Are you planning to go back to China or Singapore for a comparison study, or you are just focused on Taiwan?
Why national level instead of, say, Taipei city or Tainan city, which are, frankly speaking, much earlier -- like two or three years earlier -- in development?
It’s certainly much easier to finish your PhD at the city level.
There’s plenty of g0v members working with cities, and they also share this open government ethos. Perhaps you’re right, as the idea is that you make comparison between the communities’ ambitions and their different realizations, so you’re not so fixed on one particular realization, right?
You’re focused on...
The reason?
Maybe it’s the other way around, too. [laughs]
It’s a microcosm.
vTaiwan is a g0v project. It is defined by participants. Is there anything you would like to see vTaiwan change, as your contribution in the project?
But the idea is that for every meetup, everybody proactively shapes its direction. What do your value...?
Just show up for the dinner...
That’s something you can contribute. Just advertise, and find out how to reach more people. That would be great.
Are there anything else than vTaiwan that you’re interested in the PDIS work, or you’re just mainly focusing on the vTaiwan?
Have you seen this picture before? ( https://goo.gl/sbZ8z6 )
The green part is pretty much what we’re doing. It’s a lot. It’s literally all over the place. There are certain parts of it, such as vTaiwan, as you can see, is just this one small part.
We do it because PDIS want to collaborate with civil society. We collaborate because we want to foster a culture of social innovation. We do that because we care about civil society empowerment. It all makes sense. [laughs]
We do a lot of other things as well. If you are interested in any other part, Shuyang has in her mind this entire map. You’ll gradually find out the other parts, and if you are interested, just let me know some Wednesday, and we’ll figure out other projects that you can participate, instead of just observing.
You’ll start here, which is great.
The PO network, as you can see, is special, because this part actually has two contexts. This is both in "empowering the civil society," and "increasing trust between the government and the civil society."
The PO network here comes from our wish to build a collaborative culture, which comes from the civil society part. It is also coming from this internal innovation ethos, which is to make sure that the civil servants can try something new without worrying about the risk of failure, because a certain Digital Minister will absorb all the risk.
This part is unrelated to the civil society part. The PO network has two sides to it. Every PO has to have a side that is talking with stakeholders and civil society, but another key part of a PO’s work is to talk internally with their risk-averse counterparts inside their ministry, and trying to convince them to innovate somehow.
I don’t know whether you’re interested in the later part as well, which is really the institutional part of open government and everything else, because it’s observable by the society. There’s been actually quite some discourse, but the internal ones are pretty internal.
In our workshop, we had some slides. Peggy gave a really good talk about how it looks like from the internal part of PO, and she has a cleaned-up version now that we can share. I would highly encourage you to read that and see if you’re interested. ( https://goo.gl/di8chi )
If you are, they have a separate project called PO shadowing, in which Fang-Jui or Shuyang randomly follows a PO for a day or two, and bring them to lunch, things like that.
Right, that’s what they do. If you’re interested in that part, I’m sure that it will reveal much more than any transcripts or meeting records. So that’s the PO network.
Is your thesis going to be in French or English?
...allows it?
I ask because...
Everybody here can collaborate on it.
We actually develop a lot of discourse, and paper writing, and narratives ourselves, and we do find that if we do it in Chinese, then the international collaboration is quite limited. People will have rely on Google Translate, and whatever. I imagine it’s the same in French.
Shuyang is our international liaison, and she has this huge network of paper co-writers and reviewers.
Right. If you do your preliminary thoughts, and recollections, and studies, and whatever, in a form that is collaboratively editable, or at least comment-able, and it’s in English, I imagine that it will be a lot of value to the extended network.
You can’t?
Well the thesis is your own work, but what I’m saying is that, there is a lot of materials...
Yeah. If it’s vTaiwan related, a lot of it is in English anyway.
Yeah.
So you’re going to write...
Sure. It will be a great way to introduce this to communities together, actually. If it’s in English, then everybody gets to contribute. I think that’s great.
There is a PO actually writing her own thesis about this as well. I’ll highly encourage you to avoid duplication. [laughs]
One of our colleagues, Yi-Chun, actually wrote her thesis on this very topic as well, comparison between the two platforms. That’s in Chinese, but I’m sure that you can still comprehend it just fine.
Paper writing and collaborative article writing, that seems to be a theme. Anything else that you would like to know, or you’ll just start on this and go?
OK. Let’s see. Anything else I can do for you, other than just be there as far as I can measure, every Wednesday evening?
Sure.
Yeah, there is.
Open-source is an economic movement, and free software is an ethical movement. Their licenses are almost exactly the same, but they are motivated by different normative ethics.
Both. We draw from the free software movement on the freedom of expression, the right to assemble, to organize and collaborate. These normative rights that came from the free software movement.
But we also say that, by working in the open, it saves each other’s time. It saves us from doing redundant work. To collaborate is to avoid waste. That’s a more economic concern. Those lines of argument came from the open source movement.
If you hear "you ought to do something," that’s free software, and if you say "it’s more practical if you do something," that’s open source.
Also, the open source movement has already won. [laughs] Like Microsoft and Apple, everybody agrees that it’s more efficient to collaborate.
It’s mainstream now. It’s no longer fringe. A lot of people who original forked the free software movement into open source, now seeing their narrative mainstreamed, are now going back and now regarding software freedom as important as well. ( https://allisonrandal.com/2015/07/22/the-future-of-open-source/ )
