It’s called Slido, S-L-I-D-O.
I think being anonymous is a key part of it. If it’s taking raising a hand, even in very liberal circles, like when around five people, everybody can raise their hands. If 500, it’s very difficult for people to, especially more introvert people, to raise their hands and ask a question, even if they have a lot to contribute.
In government settings, if there are superiors in the same room, it takes even more courage. If everybody is anonymous, and half of people are looking at their phones, you don’t really know who was the person who asked this question, or who raised this sentiment.
That really helps. Slido, or Pol.is, or Vmesh, or Join, all platforms, RealtimeBoard, all these platforms that I use to facilitate group listening, they have one common thing, is they don’t let participant reply to one another.
That just consumes people’s energy to more narrower and narrower conversations. In all those tech that I use, the only way to refute a argument, really, is to raise a better argument. There is no ad hominem attacks, or things like that. It takes some design.
OK. IMED.
You can send me the link, and I will check it out.
Yeah, I’ll look over it.
You can just airdrop that to me, actually.
That’s one piece of technology that always works.
Keynote is just fine.
You can airdrop that to me.
That’s a real innovation.
Exactly. It’s non-scarce. Any scarcity is artificial with information.
OK. You can airdrop me when ready, and I’m going to pay for the lunch. We need to slowly walk back.
OK, sure.
Hello.
Pretty good. Thank you.
That’s right. I’m in the airport lounge. I’m going to speak a little bit softer, assuming that you can still hear me of course.
To New Zealand, actually, to Auckland.
There’s this annual Foocamp there called the BAA Camp, or Kiwi Foo. I’m attending it for the first time.
Just for setting the time frame, I have two and a half hours. I don’t know whether that will be sufficient for you.
Sure, because there’s a lot of questions.
If you want to go through them all, I would estimate one hour of time would be.
Give or take.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, I’m doing a screen recording of the video of both sides, and also a regular recorder. We’ll have three channels, so there will be high-quality audio and video that I will send you right after the call.
My background is pretty transparent. I started programming in 1989. That would be when I was eight years old. It was around the time when martial law was lifted in Taiwan. We had freedom of the press for the first time. My parents were both working in journalism, started to slowly migrate to typing instead of writing for their work.
At the time, things like the IBM PC and so on are still considered work and not personal items. I was interested, so I just reading up on programming when it was around eight years old and started programming without a computer at home.
I drew the keyboards and wrote down the responses that the computer would supposedly give me and so on. It went on for quite some time before my parents finally cave in and gave me a personal computer.
It’s immersive. When I was eight, as I mentioned, we just got democracy and freedom of press. Everybody was talking about politics. We get to vote for the first time meaningfully. I remember around the dinner table in our home, because my dad is a political commentator in the newspaper, and my mom also covers for politics when I was young.
There’s this constant debate about the speed we’re taking to our democracy, about what’s the best form, whether it’s splitting up, whether it means constitutional amendments, whether it’s other things like that, and how this multiparty system actually work and things like that. I grew up listening to this, as did other people in my generation.
Like any large massive-scale movement, anyone’s viewpoint would be radically different from anyone else who participated. There’s literally half-a-million different viewpoints. [laughs] What kind of experiences would you like to hear about those 22 days?
I remember I was working with Socialtext in the Silicon Valley as well as a consultant for Apple at the time. I remember posting in a Socialtext chat channel, we call it Signals, that’s our virtual workspace, saying that I would need to take a leave because democracy needs me.
It’s like one of the statement that really stuck, because I really have to explain to my co-workers what’s happening, why a bunch of people occupied the parliament. I remember going there at the night of the protest, bringing my laptop and my phone for the covering of the event, providing the necessary equipment for the civic media there.
We all thought that it will end that night. We all thought that it’s just one night of demonstration. I remember this young person who lent me his laptop, because we need this really stable connection between my WiFi and through an Ethernet bridge to the camera person who is taking in the footage of the protests outside of the parliament.
He was like, "This is my administrator password." I think he was running Windows, and saying, "You can have that laptop all night if you want." He looked like a 20-something. How does a 20-something, is OK with parting with this expensive-looking laptop, [laughs] and just leaving it to a complete stranger for the entire night?
Little did I know that he belongs to the Black Island Youth, the group who decided to break into the parliament, climb over walls, and things like that. Laptop is going to be a burden, [laughs] which is why he’s just simply depositing it in the media camp right outside the parliament.
I think that’s a really interesting meeting between the free software people, my camp, and the people who are young activists, and people who are civic media. We did not work this closely in any of those demonstrations before.
There is plenty of demonstration, like the antinuclear, forced nuclear plant demonstration, where we strictly speaking just provided broadband and things like that, but always in a very neutral way. We just support the media, we don’t become the media.
The line becomes really blurred between the media, the network people, and the activists during the days that followed, because we had to improvise practically everything. There was no Internet connection that begin with, and we had to bootstrap ourselves.
I remember getting those 350 meters Ethernet cable to connect through the parliament building to the street outside. I remember talking in our hackathon, the g0v hackathon, about whether it’s a crazy idea to apply for a fiber optic line to a random place in a street’s cross section.
I don’t think any of the telecoms got those requests before, but it is the place we needed to provide the WiFi for the people covering the protests on the street. They actually consented, and sent us a fiber optic line a couple days later.
I remember setting up those real-time spreadsheets using a spreadsheet that I co-wrote with Dan Bricklin, the inventor of spreadsheets, called EtherCalc. We were just beta testing that free software spreadsheet, and then people started just swarming on that little host to paste all the links they could find that is relevant to the protests, including the maps, the charging stations.
The OpenStreetMap people did a really comprehensive mapping of the resources, the police force, where to get supplies, and things like that, as well as real time social analytics of the sentiments across the island about all the major arguments of the protest.
As well as, of course, court reporter style, stenographic recording of all of the debates that’s been held in the occupied parliament, as well as in the streets nearby. There’s a lot of memories. Toward the end of the occupy, there is a bunch of people who don’t want to retreat.
They appeal to us, saying that, "We want to use the system that you are using for decision making, Loomio, to have a real consultation about whether to retreat, or whether to continue occupying." I also remember how we started using Loomio, because we had this coordination problem of just random volunteers showing up to help with the connectivity.
We had no idea whether they are actual civic hackers or engineers, or whether they were just here for the fun. Because the engineers have a fast lane toward all the occupy stations, and so maybe people get in for the ride. We had to somehow tell a network engineer from a non-network engineer, and so we used Loomio to crowdsource the ideas.
We started with some really bad ideas like depositing one’s passport or an electronic ID. Nobody mentioned blockchain... At that point it wasn’t that popular, in 2014. We settled with something really, really simple, which is asking anyone who shows up who looks new what’s two to the power of six and two to the power of nine. If they can answer it, then they’re likely a civic or a Internet engineer. Things like that.
