Sure. They were both very well documented, so I would share my perspective on it. The voting one, which is vote.ly.g0v.tw meaning, the "ly" being the legislative, then being our parliament. It’s one of the g0v long running projects, and it started when the legislative system was not entirely open ...

Sure. I’m not involved in organizing the larger hackathons — including the initial one. They are organized by a group of five to seven people now. It’s classic open space technology.

There’s a very predictable pace about this: The registration opens one a predetermined day, and then it usually gets ...

That’s correct, yeah.

We’re all volunteers in g0v, it is not a formal organization. It’s just hackathons after hackathons. Anyone who shows up becomes a participant, and that’s about it.

I’m retired, so I have more time to put in into volunteer work than people who work with their day job and contribute ...

The g0v community started at the end of 2012 by a bunch of hackers, and one of which is my very good friend, Chia-Liang Kao. They initially started this initiative to build a domain name g0v.tw, that provides an alternate shadow government website for every national ministry, so that it ...

How far back should I start? 1988 or...?

Yes, of course.

We made it a national issue, not just a city issue.

When we are planning the deliberation, UberX was only operating in Taipei. Since that time, UberX had expanded to cities around Taiwan, making it harder to reach binding consensus.

However, the current result is also more scalable, so for ...

Taken alone, I think none of the three tactics would work by itself — either in Taiwan or in other countries — because the Uber App can just keep operating without being a local company.

However, there is a chance of working if all three are taken together and implemented ...

Yes. The new Administration came up with three tactics to convert UberX drivers to the legal local alternatives.

First — Working with the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Investment Commission to cancel Uber Inc.’s foreign investment, citing their failure to declare as a transportation company;

Second — Working with the Ministry ...

For example, one can use existing forums like LINE or Facebook Messenger to make ride-planning accessible. Through this, and with careful application of differential privacy methods, you can share traffic patterns and allocate the rides better.

There are lots of solutions in this space, it’s just a matter or balancing ...

Ratified consensus 1 — Private cars dispatched through a digital platform should be legal. Cars dispatched through an app should not need to be painted yellow. That said, only taxis painted yellow can pick people up off the street.

Ratified consensus 2 — This is more nuanced and details will ...

Certainly. The write-up on http://www.shareable.net/blog/open-data-hactivists-help-taipei-craft-regulatory-response-to-uber covered the “problem” part pretty well.

The “solution” part involves: Fact discovery through multi-stakeholder survey ; Feeling assessment through Pol.is interaction online ; Interpretation through face-to-face deliberations augmented with livestream & text participation. Decisions is made by cabinet members informed by the results of the ...

Most of my projects, such as the EtherCalc spreadsheet, and contributions to SayIt/Hackpad/Sandstorm etc., are international in nature.

I started working with internet tech since 1993, initially with Gopher and then with World Wide Web invited in 1994–95 switched to it. I started a few internet startups and worked as a web tech entrepreneur & also with free software movement for 20 years, retired in 2013, and now ...

I work "with" Apple. I don’t work "for" Apple. My title — independent contractor — reflects this distinction. My main work at Apple or at the Oxford University Press is, actually, introducing them to works from the open source society, and people who reached out to me from those organizations ...

Mm-hmm.

The Web has a bright future in Taiwan. First, everybody’s on the Web, and everybody recognized the ideas of the early Web — the hyperlinks and distributed publishing — things like that which makes the Web unique. There’s a lot of very interesting experiments, such as twreporter.org, an entirely crowd-funded ...

There is a project called Mozilla which is the makers of the Firefox browser and a lot of other Web technologies, they are one of the main innovators of the Web...

There are two main social media outlets in Taiwan, and they complement each other. There is one where the entire world uses, it’s Facebook. Pretty much everybody on Taiwan is on Facebook. There’s a projection like in a little bit more than 10 years, there may be more Taiwanese Facebook ...

Yeah, certainly. Dr. Tsai’s campaign team did a great job! She ran a campaign modeled as a public and civic education process. She published her campaign’s visual design assets as an open source project — that is straight from Mayor Ko’s campaign, of course, she didn’t have to reinvent this. ...

Taiwan is a very unique place. I see Taiwan has a lot of innovation, on civic legislation, and social media, because it is very tightly bound. Pretty much everybody is online, everybody understands more or less the same language, so it’s very easy for ideas to spread, and to experiment. ...

As I explained, 80 percent of Taiwan’s population is on Internet, which is coming very close to the literacy rate. It just enabled a very rapid dissemination of ideas, of critiques, of conversations, of dialogues.

Mayor Ko’s campaign was, let’s say, independent. He did not actually have a single party ...

Yes. The Sunflower Movement was in March 2014. Around that time already the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring, the work from others organizers had already taken place, and researchers like Manuel Castells had already wrote analyses about them.

There was a lot of research. Castells wrote a book, «Communication Power» ...

It is.

I did not start the g0v movement. It was started late 2012 by my very good friend CL Kao and three of his friends. The way g0v works is this — we have a slogan, called “Fork the Government.” Fork has a very specific meaning in open-source development. It means ...

Certainly. The way IETF works, it is not only for people who have lots of ideas; the work does not stop when RFCs are published. Instead, they want everybody to test-drive it. Again, just like my early role with the Gutenberg Project, my current role is to look at the ...

It was in the early 2000s.

The fun thing about Internet Engineering Task Force is that really, there’s no joining or leaving. It is just a space. It has two components. First, it has an online space. Mostly, I joined mailing lists — that is to say people emailing each other and copying everybody else. Aside ...

Wikipedia came very late. My history working with the Internet, my first project when I participate in the Internet, and that was before the Web, was the Gutenberg Project. It’s still very much alive today — anybody can read public domain books, usually published before the First World War, because ...

They were exiled! They couldn’t return to their country anymore. They were locked out from their country — because they believed that there is a better way for the people to communicate with the government, which they perceived as not taking the input from the people.

But then, the student ...

I was 13 years old at the time. It was actually very democratizing. The initial setup fees were not that high. The telecom did not charge special fees for access to international forums. It was a flat rate. As we were not a rich family, I don’t think it’s a ...

Like most of the rest of the world, the first Internet users were people in the academic community. People who study computer science, people who have this very powerful computing center in many of Taiwan’s universities, especially in Taipei and Hsinchu.

However, at the same time, Taiwan also has a ...

Certainly. The Web came actually much later. It’s around 1993-1994. I was on computer networks before that. In 1992, there was already Internet coverage. That was when I lived in Germany. When I moved back to Taiwan, that was in 1993.

Around that time, there were a federation of networks ...

There were books about computer programming, but back then computers were expensive. We were not a rich family, so my parents were not exactly sure whether to buy this very expensive gadget. That was back in 1989.

So I learned, actually, computers were very predictable if you know how it ...

Yes, it is true.

My name is Audrey Tang, I live on the Internet. Physically, for two months every year, I’m in Paris. For the rest of the months, I’m usually based in Taipei, Taiwan. That’s it.

At midnight, with Blaise from Google.

Exactly.

Yes, that’s how it works in London.

The consensus was that they had to pay taxes, they had to display prominently their registration, and that they had to provide the insurance statements. We also compared these concerns with other countries, who had similar contentions not only with Uber, but also with Airbnb.

With Airbnb, we now have ...

I have a lot of hope, because I was also a conductor of this type of work, but with the government and the private sector. When Uber comes to Taiwan, they did not ask for anybody’s permission.

Uber charged, initially, higher fees than taxis, so taxi people were okay with ...

We are listening to the first Virtual Choir, curated by Eric Whitacre, the composer of this music, with 185 singers from 12 countries. These people did the recordings at their homes, wearing headphones, some people singing some parts, some singing other parts, and they were singing by looking at the ...

The thing with open source, with giving my copyright away, is that I cannot control who use it. For example, I invented a way of making a spreadsheet faster over the Web. But when I was working on it, first I’m working on somebody else’s prior work. Second, I cannot ...

It is true that I work with some Silicon Valley companies and as an entrepreneur, but I’m not particularly rich. It’s just that I decided that my skills or my time is valued enough so that people are willing to let me live, somewhat comfortably perhaps, in exchange of my ...

Well, I did work professionally for 20 years. When I say I retired, I mean that my time is spent primarily in the third sector. That means I work with people who volunteer, who work with me, who can join or leave at any time.

Still, we make important contributions ...

Mm-hmm.

The word "hacker," when it was first used in the 17th century, it means people who hack on the wood and to make tools using wood. They also make their own woodworking tools, and most of the woodworking tools and the furniture at that time were made of wood themselves. ...

I said the three virtues were: end-to-end, anybody-to-anybody; freedom from tampering and from censorship; and freedom to invent new uses. These all pertain to things that we voluntarily put on the Internet. The Internet is a way to talk to each other.

It is not, however, a way for people ...

Certainly. The term Internet neutrality means three very important things, and they intertwine with each other. First, it means that anybody can talk to anybody. There’s no discrimination based on who you are. Second, it means that when anybody sends a message, it is carried verbatim — that is to ...