Hi, thanks for coming. I think this is the geekiest title of a Republican talk

I've ever spoken to. I got the inspiration for the talk at the meetup at the Global Diplomacy Lab last year in Montreal and today we're going to talk about how communities use technology to improve democracy. We'll have some minutes for questions at the end of the talk so feel free to

slash RP 17. It's pretty easy and you won't have to remember the questions until the end of the talk. Let's get started. Let's start with the communities. We're going to take a look at civic tech communities. These are networks of volunteers who

use their tech skills, their coding skills, their design skills, and many more to build tools for citizens that help to improve the communication between citizens and the state that make participation easier, that improve access to information, and many more. So in short they are leveraging

technology for the common good. We're going to take a look at two communities in specific. A network in Taiwan where CL comes from and one in Germany. Why these two? Germany is kind of obvious because it's the country that conveniently is surrounding this building and Taiwan is great

because it has one of the biggest and most active civic tech communities worldwide. There's a lot of cutting-edge tech development going on there and what's also very interesting is that internet and democracy evolve together around the same time in Taiwan. So you have a generation of 30

plus year olds that grew up with the opportunities of the internet and this new political system. So CL, tell us a little bit more about Taiwan. So actually people like Julia say are like very new to democracy in the last

generation so they're still quite eager to do participation and trying to shape how democracy is particularly with technology which is quite a thing in Taiwan. So we now see actually a lot of collaboration between technologists and also the traditional NGO workers working on various issues. So since 2012 a lot of controversial issues like this is in great debate in the society or

caused like huge protests of half million people on street such as government spending and financial deficit, human rights in military and the

trade deal with China which is always a big problem you know and pension reform and all other controversial legislations. So this actually made a lot of the technologists think maybe their skills can be used to to build new tools for the general public to more to understand these issues before they start a debate and then take actions. This is really broken okay it's back.

Right so for those of you are not too familiar or not too sure where Taiwan is it's right there very tiny compared to Germany right we're about 23 million people and we are six hours in the future so I'm from the future. So the

community in Taiwan we started is called gov0.tw so it's basically like replacing the GOV or the government with a zero in it like it's hoping that we can build alpha version of the government website or services and for the user of the government website we just have to change one character in the URL and then suddenly you have a better website with using new

technology or providing open data. So the community in Taiwan we started in 2012 quickly attracted all other professions of beyond software developers so like writers and the lawyers designers they're starting to like collaborate in very unusual way that's not happening in their

professional before so it's like the open source way of collaboration but for different people as well and even public servants are coming to our events and then working together from different agencies which they never talked to each other before. So one example is that we built we built the

the Congress website is called ly.gov.tw so we build a community version called ly.gov.tw which combines all the different information about like past performance of the Congress member even when they're in local council

and also their financial disclosure and maybe they don't want me to talk about that and everything together so that's the community built version of the Congress website. So the gov0 community not only embraced the release early release often mentality from open source that allowed rapid collaboration

and people trying to work on existing tools people have also developed a very strong doer culture so people just start building things without like having to have a grand meeting first so basically when they see something that can be done we start doing it that's why we call

the fork the government in the title of this session because we just start building something experimental. So today more than 3,000 people have contributed their ideas or code or patches or fixes to over a hundred gov0 project since 2012. Even though Taiwan and Germany are separated by thousands of

kilometers it took CL 15 hours to get here and the cultures are a bit different yet both civic tech communities are tackling similar issues and you'll see that in a second. In Germany the volunteer network is called code for Germany there is 25 labs in cities all across the country

and they are working on like pushing openness and transparency and unlike Taiwan and Germany since we've been talking about democracies democracy has been around for a while but there are more and more reminders that we that we shouldn't take that for granted that there's always room for improvement and

that democracy has to be filled with life. This is why the thematic focus of the code for Germany this community this year will be on the upcoming elections. I don't know whether you know that but the most successful civic tech tool in Germany is ValoMart, a vote matching machine. I'm sure like

many have tried it out it's an app that helps you to compare your opinion and views with election programs. So in the upcoming months the community wants to explore more useful tools and that help to make access to this information easier and that encourage people to vote and one of our focuses will be on

opening up polling station data because currently you only receive a letter and you can see your nearest polling station or you can visit your city's website I believe so we think that to open up polling station data will help people to easier find their next polling place. So now you might ask

yourself huh why are there all these people that are in their spare time working on these topics and trying to push these topics isn't there a thing called e-government and governments and public administrations are already working on digital tools and infrastructure and well yes they are

working on the things but as you see like in the polling station data example and the fact that it's not accessible for whatever reason and you can see that it's still very limited how people can access information and how technology is put to use in these contexts. So the actual problem of that

is the government are just trying to apply the new technology into their existing paper process without rethinking the possibility of technology. So like all these promises of new form of participation and more feedback channel from the citizen and better communication or or so on are just well

still promises because they are not rethinking all the possibility of the technology. So now let's try to imagine you are a cyclist in Berlin are you? So and you want to find out where dangerous roads are and where accidents are happening so naturally and how they can be improved so you're

probably trying to think maybe I will build a website that collect people's opinion and they will submit that where dangerous roads are and then you will create start to create a community of cyclists in Berlin that will help the government to improve oh this needs to be fixed first right and so you can then do also analysis and research pattern and the weather comparison and so on. And some of you might remember in 2013 the Berlin

Senate actually did that they collected information on dangerous intersection on accident hotspots and so this was a big like crowdsourcing participation project and within like one month 8,000 people commented and gave like

suggestions on how to improve like certain intersections which is really cool it would have been easy to pick like a complete fail e-government project but this one was actually pretty great because a lot of people collaborated but then instead of leveraging the full potential of the

collection of data points and comments and sharing it back to the community all people got out of this was a report so now you can like look at the thing and see okay here are the most dangerous intersections and here are some recommendations from citizens and they even thought about sharing the data but I could I was not able to find it neither back then nor now so

imagine what you could have done with all these data sets and raw information map services could have included it in their like routing and they could have warned cyclists or you could have overlaid it with actual police data to see like does it match and you could have overlaid it with construction activities and made many more but instead of leveraging

this opportunities all that was issued was a report so a successful crowd funding but then like not really like using the potential that like this digital collection of data could have given us so so what can we

fix that so but that's good reason that government are being slow and then not using the latest technology because they have to be reliable and they have their accountability issues so because their services also need to be inclusive and secure for everyone to use right but in the meantime the government is missing out all this new technology that and they should be

open for this new opportunity that the advanced technologies bring and the new ways of building digital services especially with human centered design what the citizen actually needs so how can this like the process be improved so we are going to give you a couple examples and it's coming from

both Taiwan's community and Germans from Germany's community the first one is financial transparency and so on the left-hand side you see the official budget report which is about 500 pages PDF so a couple years ago we built something to extract all the data and then a visualization of the

budget according to ministry and the type of business and you can also see the history of individual entry of the budget and it was actually the first project in the gov zero community and about three years later because the Taipei city government they are trying to start their participatory budgeting

project and then someone told the mayor hey you can't actually do participatory budget if the people don't know the existing budget right because it will be really weird they might be proposing something that you are already planning to do so the mayor say okay so what should we do and then someone in the community say hey the community actually build a tool to show the

budget we can actually just reuse that thing and then apply that to the city government's project so actually so they took the code from our project budget gov zero dot TW and turn it into the official way of displaying budget at budget dot Taipei so they in addition to to that they actually

collect feedback on individual budget line and then people can comment and then within 30 days all the agencies will respond to their inquiry about the budget and here's a tool from Germany around parliamentary transparency that I really like and it's a tool that helps to increase transparency it is developed by Maximilian richt developer from Munich who in his

spare time builds tools like this the tool is called Kleine Anfragen and to give you a bit of context or translation in Germany opposition parties can file so-called Kleine Anfragen parliamentary increase and the

government has to respond so Kleine Anfragen are basically a pretty good accountability tool that can give you lots of insights and the great thing is that all the files are made public to the citizens but here's the flaw only in PDF formats which are kind of hard to access to find the PDFs are also

scattered across numerous government websites which makes them even harder to find behind like search interfaces and so on so the PDFs that while there's this treasure trove of information available to the public and the high barrier to entry prevents the data from be from actually being put to good

use so Maximilian to decided to change that so he scraped all the PDF documents he indexed them he made them searchable he linked them based on Ministry and contents that's the website Kleine Anfragen DE when you visited you have over 60,000 documents at your fingertips you have

full-text search you can subscribe to actual search terms so if you're interested in minimum wage and then you can subscribe to this search term and like get a notification whenever the topic comes up and you can link to the individual documents which is also a new thing and yesterday inspired by

paying the paying collectives action I searched for arms arms exports in this database and it gives you 65 different documents that you can like few in this list when you click one that's the detail few that lets you even extract data from this very inquiry and this is a great tool not

only for the general public but also for researchers for journalists and which I think is like the most interesting fact here also for the public administration because what we've found is that the parliamentary research service is linking to this tool so the community basically developed a tool

that might be easier to use than the official government tools like easier to link to and you can see a bunch of reports that have like the URLs and directing to this tool that's an example from Germany and now another one from Taiwan so there was a controversial legislation about the

change of the labor standard code like defining maximum hours you can work every week and then in the community people build a calculator that's displaying if you just put into like the regular hours you work each day in the week and then you would just show you like the current version of the law and the proposed version by the government and some

other proposed version from the NGO and how the difference would be for example you will get more over the pay time and or is it entirely illegal for you to work on weekend and so this tool was built by someone in the community but then the Ministry of Labor started to think oh maybe we can

use this thing to communicate with the general public about our legislation so they actually took this code and then fix some of the more ambiguous text in it and then and then so when they take this call they also contribute back to the community communities version and then they use this one to show the

people how their proposed version would be looking like and I think this is to sum it up for the example we've seen we can see that in our first example with the budget the government merged something back which is kind of impressive it's one of the very few examples that I know of and I hope this

is also going to happen in Germany in like the next couple of years and the second example so in the labor code calculator which is solved the government not just reuse the source code but more importantly along with the code is the mentality that behind it that connects the legislation with the

people effects so hopefully this will be a good standard for future legislation people the legislature or the government can start thinking about okay how do we connect this proposed legislation to the general public how would this affect people and how do we tell them what's happening and for

Maximilian's example the Kleine Anfragt tool public administration is already using it so a next great step would to improve access to the information to make it easier for Maximilian to actually receive all this information without having to scrape PDFs and of course it would also be awesome if the government or the public administration would just reuse

his source code because it's an open source tool or like use the inspiration to develop a similar tool so all this project we mentioned are developed by engaged citizen by volunteer in their spare time and with the help from others in the community even global community so city hackers are

using their skills and the know-how to show the possibility of emerging technology in our civic life with the mission that citizen participation should be well and will be accessible and impactful so the complex problem of now we are facing in the globe in the future will need to be

solved together by all of us so these were just a few examples there they are like from the active civic community around the world there is also a good network for for for people in various countries doing the same thing called call for all so you can check out on call for all dot org and learn

more about it and in September this year we'll be hosting the first ever civic tech fest in Taiwan for people around the world to share their experiences how they do this kind of thing with technology and and work or collaborate with government or not yeah and last but not least we wanted to thank the global diplomacy lab that made it possible for CL to travel all

the way to here and the lab is an initiative which is based in the federal foreign office and it's exploring new and more inclusive diplomacy that goes beyond to traditional politics so thank you all for listening thank you the global diplomacy lab and yeah someone have a

also check out the Slido any questions hi I'm thank you for your talk I was

wondering when you mentioned the participating budgeting program how Taiwan is handling digital divide issues or even the question is how is the internet distributed over Taiwan at the background for the internet

coverage in Taiwan is pretty pretty good I suppose I think 85% of the household have broadband and for but still in things like citizen participation and participatory budget they're hosting not just online

presentation but also like real world to be more inclusive so I can I can tell you a bit more detail about the the budget thing project in Taipei if you want and but just want to give a quick background about a digital device situation in Taiwan yeah any more questions to sell or Julia so the

examples that you gave were taking data that's being released by governments and remixing that into a form that makes more sense do you have any insights

into what you do in a case where government's not releasing the information or doesn't maybe have a plan yeah how do you do it in in Taiwan so the community generally only work with the information that's only available there is one case that it's about campaign financing details so the

information was supposed to be public but they're probably inside a building you have to go there with your ID and then they can give you a paper copy of that so it was an NGO who they mobilized quite a few dozen people to go there every day and then just copied it out and then go to a print shop scan

it put it online and then people created a program to turn all the scan document into a capture program so it's like playing again you're just entering the number you see on the screen so this is like a good example of disruption like the first batch of the data is about 300,000 entries and

about 10,000 people participated in 24 hours and then digitized everything but still we are still trying to push the government or the auditing is actually in the auditing office to actually release that data in digital form because they already release it in paper form yeah what we also do is innovation without permission so you ask like you ask if they give you the

data and if you have good reasons why you think it should be accessible to everyone you just scrape it or take it and then spread it thank you very much for the presentation and some of the tools that you presented here seem kind

of similar to tools that I've seen people working against corruption in for example the Ukraine have been using to try to show what the national budget was like to make sure that you could see okay how is your money being spent and how do you think that it should be spent and how do you then see where money is disappearing how could we make sure that the tools that are being

created can be shared across the world and also go to places where we need activists to actually fight to get the information out of the government's where the government's aren't giving it willingly the question is how can we make sure that people know about it and that how can we for example share

the code that's being developed in Taiwan with other places and is global diplomacy lab trying to make sure that this code is being shared to activists in other countries that aren't as fortunate as people living in Germany and Taiwan I think one very important very important thing when we talk about

like redeployment is that you cannot just take a piece of code and apply it to a completely different cultural context so you always have to keep in mind the cultural context and also that you have to adapt stuff so this notion of redeployment and just like rolling it out across the world does not really

work but I think that to like bring developers together with like people who have expertise around certain issues in their home countries I think that's the that's the way to go for it and there's a format called replication sprints where exactly that is being being done where like a piece of

technology is taken and like redeployed but also with the like larger context in mind so the Kofo network around the world collaborate that and make sure people know what's going on and then which country develops something interesting and like Julia says sometimes not possible to redeploy but we do see a

few examples but in the meantime what happens is usually some some kind of standard or best practice come out from the collaboration and people know okay if you want to tackle this problem here are the components you can use already and here are the standard and then we if you can just convert the government data into this standard then it will be available to

all these tools thank you very much thank you CL thank you Julia thank you for this talk