Would any of your members happen to be in Taichung or Taiwan around May 5th and 6th?
So come to the meeting.
I’m pretty sure I’ll come to Edinburgh. I don’t know about others...
Supposedly, one of the SEWF team is also coming to the our event. We can figure out directly in May. I don’t know much about the September planning before May, actually.
That’s right, that’s right.
The tailor of Chiang Kai-shek you mentioned last time?
The family of tailors for Chiang Kai-shek.
Just include that in your email, and we’ll go through it point by point.
Yeah. It’s great to have this chat.
I will send you the transcripts in the next 24 hours.
Yeah, the vTaiwan people, they’re there.
Yeah, exactly.
Everybody, including me, is here for the pizza.
We’re good. All right, cheers.
Ciao.
Would you care for a coffee, or water?
Cool.
It was awesome there. My first one.
You’ve been there before?
Oh, you did?
I knew Nat for ~20 years, and the Foo unconference format, we have replicated it a lot here in Taiwan. However I didn’t know that Nat went back to New Zealand — and I didn’t know that he brought the Foo there with him.
A decade or something?
I think it’s a hundred new people every time? That helps.
The diversity status is also awesome... I was so surprised; it meant something. In Silicon Valley, when people threw up something like this, sometimes they just gather people very similar to them, but this time in New Zealand, it was perfect.
[laughs]
Wow. What made you do you it?
A naturalized Kiwi.
Yeah. For the Open Source // Open Society conference.
Yeah. It’s lovely.
Awesome win.
I’ve heard of it.
Before the term open source? That was in ’97...
...Free Software folks...
...I joined around ’94 or so.
You don’t look that.
It’s OK.
OK.
Without the Internet, we would be nothing in the startup scene.
She’s my mentor. I was her understudy.
We’re both Independents, as far as I know.
She worked with the last Cabinet. But her Premier at the time, Simon Chang who came from Google as a director of engineering, is also Independent. Mayor of Taipei City for the matter of fact also Independent. Here we have a bunch of Independent people.
As a matter of fact, we’re in the "digitaln" Slack.
Brenda send us invitations. Our interaction designer, service designer, and myself -- I guess political designer? Have joined already the Slack channel, and we’d be happy to join Basecamp or Wikis, whatever.
As far as I know, you’re also checking out our GitHub repositories?
There’s this daily operational level that we can already coordinate a lot because we develop completely in the open. There’s no system that we use that are proprietary. If there were proprietary ones like Pol.is, we convince the hell out of the creator so that it’s not proprietary. [laughs]
Most of the time, I find the problem is not in the license. It’s in it was designed for Heroku or it was designed for a hosted environment. It’s very difficult to make it run truly independently.
We help that too. We have a container system called Sandstorm. It’s very easy to port application to run inside it. That’s what we’ve done. We ported Pol.is to run completely independently and publish how we do it last week.
We have a lot of interest in New Zealand civic tech applications. The first one I encounter is in 2014, Loomio. It was pretty ugly back then and doesn’t really work with mobile phones that well. But it has really matured and is now very beautiful.
I participated in the NZ digital service standards consultation...
...and brought our conversations here, how to avoid vendor lock-in, how to get minister-level support, how to consider front line staff as well as users and so on into the consultation process. I don’t know whether they’ll be received. But we’re doing a lot of those day to day operational connections.
