I first got an Internet account through the NTU network by way of a friend when I was 12. That was 1993. There was no graphic browsers then. As I remember, those days we had Archie and Gopher and probably it makes no sense to use those words now, but those were pre-world-wide-web technologies that were attempts to make a hyper-linked world.
My first foray, if we can call it, into Internet governance is just to set up USENET groups for what we call Perl-mongers, which are people who are trying to spread the Perl language. I also participated in the transition between Perl 4 to Perl 5, the forming of CPAN, and things like that.
All this is basically people building a library of reusable software components and trying to make sure, in a way, that people can trust each other, even complete strangers, to reuse parts of our code in your code and vice versa.
That is my first foray into Internet governance, just by way of participating in CPAN.
You cannot punch anyone over the Internet. Even though there were latitudes and longitude and we jokingly call them ICBM addresses, but there was no real ICBMs ever flown because of those addresses.
Well… Recently, there was one . At that time, there’s no ICBMs flying toward those IP addresses.
In any case, the difference was, as I said, the absence of coercive power. You really could not coerce somebody to not speak over the Internet like that.
The governance works in a purely voluntary fashion. It doesn’t have the army, it doesn’t have a navy to maintain some kind of sovereign of Internet governance. We just earn legitimately through other means. People earn it through radical transparency, poly-participation, and the emphasis on rough consensus.
OK. Do I have to say that again?
From the very beginning, when I was four or five years old, is when Taiwan started relaxing its one-party rule. The Democratic Progressive Party was just born at that time. I remembered all the conversations in my household, plus my parents are journalists, one studying politics, the other law.
They all very much cared about the democratization and, indeed, joined and founded many social-sector organizations. It’s in the family. Everybody really cares about the empowerment of social sector. Remember that was years, a decade or more before we even have our first presidential election.
It’s all social-sector governance or local-level governance, instead of just electing the president, which took place in 1996.
The Economic Power-Up Plan was a interesting plan that tried to motivate the economy, but it’s “too complicated to explain” at the time. The government at the time, in 2012, tried to film something that basically have a voice-over that says, “The Power Plan is great but too complicated for citizens to understand. So, just follow it along and make it happen.”
It’s the first advertisement on the Internet that’s flagged as spam by citizens, from the central administration, so a complete flop. What it represents is the kind of elitist mindset that thinks the public, the “commoners,” have no way of understanding something as comprehensive as a multi-year budget.
The civic hackers at the time, four of them, imagined that it’s not because we’re dumb, but it’s because it’s not made in accessible way. They went up and did a interactive visualization of the national budget just to show that people can actually collectively understand budget very well.
Can we move?
We need to redo anything?
…blindly.
No, it inspired my friends. I wasn’t part of the g0v movement till 2013. That’s three months after the movement started. What they decide to do essentially is just to register a domain name “g0v.tw” and systemically look at all the bad-taste, authoritarian government services and websites and redo them in a participatory way, in a more interactive way.
I joined the movement in 2013 working not on a particular government project but on a dictionary project that combines all the different government offerings of dictionaries – because Taiwan had many different national languages – together into a shared dictionary that can share every national languages as well as, of course, German, French, and English. It’s called MoeDict .
At the time, civil disobedience as well. Because the dictionary that we downloaded said “all rights reserved.” Fortunately, Taiwan has Fair Use clause that says it should be used in proportion. The government publications can be used in a free way if your use is in proportion.
This is actually controversial because we download each and every entry. What’s proportional about it? What we’re saying is we’re adopting a device that was just invented back then. It’s called Creative Commons Zero, meaning that we wave all our copyright and any nearby right to our remixes. We were like “All times zero is zero.”
We’re making zero profit out of this. We say we’re just a format converter for the Minister of Education. After two years of legal debate, they eventually agreed.
Basically, after that, between 2013 and the May of Sunflower, there’s also another demonstration, the so-called White Cross demonstration against the attempted covering of a murder case, or accidental killing case, depending, in the military.
Random people, out of nowhere, on PTT — which is like a local Reddit except it’s not-for-profit — just assembled in the flash mob. The flash mob became a quarter-million people and exerted a huge pressure for the military to try the military cases with civil code in non-warring periods.
It’s a successful movement, in many cases, a prototype of what’s to come in Sunflower. At the time, it coincides with the COSCUP, which is the largest open-source conference here. People went on the street and discovered they cannot do anything because the Internet is saturated.
There’s no reliable communication. There’s no nervous system for that flash mob. It is a flash mob, after all. After that, there’s a Google Doc, people just learning from the occupy movements worldwide of how we can make ICT more useful in occupied state like this. After half a year or so of discussion, that is then deployed to the Sunflower Movement.
It’s very fresh access, like 10 days before the Sunflower Occupy, in the anti-4th-nuclear-plant protest. It was a typhoon-like weather, so not many people came, but people really want to watch live stream. Live stream was just introduced at the time, so we have much more people watching from afar than people directly on the stage or besides the stage.
Our equipment was still hot when the Sunflower Occupy happened.
Yeah.
I was there the night before they burst in, when they were just about to burst in. I was there providing Internet connectivity. I actually left my phone there to keep providing Internet while I go home. Two other people from g0v movement came, and they captured the entire breaking-in sequence.
After that, many professionals did join. The CPR team came, the “Cable, Radio & Power” team that supported pretty much all the open-source conferences.
We all agreed to use the banner of g0v because it’s easier to identify. Many different movements, the Mozilla movement, all the different movements, kind of re-branded under g0v during the Sunflower Movement.
The core was that the administration, indeed the legislation at the time, considered the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement a regulatory-level not a law level deal, so it could be passed just by the administration itself without a substantial debate or oversight from the legislative branch.
The regulations at the time, they have a pre-announcement period that is just one week or two. You can call the public servant… That is it. There’s no meaningful public deliberation to any of the regulations. That so-called “black box” prompted people to move to the street to demand a more democratic process.
I wouldn’t say that it’s against democracy; it’s against the institutional implementation of democracy that people feel is not up to times. Nowadays, it’s 60 days. The announcement is online. No exception, all regulations is up for public debate and things like that. That came directly from the demand of the Sunflower movement.
Jaclyn Tsai came to g0v. Jaclyn Tsai, I wouldn’t say that she’s particularly representing the government. She was from IBM Asia anyway. That was her second year, third year working in the government. She’s as much a private sector lawyer as a government minister.
She naturally sought support from the external network after Sunflower happened because she really want to help Taiwan in building the digital transformation. I remember that she came with two questions. First, how can we regulate teleworkers when they have no unions or there’s no association of people who employ teleworkers?
Second, how can we hear about people who start up their start-up in Cayman Islands? Why don’t they set up in Taiwan? Again, they don’t have any associations like that, so how can we think past traditional representativeness when making regulations?
Things happened after that. There’s many people who participate in the vTaiwan project initiated by Jaclyn. I was mostly just the technical. Then I learned facilitation from the facilitators, then became also a facilitator, and finally an architect on what is permissible, what is not permissible to talk like this.
For example, this need to occur at the agenda-setting stage where the government has no idea. If the government has a lot of idea and just want a quick poll, vTaiwan is not a good place to have this kind of conversation.
Governance mechanisms start to emerge, but that’s all with a year or more of experimentation on many, many different cases. When I become Digital Minister, people said that I just get promoted from the understudy. That is kind of the case. Jaclyn Tsai then went to g0v and started working entirely on the social sector. We swapped positions.
There was a paper on SocArxiv , that’s our attempt at just having a condensed version.
It’s described as a recursive public that meets regularly among the different stakeholders to talk about emergent issues that the government doesn’t quite know what to do, and have the social sector collaboratively design a participation agenda for each of those cases.
The process is just open-space technology. People meet up every Wednesday night, share dinner, share stories, have fun, and occasionally discover some interesting issues to talk about and then talk about it. Anybody who shows up is the right people. Anything that gets discussed is the right things to discuss, and it continuously evolves every day, so pure open-space technology.
They do. On the other hand, other spaces may have different technological components. It may change its process. That’s based on whether the stakeholders are mainly all residing in the same space or they are very distributed.
Whether those things are more on the reflective stage, people are still getting the feelings about it or whether people already have very solid consensus in terms of feelings and just want ideas, to start brainstorming. There’s no fixed process. It’s collaboratively determined by open-space technology.
People just have to read through the Hackpad and now HackMD and the transcripts of every week’s meet-ups in order to participate in the context of policy-making. Anyone who shows up is the right people. The government sponsors the venue or maybe sometimes some food, but otherwise, there’s entirely in the social sector.
No, vTaiwan came up with a minister’s questions about teleworking and about start-ups registering in Cayman Islands. Each time, the minister with a portfolio makes sure that the agencies that are related need to show up when a community decide it’s time for them to show up.
They participate also in the meet-ups to exchange, before going on live stream, their takes on these matters. From the very beginning, this is a partnership. This is not about protesting.
