their lives are already predetermined? This is where I'm going to be when I'm this age and this age. But in reality, that doesn't usually happen. How about for you? Yeah, I'm a slash. So I'm digital minister at TW, slash, board member radical exchange, working with Vitalik buttering on Ethereum governance, slash, Digital Future Society Barcelona, slash, Council Democratic Foundation, that's a bunch of occupiers in Europe and things like that. So I think it's not about any particular post, but rather about the connection between those posts, again, referring to the network and communication power. The more the slash become a dash that connects things together, the more holistic ones worldview become and the more practical this idea of taking all the side become for me personally. So I would encourage even if you think you have a predetermined role or position to to fill, it doesn't really exclude you to stop you from seeking other slash or dash positions. And once those new positions start to grow, you form your own new constellation. That's very nice. Sachi. Oh, sorry. I think that was an old question. But that's okay. I can ask another question. You said before about creating a culture where government trusts citizens and citizens trust governments. But how do you actually get that? What were some of the biggest hurdles that you've overcome to get to this equilibrium, which seems ideal? Yeah. Well, government must trust its citizens. The other part is optional. That citizen doesn't need to trust the government. I think the government should earn the trust and a citizen should trust us as much or as little as they want. So maximally trusting the citizens, I think is easier if it doesn't take extra effort. For example, the mask availability open API, say if we publish not 30 seconds at a time, but 30 days at a time with this monthly statistics approval review process. That's actually what most governments do through a Freedom of Information access plan. But that basically says that the more publication one does, the more burden it places on the career public service. Contrast that with the open API, which simply says, for things unrelated to privacy, national secrets, confidentiality and trade secrets and so on, everything else. We just publish whatever we collect and with all the quality problems that I just highlighted a few questions back. And when people see that the quality is off, well, that's invitation to co-creation. And the public service only respond to the collective intelligence mandated new ideas that's provably better than the original ideas that we had. So we do not have to do this power struggle of keeping information to ourselves. What about the quality? What about accuracy and things like that? We simply say, okay, this is what the machines tell us. It may or may not be right, but it's at no extra burden to the career public service. So automate it. This makes trust much easier to give from the government to its citizens. Jamie. It's me again.  If you have to give yourself advice when you were younger, what advice would you give? Yeah. First of all, I would start traveling across the world sooner, I guess. I did this poor earthish thing of randomly couchsurfing and staying at people's homes until they get fed up with me and suggest someone else for me to crash. And I did that when I was 25 in 2005, 2006. But I actually could have done it sooner if I learned to trust random strangers on the internet earlier. So that would be my main suggestion to my younger self to trust random strangers on the internet. Maddie. Yeah. I don't know if this is a question you can answer, but I wanted to ask as a student of US politics living in the US, we talk a lot about these issues of trust in government and citizen participation right now. And are there any politicians or parties you've worked with in the US that you've enjoyed working with that you recommend we take a look at? Sure. I'm slash international advisor GovLab. So I already quite closely actually with the data collaborative with the crowd law and many initiatives of the GovLab in NYU. So that's actually something that I can directly answer. Alice. Yes, I have another question related to women in power. I wonder as a great leader like you, do you have any women role model in this space? Or do you draw any leadership philosophy wisdom from any anyone or anywhere? Yeah, I signed up to this particular post literally because I was quite touched by our president Tsai Ing-wen in her first inauguration speech where she said before we think of democracy as a showdown between two opposing values. But from now on democracy must become a conversation between a diverse set of values. I think that perfectly captures the new capacity that digital offers for us to listen not just speak at scale. And democracy in that view is a type of technology is a type of social innovation that everyone can contribute to. It's not just something that's fixed in stone. And so this democracy as a type of technology view, I think I draw very heavily from Dr. Tsai Ing-wen's leadership and also from the fact that there's more than 14 years now in Taiwan for gender mainstreaming. So the people public-private partnership work is literally grew out of the feminist movement that then grew into this intersectional LGBTQ friendly movements. And there's just too many names to name. But Annette Lu, our previous vice president, she was also very influential. I have a question. There's this incredible spirit about you that reminds me so much of what the internet was like many years ago, decades ago, before the United States became so commercial. And it seems like it's really shaped a lot of your thinking. Which came first, was it that the internet drew you because you were already like thinking, like of like minds? Or is it that it influenced you, that early way of thinking about the internet was a blank slate? What could this be? How could this work? And it was very open and very, let's all do, we're all in this together kind of thinking, which you certainly have really taken to a whole new level. Yeah, I think the early internet definitely happened first because it was born in 81 and the internet was before that. So there's a definite sequence of chronological events here. First the internet, right? And I was born around the year the personal computer was introduced to the world and Taiwan makes most of those personal computers anyway. So we do have a very strong ethics of just taking a new idea and then just make new forks to innovate, to reverse engineer what logic was there in the designing of larger mainstream computers and things like that, but do it in a way that is democratized. And I don't mean democratization in the sense of becoming more accessible. I mean democratization in the original sense in that citizen control, the agenda of the development of the type of technology. So I think Taiwan's own democratization, the lifting of the martial law, as well as the early personal computer and internet definitely took place first. And I'm immersed in those communities and cultures so that it feels like native to me. Yeah, I definitely, I can definitely see that and feel that and in that way it's a real pleasure. So back to COVID, so contact tracing, did you play a role in contact tracing? And if so, what does that look like in Taiwan? Yeah, so I'm mostly a poetician, so I mostly just write poems and recite them. And so the day-to-day operations I'm only involved in the mass distribution and not in particular the contact tracing. But the one heuristic that I helped define is very important in that we only collect data during the pandemic from the touchpoints that we were already collecting anyway before the pandemic. We do not invent new data collection touchpoints. And this is out of this respect to privacy and cybersecurity. Because for unknown systems, green field systems, the cybersecurity and the privacy parameters are unknown, literally to the people coding them probably. And so there is very much a difficulty in forming a social consensus on where lies the acceptable realm. But because we only use existing data collection points for, for example, location-based earthquake warning, flood evacuation warning, the national health IC card, and things like that, people understand very well the regulatory and the algorithmic parameters of safety. And so people feel safer because we don't have to declare, and we never did, a state of emergency that makes the administration grow and the legislation shrink. Everything that we do must be interpolated and approved, pre-approved by the legislature. So what are you working on next? What's new on the horizon that you can share with us? We just published a month ago, the National Action Plan on Open Governments in Taiwan. So instead of just one anecdote here or one anecdote there, this is now a system of 19 commitments to the global Open Government partnership community that we will institutionalize the kind of co-creation as evidenced by the examples that I just presented in day-to-day government work. In particular, I'm excited about this dimension of opening up citizen control to people below 18 years old. This is first because I'm very active as a 14-year-old, but I also genuinely believe that the youngest people, they have least legacy system view. They don't get trapped in the business as usual thought. And judged by the more than one quarter now, e-petitions that they raise on the joint platform, they care the most about sustainability and regenerated potential of the economy, long-term thinking and things like that, which I firmly believe is the direction to go. Valeria? Thank you. No, I just wanted to thank you so much, Minister. I know that you have to run for your next meeting, so I just wanted to thank you. And maybe, yeah, thank you on behalf of everyone, like these group of fans that you have over here. Professor Latanya, back to you. My next meeting is the cabinet meeting, so I thank you. Well, you've been gracious. We really appreciate it. What a great honor. Thank you very much, Minister Tang. And thank you for the great questions and exchange of idea until we meet face-to-face. Live long and prosper, everyone. Oh, I can't do it. Thank you. It's okay. Live long and prosper. Bye.


What's going on and welcome to the fandom hurry up. My name is Tom Vecchio week 17 is here and I'm set to bring you three value plays For your DFS lineups Let's jump in starting off at running back with Darryl Williams $6,200 of the Kansas City Chiefs first off We know that Clyde Edwards a layer is listed as questionable for this game His status is just up in the air and if he doesn't play we know we're using a big workload from Williams We look to this game against the bangles as a 51 point over under which is the second highest on the slate Very very solid the bangles are very average against running backs They're running 19.8 finger points per game to opposing running backs. That's right around the league average Nothing we need to be worried about. Yes looking back to Williams most recent game He's not doing a whole lot But he was splitting carries and splitting touches with CEH in that time If we look back to some of the games where CEH missed we saw Williams with 20 plus touches in three of those games So that's what we really want to be focusing on What will Williams workload look like if CEH doesn't play and it's realistically going to be 20 plus touches at $6,200 Is absolutely a fantastic value option moving on to a wide receiver Devonta Smith for the field of the Eagles coming in at $6,100 a great match for him going up against the Washington football team They're running 33 finger points per game opposing wide receivers. That's the third worst in the league We see Smith coming in with a 25% target share on the Eagles. That's number one overall He has a 16% red zone target share which is tied for the second highest on the team And the Eagles are carrying a 24 implied team total this week Everything is shaping up for Smith to continue doing his team seeing four or five six targets Hopefully some of them in the red zone providing plenty of value at $6,100 love the match against Washington It's really going to be all about the Eagles in that game And then finally moving on to a value at tight end. That's gonna be Zach Erz at $5,500 This game against Dallas is really shaping up to you probably the best game on the entire slate But a 51 and a half over under we have two good offenses on both sides We look at earths and he has seven targets or more in three straight games He has 13 and 11 targets in each of his last two games that we see Dallas They're on 10.4 fade new points for game opposing tight ends That's also around the league average and with the Andre Hopkins done for the season for the Arizona Cardinals We actually see earths right now the third highest red zone share red zone target share on the Cardinals So certainly getting down in the scoring area We see Kyler Murray looking to earths often and that is an option We want to be going to they have the downfield options with Kirk and somewhat of AJ green on the outside But the middle underneath stuff is going to earths as we've seen with 13 and 11 targets in the past two games So 5,500 for earths is one of my favorite values at tight end this week. All right So that does it for this week's hurry up. I'll be back next week bringing you three more value plays for your DFS lineup


The reason I chose to work in Extension, because I thought that it gives me a unique opportunity to work with all the stakeholders at the grassroots level. At the same time, I'm in a position to pass on that valuable feedback from the stakeholders to my co-workers, my supervisors, right at the REC as well as in Fargo. So I find it a very unique opportunity.


Woman demands immediate changes to rec center, owner responds. A Colorado woman was not happy with her local rec center, so she demanded immediate changes. The owner, however, had the perfect response to those demands. Sabah Ali, a Muslim woman from Colorado, was denied the ability to swim in the public pool at her local recreation center in Commerce City because she wanted to do so while wearing a long Islamic dress over a shirt and pants. When staff at the pool saw her attire, Ali was told she would not be allowed to swim since her clothes, which conformed to her religious beliefs, didn't fall in line with pool rules. According to Ali, when she took her family to swim at the Commerce City Recreation Center on a Sunday afternoon, she was denied access to the pool even though she claims that she asked if she could instead wear just her shirt and pants and remove the dress, but rec center employees pointed to pool rules stating specified swimming attire only. Sabah Ali shows an ABC reporter the attire she was wearing at the pool. And that I had clothes on underneath, Ali recalled, according to ABC7. But they said if they let me, everyone would ask, why did you let them and not us? After Ali's request was also denied, she went public, adamant that you shouldn't have to be half-naked to swim. The local recreation center that turned Ali away happens to be owned by the city, and a Commerce City spokesperson had a response to the woman's demands. Quite simply, she again pointed to the pool rules which are in place to protect the public and said that the rules, not allowing street clothes, are best practices for public health and safety. The city says it's not discrimination, but rather, it's the rules. Furthermore, the rules are not discriminatory, but rather, they are equally enforced. Sabah Ali, however, says she still views this as an issue of religious discrimination, and civil rights attorney Quasar Mohammed Bayh agrees. However, the city is standing firm, adamant that the regulations are in place for a reason and that others, who are not of the Islamic faith, have been turned away under the same rules. The city routinely turns away people who don't have appropriate swimwear, jean shorts, sports shorts, not wearing swim diapers, said Commerce City spokesperson Michelle Halstead. We turn all those individuals away because the number one focus for us is safety. Ali's own case proves this to be true since she was still turned away when she offered to take off the Islamic dress and wear a shirt and pants that were underneath instead. Commerce City spokesperson Michelle Halstead spoke to reporters at the rec center pool. Why do I have to be half naked to swim, accused Ali, who later rented a hotel room so that she could swim with her children in a private pool, according to the Daily Mail? To enjoy time with my kids. I want to have the same rights as every citizen, she added, even though the rules are equally enforced. However, she seems to have missed something else as well. The brochure makes it clear that the problem is street clothes rather than swimwear that is the issue and not Islamic attire. Commerce City spokesperson Michelle Halstead explained that outside clothing can increase the chances of contaminating the water and spreading waterborne illnesses. In her response to the accusations of discrimination, Halstead pointed out that full body swimsuits, which would include an Islamic Birkenai, are allowed in the pool. In other words, no one was forcing anyone to swim half naked. Although one would think that the full body swimsuits would be an option for Saba Ali and anyone else who doesn't want to swim half naked, the Muslim woman continues to claim that she was discriminated against because of her Islamic dress, ignoring the fact that the Islamic Birkenai, a loose-fitting full body swimsuit with a hood made for Islamic women, is actually allowed. Still, civil rights attorney Quesar Mohammed Bay said the policies of public places should be modified to ensure that Muslims feel included. As a result of Saba Ali coming forward, the city decided to update its swimwear brochure so that full body swimsuits or Birkenis are included in its list of acceptable swimming attire while still pointing out that street clothes, including full Islamic dress, are not appropriate for the pool.


What's up everybody it's your boy Mr. Ghana baby right here in the land that we love, that is Salon. It's all about Africa to the world and it's time for us to tell our own story and if you want to tell our own story we need to tell our own history the way it is. I am here but I don't even know your name but what is your name? I'm John Mamadu. John Mamadu. So John Mamadu is going to be our tour guide today and he's going to take us through all the history about this country Salon. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm John Mamadu. You are welcome to the Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument. It was established ten years ago by the Sierra Leone forces. It's just to create the relationship between the civilian and that of the military and it was done during the regime of our former president Dr. Anasibai Kuruma. Once more you are welcome. As you can see these are elephants. This is also to tell you that to have them in Sierra Leone you can found this elephant in the northern part of Sierra Leone in the Cuenadugo district, now Carina district. From here to that place it's 177 miles and they occupy 200 acres of land. The place you can found this elephant it is called the Otambak Kilimi National Park. If you have the opportunity to go there you will see a lot of different types of animals there and a very nice place to stay. And here is the Lion Mountain. Lion Mountain. Yeah. The Lion Mountain. 557 years ago when in particular there by the name of Fedora Central was sailing across West Africa and he was in search of freshwater and salt. Yeah he saw this topography of the surface of this mountain when he look at the mountain he said oh it's example the lion. So he decided to call the mountain the Lion Mountain. The second reason was he came during the rainy season. During the rainy season when he heard the sound of the thunder it thought it was a roar for Lion. But when he looks around he's seeing a lion. We're trying to tell you that when the Portuguese came in here the people were not living here. People were living. So how come he got the name for us? Well that's what Istri tells us that when he they came around when they saw the lion when they just look at the the mountain the surface of the mountain when he said oh the example the lion. So that's came the name. That's came the name Sierra Leone. So when the people that were living here what what is the name that they call this place? Freetown because you know Freetown was known Freetown was having several names. We have the Maroon Maroon Town and now Grabbing Town you know all these names and later became Freetown. Okay all right. So but when the British people came in 1808 that when Sierra Leone came in this calm colony they decided to change the Sierra Leone to Sierra Leone. But the meaning still remains the same the Lion Mountain because there were British Portuguese people before the British came in here. Three at last it represents 411 slaves that were bought in Sierra Leone. I told you earlier that there were slavery before the British that we have the Portuguese system of slavery. During the Portuguese system of slavery these slaves they have the right liberty to see their loved ones friends and relatives when we are working for the Portuguese people. But during the era of the British they were classed as second class animals treated like animals. They took them to Kent later went with them to England came with them back and passed to the gateway to the old kinsial which we now call the Conalto hospital. Okay. At that place whenever a slave step his or her feet there you automatically free that's why I see see we are no longer slaves we are now free I'm now free man. So from there they walked through to this majestic country this is where they were praying and doing their normal businesses. So from there they moved this way go to villages closer to the colony at that time. These villages like Leicester, Gloucester, Regent, Batos, Waterloo, Kent, York. This we are the original settlement of these slaves. And we have another important personality this is Bibore. Bibore as far as the district of Sierra Leone is concerned is one of the hills that fought for the Sierra Leone. He was the hero of the whole tax war which started in 1898. Bibore was born in 1840 and he led the timidly uprising against the breaches when the breaches said these people should pay tax. And he said why my people should pay tax for houses or land belongs to them. So he revolted against the breaches and the breaches at that time the governor at that time sent two of his officers go to Bibore go and ask Bibore that his people should pay tax. So he killed one of them and let the one go go and tell your governor that my people are not going to pay tax for houses or land belongs to them. But unfortunately for him it was he was betrayed by his own people. He sold him for 100 pounds to the breaches and they sent him on exile to Ghana to the Gold Coast Brains called Ghana. He was there for seven years. He came back and he was stated again as chief of Kase and he died. So that's why to remember Bibore we have the 1000 news notes his face is there and we have the Bibore beach the Bibore road yes and the Bibore town as well. As we are talking about politics in Sierra Leone these are the two major people we should always remember as far as politics is concerned in Sierra Leone. This is Samuel Timangai and this is Shaka Provence Steven. Both of them came from the same district went to the same primary school secondary school and college and the university as well. He was the first prime minister we have in Sierra Leone and the first executive president we have in Sierra Leone. This is the bond and it took to England for Sierra Leone to gain independence. Samuel Tim was the first man to graduate in the phobia college from the provinces. The first medical doctor as well to graduate at the phobia college from the provinces. This is the bond that it took to England for Sierra Leone to gain independence in 1961. Both of them went and they were in the same party the SOS now called the SLPP. Yes but something brings separation. When Shaka Steven said election before independent he said no independent before election separation. So Shaka Steven came back and he was part of the SOS now the SLPP. He broke away from there and formed his own his own party the APC. In 1967 election there is election he won election by one vote because at that time all the parliamentarians are legible to vote. So automatically he became the first executive president we do have in Sierra Leone and he died in 1988. So to remember them we have the Shaka Steven street we have the Shaka Steven stadium and both of them when they died they were beggar the parliament. Yeah so this and this is the founder of the Sierra Leone People's Party and this is the founder of the Old People's Congress the APC and the SLPP. The SLPP is in power. Yes it's the green and this is the red. This is reconciliation. I'm once a former president I'm doing after our civil war. This man you are seeing he was an ex combatant a power man chief his wives and this man his family but during the war because of he was under the influence of drugs he amputated the power man chief his wife and he did the same thing to his own family. But after the war he came back to his village and his acts of mercy please forgive me for what I've done and he came to the power man chief in Africa in Sierra Leone particularly when somebody has done something wrong this is how that individual would be acts of mercy. Either he will touch the foot of you or lie down and say please forgive me until you touch the head of that person and he said you are forgiven. So it's what this man is doing with the amputated hands the prime man chief is touching the head of this man and said you are forgiven. But the second wife of the chief she was not around when she came so why are you forgiving this man with all what he has done to us and the chief said we should learn to forgive one another no matter the atrocity no matter the things he has done to us let's just forget about everything and to maintain peace because there is a sweet word there said once said by a former army chief of staff Major General Alfred Nelson Williams there is so much in us that unite us than divide us as single unions we must recognize this fact and learn to live with one another This is Thomas Peters he is the true founder of free town he was born in 1738 he was an Afro-American he was a slave poor and uneducated he was in America he left America and went to England and joined the army there and went to the rank of sergeant there he met a Sierra Leonean coming in England he said they want to come to Sierra Leone to establish a colony okay but before that they took them to England and to Nova Scotia but because of the weather condition there they came back to England and he met the Sierra Leonean coming in England said they want to come to free town to establish a new colony at that time free town was called the Maroon Town but on arrival five thousand of them they are all slaves so they saw a very beautiful land say oh this place is so beautiful so he decided to give the name free town in 1792 Afro-American which means he's an African born in America born in America this man you are seeing he was Italian so they are doing the Second World War his name is Farang Befambe the meaning of that word is if you hit on a stone you will feel the stone if a stone hits on you you will feel the stone but he's trying to preach about discrimination as a soldier your responsibility is to save a civilian and out of a soldier and he even telling us that as a Sierra Leonean we should stop discrimination as far as you are Sierra Leoneans you are all one no matter whether you are a Mende or a Timene or a Limba or you are a Sosu we are all one we are all Sierra Leoneans so he's preaching about discrimination said as a soldier he has the responsibility to save a civilian and out of a soldier that's why he hold the hand of a civilian and out of a soldier but the man at the back is telling us all these things we are using to kill ourselves why are we not using them for material that we use for agriculture so he is destroying this weapon we are using to kill ourselves and turning them to things we use for agriculture which means that this story came about after the civil war after doing the the Second World War