Well, what an amazing few days in Taipei!

On 11-13 September we co-hosted TICTeC@Taipei, our Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, with our wonderful Taiwanese partners Open Culture Foundation (OCF).

Good morning #CivicTechFest 270 people from 33 countries ? check the shared notes for more info. pic.twitter.com/hxajUpDFLR

— Julia Kloiber (@j_kloiber) September 11, 2017

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It’s only a few days now before we’ll be in Taipei, hosting an extra special edition of TICTeC, the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference — or TICTeC@Taipei as it’s snappily being called.

TICTeC@Taipei will be the headline event of Civic Tech Fest, Asia’s first ever festival celebrating all things Civic Tech. It’s also an official side event of the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT), so TICTeC@Taipei attendees will also be able to attend the WCIT, and vice versa.

We’re super excited about not only TICTeC@Taipei and WCIT, but the other events that are happening during the festival too, which include g0v’s legendary hackathon, the Code for All Summit, State of the Map Taiwan, and Wikimedia Taiwan’s 10th anniversary event. In fact, our only concern is that there will be just too much to choose from!

We’re looking forward to reconnecting with friends and associates across the global Civic Tech scene, not to mention meeting new faces. It’s such a great opportunity to share ideas, learnings and experiences not just within our own community, but more widely with the WCIT crowd too.

Attendees will be coming from all around the world: check out the CivicTechFest Google Group to get a snapshot of who will be there. We’re delighted that we’ve been able to provide some travel grants to individuals who wouldn’t have been able to come without support, and we’re really looking forward to meeting them.

There is also time left to submit a proposal for the unconference part of TICTeC@Taipei. If you have a workshop idea, or want to share your Civic Tech story, you can propose an unconference session idea by filling out this form before 7th September. There will also be time to submit ideas in person on 11th September.

Feeling a bit envious of all the anticipated fun? There’s still time to register for TICTeC@Taipei, so if you fancy coming to the biggest Civic Tech gathering of the year, get your tickets here!

While we’re there, we’ll also be making a special announcement about TICTeC 2018. We’ll share it here as well, of course, so watch this space for more information!

As we shared back in April, this September we’ll be hosting an extra edition of our TICTeC research conference, in Taipei.

TICTeC, or The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, is the Civic Tech sector’s only conference that’s dedicated to promoting and sharing research into the impacts of online technologies and digital democracy around the world, to share what works and (crucially) what doesn’t.

TICTeC@Taipei will be the headline event at the Open Culture Foundation’s Civic Tech Fest,  a week-long festival featuring a series of conferences, workshops and hackathons related to open data and open government. And Civic Tech Fest itself is an official parallel event of the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT), one of the world’s largest gatherings of the IT industry.

It’s a really unique opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners from across the globe in Asia’s Civic Tech hub, and to showcase our sector’s initiatives to the wider IT industry.

We’re delighted to announce that the TICTeC@Taipei agenda is now online. The conference will feature speakers from the Omidyar Network, UNICEF, the Web Foundation, government ministries of France and Taiwan, leading universities, and many more.

Early bird tickets are still available until 21st July and registration includes entry to all Civic Tech Fest and WCIT events. We’ll even be having the TICTeC after party in the Taipei 101 building (the tallest building in the photo above), at Google’s Taipei offices. Pretty cool huh?

Don’t miss out on this unique opportunity — book now!

Image: sama093 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Thanks so much to everyone who joined us in Florence last week for the third Impacts of Civic Technology conference, TICTEC. As always, it was an event shaped by the many thoughtful contributions from both the speakers and the audience.

Resources

For those who couldn’t be there, and for those who were but couldn’t see everything, here’s where to find a taste of the two days.

• The official TICTeC website has a full list of speakers and the schedule. To see more about any session, click on it from the speaker’s page or from the schedule. We’ll add any links, transcripts, slides or videos as they become available to these pages, too.
• Want to know more about a specific session? Most speakers have included their Twitter handles on their page, so you can tweet them your question.
• You can also see all the slides in one place (where we’ve received permission from speakers; there may be more to follow) on Slideshare.
• Everyone who attended is automatically a member of the TICTeC Google Group (and you can also join even if you weren’t there, of course). Feel free to continue discussions or start new ones there.
• Thanks so much to the enterprising delegates who contributed to these crowdsourced notes on many of the sessions.
• We’ve gathered together the best tweets and pictures on Storify.
• Key sessions were videoed, and we also interviewed several delegates — but editing takes a little time, so keep an eye on this blog or our Twitter feed to find out when those go live.
• We’ll also put professional photos from the event over on our Flickr account, as soon as we have them. They’ll all be under Creative Commons, so feel free to download and share them if you wish.

Taiwan

Don’t forget that TICTeC is expanding this year: we’ll also be in Taipei as part of the Civic Tech fest in September.

We’re really glad to be taking the event to Asia, and we’re certain that this will bring a completely new perspective to the issues and initiatives discussed — it should also make the event accessible to a wider audience.

If you’d like to present at TICTeC@Taipei, please submit a session proposal by 16th June 2017. Applications for travel grants are now also open, so if you need financial support to attend submit your application here by the same deadline.

We’re currently in Florence, Italy, where TICTeC, the Impacts of Civic Technology conference, is in full swing. But as if that wasn’t exciting enough, TICTeC will be hitting Taipei for a spin-off event later this year.

TICTeC@Taipei, hosted by the Civic Tech Fest, will run on 11 and 12 September: you can expect the same insightful sessions on Civic Tech and its efficacy.

Registration and the call for session proposals are both currently open, so if you’d like to be part of TICTeC@Taipei, act now.

If you’d like to present at TICTeC@Taipei, please submit a session proposal by 16th June 2017. Applications for travel grants are now also open, so if you need financial support to attend please submit your application before 16th June 2017.

Last week we announced the two keynote speakers for TICTeC 2017, the Impacts of Civic Technologies conference. You’ve met Tiago Carneiro Peixoto; now let’s turn to the equally insightful Audrey Tang.

Audrey is Taiwan’s Minister for Digital, and is part of a massive shake-up that has seen that country embrace unprecedented levels of transparency, accountability and citizen participation. Her keynote will describe some of the ground-breaking methods they’ve introduced.

One of these is Audrey’s famous accessibility. Using a public platform, she is happy to answer questions from anyone, and endeavours to do so within 48 hours. We posed ours there, but we’re replicating them below for our readers to follow.

Such is her schedule that Audrey will be delivering her keynote virtually, but there will be an opportunity for delegates to put questions to her live. Accordingly, we’ve gone a little more in-depth with this conversation.

Why haven’t we in the West heard more about the transformations that have been happening in Taiwan? They really are so ground-breaking — do you have any idea why they might not have received more global coverage?

There is reasonable regional coverage in Korea, Japan and Hong Kong. However, global awareness is limited by Taiwan’s restricted participation in multilateral organisations, as well as the relative lack of English material (somewhat ameliorated by recent advances in machine translation).

How would we go about encouraging our own governments to follow in your footsteps? You visited the UK Parliament recently: what was your perception of how they are doing on the Open Government front?

While rules, playbooks and tools are reusable, each government’s political context is unique, so I would encourage everyone to pave their own path instead.

I didn’t stay long enough to learn about UK’s progress — looking forward to learn more from mySociety folks in the future, perhaps when TICTeC comes to Asia. 🙂

TICTeC is all about measuring the impact of civic technologies. Do you have systems in place that help you assess the effectiveness of the measures you put in place?

Yes, there are quantitative engagement metrics and surveys, though they are mostly in Chinese — for example for the petition platform [opens as document; in Chinese].

Clearly, it’s early days yet, but have your implementations been an unqualified success?

For the past 100 days, our main contributions are proceeding well — providing an internal collaboration platform (sandstorm.io) for participation officers from every ministry; requiring all regulations and trade-related laws to be open for public discussion (join.gov.tw); as well as help codifying an open multi-stakeholder mechanism into the draft of Digital Communications Act.

What feedback have you had from citizens and the national press?

In Taiwan’s post-2014 political climate, mainstream press and citizens would never call for “less transparency”, so people mostly respond favourably — of course, there are calls for more accountability and more informed participation, for meaningful conversations to form around divisive issues.

What proportion of the population has taken part in your crowd-sourcing projects? Do you worry about the elderly or less connected not being sufficiently represented in decision-making?

As a proponent of assistive civic tech, it is important that we seek diversity of opinion (not zero-sum voting) and each engagement venue opens up access for previously unavailable folks (not taking existing venues away) — see this write-up by LÜ Chia-Hua.

Of course, even in a democracy of feelings, there will still be some people who lose out, or see a decision that doesn’t go the way they wanted. Are you sensing more understanding from these people, since they’ve gone through the online debates process?

Yes. Generally we come up with rough consensus that people can live with — as long as the procedure are transparent and accountable, we are seeing people who did not get what they initially demanded nevertheless help defending the result.

How stressful is it for a human being to hold themself up to constant public scrutiny? Transparency is of course a laudable aim, but might it sometimes be at the cost of a person’s own downtime or privacy?

Private meetings and on-the-record transcripts are fully compatible; note that we allow each participant to make corrections for ten days after the meeting: here are our guidelines.

A large proportion of Taiwanese politicians are Independents. Do you think party politics is now an outdated system?

In the cabinet there are more independents than members of any party, but in the parliament every party has more MPs than independents.

How can digital technologies bridge the gap between citizen and state without simply reverting to irrelevant soundbite politics or Twitter trolling?

We need to partner with (and become) media to make relevant facts as easy — and eventually easier — to spread.

What is the importance of TICTeC? Why assess the impact of civic technologies?

Informed discussions need to be rooted in evidence. If we are to build a global democratic network of feelings, we need to make sure that these feelings are reflective — this is only possible when they are built upon facts.

Finally: what are your next steps? Are there any more big innovations you plan to introduce during your time in cabinet?

For scalable listening to work, we need to engage people who prefer interactive & tangible understanding, including children. This post outlines the initial steps; and this one outlines the main vision.

Book your place at TICTeC

If you enjoyed reading this interview, it’s time to book your ticket for TICTeC, where every conversation will directly examine the impacts of civic technologies.

And for those who would like to present their own insights, better hurry: the call for papers runs until February 10.

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Image: Medialab Prado (CC by-sa/2.0)

You can be sure of seeing thought-provoking speakers at TICTeC, all focusing on the vital area of researching the impacts of Civic Technologies. We put a lot of effort into making sure of that!

And we especially strive to bring you keynote speakers who are inspiring, insightful, surprising… in some cases even provocative. You may still recall last year’s keynote Helen Milner asking ‘Is Civic Tech just an amusing pastime of the middle-classes?’.

For TICTeC 2017, we can promise keynotes that are just as compelling. We’re delighted to say that each day’s proceedings will be kicked off by  Tiago Carneiro Peixoto and Audrey Tang.

Tiago Carneiro Peixoto

Tiago is from the World Bank, which has the ambitious mission of reducing world poverty.

As a Senior Public Sector Specialist, Tiago works with governments to develop solutions for better public policies and services.  As you might expect, that involves research around technology, citizen engagement and governance, to help understand how those things can intersect for the good of all. One example of that is the research using FixMyStreet reports, which demonstrated how government responsiveness can lead to citizens becoming more engaged.

If you’d like further reason to pay attention to his keynote, well, Tiago was featured in TechCrunch as one of the twenty most innovative people in democracy. We know he’ll have plenty to say that is of direct interest to TICTeC delegates.

Audrey Tang

In her inauguration speech, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen said, “Before, democracy was a clash between two opposing values, but now democracy must be a conversation, a dialogue, between many different values”. To help bring about this vision, she appointed Audrey Tang as Minister for Digital in her new cabinet.

If you think parliamentary proceedings can be as dull as ditchwater, you may be in for a surprise. Audrey was not a standard appointment: she comes from a background of activist hacking, for one thing.

Since her arrival in August 2016, the government has undergone a colossal transformation into one of the most open and participatory administrations operating in the world today, ranking top in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index.

Audrey will be running through some of those groundbreaking changes in her keynote at TICTeC. Note that she’ll be ‘appearing’ virtually — she’s very much in demand — but there will still be the opportunity to pose questions to her live.

Get involved

Stand by, as we’ll shortly profile our two keynotes further. For now, we hope your appetite has been suitably whetted.

If you’re interested in presenting a session or workshop at TICTeC, see the Call for Papers here — and submit before February 10.

Registration to attend is available at the earlybird price until March 10 — book here.

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Images: Florence, Italy by Lex Kravetski; Audrey Tang by @daisuke1230 via Wikimedia Commons – both CC/by/2.0,

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