I am Tenzin Yangtso. The name was given to me by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as an act of compassion. For me it is more than an appellation: it is a quiet reminder that a life is not completed in isolation, but learned, slowly, within the currents of relationship, culture, and time — learning how to settle, and how to help others settle too.

Looking back, a single thread has run through my life: I have always been learning how to help people and communities, in the midst of change, find new ways to connect, to trust, and to live well together. That thread begins in my hometown of Hualien; it passes through the rise of Taiwan's online communities, through entrepreneurship and crowdfunding, through public governance and digital public good, and continues now into Plurality, Dharamsala, and Civic AI. Different paths, but all pointing to one question: in a world that changes so quickly, how can technology help a person become more fully a person?

My roots are in Hualien, Taiwan. I grew up in a public-service family, in years full of change and hope. My grandfather came to Taiwan with the Nationalist government and helped lay the early ground for our family. My father protected the mountains by day and wrote poetry by night; his love of literature opened my inner world. My mother gave of herself easily — gentle in daily life, willing to give a little more in any exchange. What she taught me was not abstract morality, but the most essential shape of care: to truly see another person, and to be willing to take one extra step for the sake of the relationship.

I was born in the years of postwar economic ascent, an era restless with experiment and curiosity. From my family I received a conviction that has stayed with me: that to try something new is not only to chase success or amusement, but to seek deeper, more meaningful connection. My father wrote because he loved writing. My mother supported every step I took simply because she loved me. These quiet, ordinary days became, in time, the inner ground on which I came to understand public affairs, technology, and social innovation.

I was originally a humanities student. To meet the changes of the era, I chose information management — a field closer to engineering. That seemingly cross-disciplinary choice placed me at the leading edge of the global transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. After joining DoubleClick Taiwan, I began to see how digital technology was changing the relationship between people and information, between people and community. Not long after, with my partners I helped build wretch.cc, the classic of Taiwanese community blogging. In that flowering era of mass connection, we watched digital communities reshape society, and saw how any ordinary person, through the network, might be seen, heard, and connected.

After three years at Yahoo!, I returned to entrepreneurship. Through Jiouhe Consultancy and the crowdfunding platform flyingV, I began to translate this "power of connection" into more concrete social impact. Crowdfunding is not just a financial instrument; it lets people without large capital or large platforms bring their work, their culture, and their ideals into public view. From social platforms to crowdfunding, I came to understand: what truly matters in digital innovation is not efficiency, but whether more presences are allowed to surface.

At thirty-five — a real turning point — I let go of entrepreneurship and set out for Southeast Asia on an entirely different journey. I joined Oriente, a Skype-backed digital finance startup, and moved among six Asian countries. In unfamiliar terrain, in cultures with different rhythms, I began to see that cultural and digital progress are bound together, and bound just as tightly to national policy, institutional design, and the foundations of social trust. Technology is never a tool floating outside of society; it is always inside specific cultures and institutions, shaping how people live, how they cooperate, and how they come to trust one another.

When I returned to Taiwan, I joined the Institute for Information Industry, a government-affiliated think tank. It was there that I came to a clear conviction: if digital development is to truly return to people's lives, it cannot speak only of technology and markets — it must also speak of public interest, institutional design, and social trust. I proposed the idea of "digital public good," and later joined the Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) to work on policy and infrastructure where data altruism, AI, social safety, and personal data protection meet. What I have cared about, all along, is the same thing: whether a policy actually serves people's lives, rather than merely sounding complete in institutional language.

I often divide this path into four seven-year stretches: digital marketing, entrepreneurship, public service, and social symbiosis. These four phases are not just changes in career but a slow widening of life's spirit. In the first seven years, I learned to see how people are connected through information. In the second, I learned to turn that connection into action and support. In the third, I learned to bring innovation back to public institutions and the everyday needs of people. And in this fourth seven-year stretch, what I care about most is this: how people, communities, technologies, and intelligent agents can move together toward symbiosis.

This same care runs through Plurality. As a co-author, I worked on more than a third of the chapters, thinking together with more than seventy participants about how, in a deeply digital age, the commonalities of a plural society might be used to recalibrate the relationship between institutions and technology. For me, Plurality is not an abstract theory but a practice of looking out at the world from different ridge lines: from different positions of experience, we see different faces of technology, and so reopen, together, the social horizon of what plurality can mean.

The symbiosis I have come to understand is not only an idea I have chosen, but a kind of moral gravity that draws all beings toward one another. It concerns how each individual contributes within relationship, and also the possibility of mutual passage between consciousness and matter. This is why, when we invited His Holiness the Dalai Lama to endorse Plurality, and let the spiritual axes of "harmony" and "the oneness of humanity" enter more deeply into the inner structure of the book, what I felt was not only that a book had received support, but a reminder: the harder the moment, the more actively we must move — to let the flowers of harmony bloom, and to build, within difference, a place where the heart can rest in the future of symbiosis.

The garden, Dharamsala, and Civic AI are not, for me, side roads — they are extensions of one road. I have come to believe more and more that the future should not be built on fear of technology, but on trust in people. Civic AI is not about replacing people; it is about teaching technology to understand plurality, to support cooperation, and to protect each person's dignity to live and to be.

If the years before were spent learning the languages of different fields, what I am trying to do now is to gather these languages into a fuller circle: from love and freedom in the family, to connection in online communities; from action in entrepreneurship, to responsibility in public governance; from plural collaboration in Plurality, to symbiotic intelligence in Civic AI. The circle is not a closed end, but a place where one can rest, and from which one can keep opening outward.

I hope that the person I am now can keep moving forward within this circle: that technology will not only be used, but cared for; that communities will not only be connected, but respected; that intelligence will not only be expanded, but cultivated within relationship. To me, this is the most important public question of the digital age — when output and ethics can be brought into contact, human compassion can extend into the code itself. It is also the direction my life, so far, most wants to keep practicing.