Sure. If there’s live streaming, I am sure that most public servants prefer watching the live stream.
I don’t know whether it will be recordings or live streaming.
I know. Maybe the better way is that, for after you come back, organize a sharing session. Then people, it’s like a flipped classroom. People will be required to see through the playlist, maybe you curate.
Like, “You must watch those three talks before coming.” Then we can just provide for free the space of the Social Innovation Lab, which is free of charge for you to use. Many people use that for this kind of thing.
As long as you, it’s open to the public, and you can say which SDG it correspond to, the venue is free for you to use. You can host, I don’t know, 100 people or more, if needed. Then we make sure that the people have watched this video and came specifically for discussions.
I think that’s usually the better way, as opposed to asking three representative coming to Mexico City, which as you mentioned, it really gets lost in translation. People can’t really go back and start spreading the word without their audience already immersing in themselves a little bit of the context of the conversation.
I’m happy to offer the venue and things like that.
Yeah. If you have posters or whatever, you can also send graphic files to me, and I am happy to just put on my office for free advertisement to get people just enrolling.
Yeah, I’d love to.
That’s right. I think it’s not exactly not new, it’s just, we don’t know what to do on that day. There’s no immediate call to action, right? Like last year, it’s that our action are the future. That was the theme, but there’s no very easy call to action here locally in Taiwan.
If you can figure out some call to action as part of the message on the market, for example, if people can just subscribe to something and start something. For example, going vegan one day per week, that really took off. It took off very, very well.
It’s something that people can very easily do and say that they are doing. Figure out some call to action like that, I think, is paramount.
No, it’s fine.
Thank you.
Yeah, very much so. Looking forward to it.
Yeah, of course, of course.
Sure.
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 an 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 an 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 waive 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.
