Also take into account mid autumn, which is the first of October, all the way to the National Day, which is the 10th, including the 11th, so many people will probably not be around that 11th day, although I will be around.
That’s fine. If you want to include local speakers, or local contributors, or key influencers from Taiwan, you will probably have to extend your invitation well in advance if you’re running it in this, because unlike a traditional mid autumn, this one connects very well with the National Day.
People may make travel arrangements, but if they commit to, for example, be around like the first day, the 1st, or like the last day, the 10th and the 11th, that will probably work if you invite them in advance.
I really liked it. I find that there is many local young people who are even not so proficient in conversational English very much willing to attend because they really care about the Hong Kong situation, the human situation worldwide, and things like that.
Some of them tell me they get maybe 30, 40 percent of the keynote, including mine, but still, they’re very eager to learn and they try to speak English. I think this is really good in a civil society capacity building kind of way. This time, if the venue allows, I would encourage for even more youth inclusion.
Yeah. The speakers or panelists were mostly speakers, because of the format. The speakers, they are a little bit more senior. I’m almost 40 years old now, Freddie, certainly more than 40, and a cadre of people older than 40 years. Really young people, I think they would resonate a bit more with people in their 20s or early 30s.
Awesome.
I think a predictable venue is very important actually, because if you have to start off from scratch to plan your venue every time, that makes it harder for people to build a longer engagement week around the Oslo Freedom Forum.
I think that’s the main challenge of the OFF in the past two years that I personally observed, is that there is no side events as such. It’s just the OFF itself and even though there is many local partners that you work with and they’re all excellent, there is less of a pre-event, post-event, side-event engagement opportunities. It’s the OFF itself and little else.
Maybe I missed something, but that’s not the norm here in Taiwan.
If you’re not tired of me reading poetry and singing, I can do that again.
Not Denise Ho level, but I try. In other capacities, I think it’s about the planning and branding of how Taiwan can help not only to amplify the human rights voices, but serving as a platform on which the novel approaches to get the message out can be developed and co-created here. I have in mind for twice now a yearly forum for the Open Tech Fund Summit, which is less public facing and more community facing.
They chose Taiwan for two years running, the same venue, precisely because they want to engage the local activists and developers in Taiwan to develop new digital, but not only digital, tools and mechanisms to further the mission of human rights, making it a social production, not just ideas worth sharing but ideas worth developing kind of conference.
Although that may or may not align with the OFF Fund, I nevertheless find it interesting. The TED community also did a TEDx weekend in Taiwan in Taipei. I also participated as a panelist. It’s interesting to see that, because the attendance is all TEDx curators, mostly TEDx curators, the focus is on getting something new done sharing best or at least better practices, and not just getting ideas across, which would be what we originally think about TED.
Yeah, the OTF.
OTF, Open Tech Fund.
I think so. They expressed a strong willingness to work with Taiwan, and also because their local partners such as the Open Culture Foundation is quite eager to offer what we have developed in the forefront of, for example, countering disinformation, countering propaganda online, cyber defense mechanisms, and things like that. I think they are quite aligned with the local partners.
Yeah, it’s quite relevant. Last year, the OFF had a banner event of the anti-ELAB. Of course, there is no prediction of what will happen in September or October, but having strong focus on getting something done together, I think, would also improve the OFF brand.
Exactly. That’s why the young people, youth engagement, is so important, because they are far less institutional baggage or legacy. You can see a various assembling of things that not necessarily work but in a proof-of-concept stage. That is more inspirational.
That is not to say that people very seasoned and very respected, Nobel Prize winning is not good to draw a crowd. It’s this cross-generational solidarity to pair curiosity with insight that together makes a forum work, which are names of the two most recent [inaudible 10:02].
Many cities, especially non-Taipei cities, are trying to brand themselves as a place to go for international NGOs, like Taichung and Taoyuan being the two most active ones of branding themselves as an international NGO center. With Taoyuan actually having a human rights angle to it, and Taichung more of a democracy angle. OFF can fit both angles.
My suggestion would be, of course, consider Taipei City and New Taipei City, but frankly speaking, there you will be sharing resources with other already quite established international NGOs in terms of attention space, not physical space, like Reporters Without Borders and things like that.
In Taoyuan and Taichung, which are traffic-wise quite easy to access from the rest of non-Taipei regions, in Taiwan, they are closer than Taipei to the middle and South Taiwan. I think they may devote more attention to you if you are helping them in establish this idea of international NGO hub for human rights in Taoyuan or for direct democracy in Taichung.
Yes, definitely. They all have international NGO offices. I would also say that it makes sense to combine that with the venue.
Like the Asia Pacific Summit that we’re hosting again this May is actually in Taoyuan and with the full blessing of the city mayor, exactly because they want to get across the idea that they too have a voluntary local review for the global goals with emphasis on inclusion, like participatory budget for migrant workers with no voting rights under representative democracy and things like that, like a full inclusion for betterment of human rights of non-citizens.
They want to get across this idea. For Taoyuan, it’s harder than Taipei City. If Taipei City publish a voluntary local review, the international press probably reports that as their sister cityhood now with Prague City, but for Taoyuan, that international spotlight is harder to get, and so they devote more resources into making the Asia Pacific Summit a success, which will coincide with their voluntary local review.
I’m just saying that the venue, if it’s in non-Taipei but still very accessible traffic-wise places, you may get more matching support from the local government.
After the airport metro, which is in full action now, they even have an express route, is actually, I would say as easy, if you’re living close to an airport metro station as any other place in Taipei City.
I haven’t done my research, I have to be honest, about your priorities for this year. I understand that there is a Mexico branch or just a forum there in addition to the Oslo one, but I don’t know other focus areas on earth that you are paying attention to.
I have an additional question. We’re quite familiar with the Open Tech Fund or even the CIVICUS micro-grant and other micro-grants of that nature. You used to or are still running a micro-grant, but the material around that is less visible online. I don’t really know how is that going.
Yeah, because a few things. I’m currently also on a board of an international NGO based in New York called RadicalxChange. We are just trying to improve micro-grants and how they work. I’m just offering this to anyone who is running micro-grant to combine a matching grant with crowdfunding, which we call quadratic funding.
This is the idea where people can receive more matching funds of more people pooled together, so it counts not only the number of donations, but also the number of people who donate. These two together determine the matching fund, because it’s taken as a signal that there is more people caring about it.
The main experiment of that mechanism is Vitalik Buterin, previously known for Ethereum, and also a board member. I’ll just paste you the link to his write-up about the experiments for the Ethereum community. This is a kind of idea especially for human rights activism, which benefits the world but very costly actually to the individual, or just trying to find a better funding model for that sort of thing.
This is just an aside. You may or may not be interested in that. I’m just showing what I’m working on.
Yeah. I’m flying to DC very soon actually on a CSIS invitation. I will land, I think, Monday, so 10th of January. I fly out I think early Sunday, so a full week.
That’s right. For the moment, what we’re doing or what we’re committed to do is just that one single CSIS forum, although the RadicalxChange community is also planning something, maybe an event together. The schedule is quite open actually. If you have any proposals and/or any activities you’re already doing anywhere around the vicinity, feel free to let me know and we can meet up.
Yeah, I am in Taipei right now. I have been just teleconferencing all this week during the Lunar New Year. Especially given this Wuhan viral outbreak situation, I find teleconference to be very useful.
Very much so. I just shared the last link with you that talks about how the idea of the quadratic financing came about, which may make an interesting read. Feel free to let us know any thought, possible intersection of this work with your organization.
No, it’s fine. We’ll send you a transcript soon.
Bye-bye. Have a good-looking time.
A few has moved from draft to actually passed by the parliament, but the number have not changed. There’s one case currently going on for e-scooters. Although it have not yet produced a regulation, but at least stakeholder agreement. I’m sure it’s like that everywhere in the world…
It really is because in municipalities such as Taipei, there’s dedicated bike lanes. They are keen to classify as electric bikes. Outside of Taipei municipality, there’s no dedicated bike lanes. They’re inclined to classify it as scooters and so on. It is actually a national level issue, but in any case…
No, that number have not changed much. The PO network, the internal vTaiwan-inspired community that we built, has now processed 60 cases. That’s twice a month. Those 60 cases are mostly new.
A largely vTaiwan-inspired multistakeholder process, except the facilitators are mainly career public service.
It is from the PO network. Actually, we have a folder here that contains the rundown of all the 60 cases. The last two have not been updated there, but they will soon. You can just look at all those different cases there.
Carl Jack Miller did the e-scooters one. It’s an OK story, I guess.
The most exciting thing is largely this generative approach that vTaiwan was able to produce new vTaiwan-like processes. Not only the PO network, but literally the fintech sandbox, the self-driving vehicle sandbox, now the 5G testing spectrum sandbox, and platform economy sandbox, general purpose regulatory.
These were all generated from a vTaiwan process, which then makes new rooms for multi-stakeholder processes that is outside of vTaiwan. It is those further on sandboxes and generative multi-stakeholder mechanisms that is seeing most of the action now.
While the vTaiwan community are still meeting every week, have moved on to a lot of new social innovations, such as pairing different supporters of different candidates to meet each other in person before the election…
Or in real-time crowdsourcing fact checks of everything every presidential candidate said or things like that which are not quite e-rulemaking or crowd law but is nevertheless a part of the democratic fabric.
