Well the thing is that, when we had a deliberation, Uber was only operating in Taipei City, and the drivers were reasonably happy with this compromise. But Uber has since expanded to other cities, now we may have to do the same deliberations in other cities as well.
Well, they could join such a fleet. The idea is that existing taxi drivers are still having a monopoly of hailing on the street; and they can also join those dispatch systems, while the Uber drivers would be restricted to only an App-based dispatch system.
But the taxi drivers for this new kind of taxi must be protected in the same way the normal employees are. And we also encourage local co-ops to form this kind of App-dispatched taxi fleets to serve under-served areas.
There’s quite a few outcomes. The government pledged to ratify our consensus in a new regulation, slated maybe a week or two weeks from now. It’s basically saying, as long as they register locally as a fleet,as long as it pay taxes, we’re willing to have a different kind of ...
Over the four weeks, as they try to convince each other, they gradually fuse in the middle, and we basically take the points which more than 80 percent people have consensus, and use that as our negotiation points with Uber.
People were very split in the first week, and we can visually picture the split, because their groups were dispersed in four corners in a two-dimensional graph.
Yeah. We were sending an interactive online survey, that brings both the legal Uber drivers (UberBlack) and the not-so-legal Uber drivers (UberX) together, along with existing taxi drivers and scholars and policymakers, into a four week interactive discussion.
In other modes, we also buy Facebook advertise meant to take people out of Facebook, saying that "maybe you can have your discussions elsewhere, where it has a binding effect on the government" — either state or a national level. Most people would find this motivation enough.
For example one could install this browser plug-in called "Facebook feed eradicator". And once you install the plug-in, the social feed goes away from the Facebook website — you can still use its other functions.
Certainly. Facebook is sort of in its own league, as their social media is trying to encompass all modes of media and try to basically let people stay on it forever, using machine learning algorithms to tailor-made itself into the kind of media that someone craves — not necessarily needs. ...
Well I think it was due to the digital equality program the Taiwan government did when I was 12, to make sure that everybody — even the less connected areas — must have affordable ADSL lines for Internet download. I think I was fortunate in that the first web sites ...
That would be correct.
Yeah. I found a series of companies, and partnered and sold some companies; it’s just standard Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
That’s exactly correct.
Certainly. For example one of the g0v-facilitated discussions was how the Taipei city — Taiwan’s capital city — distributed its social housing to their people in socially disadvantaged groups. So disaster victims, aborigines, homeless, and mentally and physically handicapped people. So we know as a fact they were not "clicktivists", ...
But I think the gap between clicktivism and hacktivism (which requires almost full-time attention) was an arbitrary distinction. What the g0v people is doing, is to build engagement at levels of maybe one minute, maybe one hour, maybe three hours and so on. So everybody can find their useful way ...
"Clickvism" usually refers to people who would spend maybe one to ten seconds, like that time you require for a click to interact.
Yes, that’s the part where we relinquish our copyright comes in, because then the government can just cherry pick the pieces that they find useful. For example, the original national budget visualization the g0v people did in late 2012, is now being adopted by six different cities as a way ...
That’s correct.
Well basically presenting you the same information as the government does, but in a much more interactive, visualized, open data fashion, and then offer a way for people to participate. For example in our budget visualization, people are invited to look into one specific part of the city budget or ...
The only thing we have in common is that a project we do are in the commons, meaning that we relinquish most of our copyright. We work most on this shadow government website called g0v.tw, that basically takes an existing government agency — like the environment agency would be the ...
Gov-zero (g0v) is a assembly of sorts, in a few loosely coupled bits of spaces. We have hackathons every month and it’s a bunch of — about 5000 by now — designers, hackers, activists, coders, scholars, who meet every now and then.
Well, "conservative" means very simply that there is a large part of existing ways of how people work on the Internet that’s worth keeping. Conservation to me means keeping what works and try not to install too drastic a change in circumstances. I guess the two words linked together, to ...
I guess your are interested in the "conservative" part?
Sure. The term "anarchist" has a well-defined meaning, meaning nations and countries are very useful illusions, but they’re not always a useful. So we just use it where it’s good to use, and try not to pay too much attention into it where it isn’t.
About the technocratic part - I worry about that a lot. Process as product. Open source everything, put all our playbooks online. Change it, distro, fork, bring to new heights. Show this listening process is something you can do just like software.
Complicated arena we’re navigating. Deliberation is about policy, whether it’s budgeting or de-budgeting; whether it’s a council or a mayor. But comparing the vTaiwan process versus participatory budget - in PB the role of the councils etc have some of their power taken over by citizens. Here we work with ...
At the moment we have only reached the magicalness of facilitation in person. People focus on what they’re saying and each other’s faces etc. Doing some virtual reality experiments, but still a year or two in the future. We are using only face to face when there are actual ideas ...
We are very careful about choosing questions only through online work. Housing etc we bring technologies to the people. Flying out to one of the most rural areas so they can speak in their native habitats but include their Prime Minister. A good assistive technology should disappear when people use ...
no presidents or kings. Instead of voting we have a lot of struggle which is not binding. You don’t pass a law unless everyone signals consensus which is not articulated verbally. If only one or two minorities see something wrong, it doesn’t pass. That’s the only political system I know ...
The canvassing organizer has 90% of the human part of our facilitation. We were trying to design the room as the ambient computer so the facilitator doesn’t have to look at a device. Turn things into a quantifiable signal. Deliberation is messy, magical. We are not taking the messiness or ...
my hobby is troll hugging. Summarizing my work in the Perl community by handing out "commit bits", community rights. They complain, they get a commit bit - invited to contribute. There is computational propaganda and there are trolls - other counter movements going on. Net Neutrality - we provide equal ...
Trying not to get the Minister of Foreign Affairs angry with me. [laughter] The Umbrella Movement it was very difficult because the sites kept changing - had to make the message heard in many different channels. Many of the Sunflower technologies were deployed during Umbrella. The Civil Society part is ...
Sunflower was also class struggle. Unionists wanted to replace students. Two generators of power. Broadcasting live from the occupied parliament generates counterpower, which decimates the legitimacy of establishment. People on the street generate communication power, i.e. network-making power. Both were widely broadcasted to people who felt powerless. Geeks were learning ...
We worked with Umbrella Revolution, students were using Pol.is. Didn’t take root because joining conversations with institutions has a power play in it. New York Times dials about election night - when our actions are connected to real power we’re so willing to show up and make change.
They broke in during the night. That happened because there were very few people there, didn’t want media press. Wanted a livestream, just wanted to get in and there were no police. No one said "we will occupy 23 days" every day felt like the last day.
After Tiananmen, the wild lily movement made sure same mistake not repeated.
Taiwan’s democratization with protest and first election was 7 or 8 years. Saw a growth of civil society. Not direct democracy or some elections, but lifting of bans on freedom of speech and assembly. Those NGOs (gender equality, environmentalist, etc) cut their teeth on local issues. Not threatening the diminishing ...
Complete freedom of assembly and speech.
Back in the 70s, a complete disregard for intellectual properties. Not part of WIPO, not a part of the UN, think China and Shenzhen, personal computers were just being manufactured in Taiwan. Before there was distro, there was slackware. Is distributed very quickly because we all want it and make ...
The Public Digital Innovation Space.
They sync very easily, and then you can import PowerPoint or whatever onto here and do annotations.
Yeah.
It’s an Apple.
This is an iPad Pro.
It’s a stylus and tablet. I’m trying to get everybody off paper, so I’m to offer them a considerable alternative. Then there’s a projector here also that I use in meetings. This is how I record these meetings, and just project everybody’s thoughts on a projector, so that with maybe ...
This one?
...get easily pronounced.
Our team’s PDIS. It also doesn’t....
I’ll send you all the details.
