At least off the top of my head, I would think that cultural ideas of what’s important or what is needed for government would really change based on the country.

Something you mentioned there, it might be a little bit of an aside, the idea of many different civic tech organizations across countries and across societies and cultures working together. I was wondering, in your experience, has there been any interesting things about civic tech and technology for social impact ...

For example, before I came to g0v, I was on the Slack. I was more or less hearing about what people had to say and what it was like to work here. Coming here and participating in the community was an entirely different kind of sphere.

That’s true. Would you say most of these communities exist mainly virtually over the Internet, or would you say that there’s any physical conferences, physical organizations, or places to be where it would be really important to get a good start?

Like Mozilla.

I don’t know if I’m going to get the funding for sure. My question is if I want to be putting myself into places to learn a lot, or organizations or different opportunities for participation, if I had $10,000 to do it, what places would you recommend? What would you ...

I’m in a process for applying for a source of funding from my school. It’s a very open-ended kind of opportunity. It’s for experiential learning, and I want to direct it to this entire field of how to make technology that is better for the world, that is truly better ...

OK, great. I was a little bit alarmed.

That’s a really good point. Thank you. I have a second part to what I wanted to ask, depending on time.

The idea is that access is given an everything follows from that, when what you’re talking about has been implemented in Taiwan is these centers that...

Definitely. That’s interesting because in the US when people talk about Internet accessibility it’s all the big profile -- Facebook, Google, whatever -- projects about making hot air balloons that provide Internet access and all of that. I’ve always gotten the sense that it’s not entirely thought out.

I was wondering, apart from Internet access itself, if there’s any other things that you think is really important.

I know that in Taiwan you’ve set through the motion for broadband for all.

I was also wondering, I was looking a previous interview you’ve done. You speak a little bit about the issue of accessibility when it comes to getting everyone to participate, because part of a digital democracy is the idea that once everything’s digital everyone can participate. The question then becomes ...

Definitely. I’m definitely trying to get this huge database of reading to get through.

You were talking about before whether its gamification is doing what it wants to do. If there are any names that come to mind I can go and look into them more and see if there’s any specific problems I can jump on.

Out of curiosity, obviously you don’t have as much of an understanding of the US field of this, as opposed to the Taiwanese field, but now that we’re talking about surveillance capitalism I was wondering if there are any, I would say, feel-good projects that the US government or well-funded ...

May be a dangerous field to study.

The criminal justice system is something that I’ve been looking at a lot because the previous thesis had focused on that. Any time government and technology gets talked about it’s always using technology to improve the government, but especially in recent years for the US a lot of citizens have ...

I’m trying to think about any other possible fields because indigenous rights and also language connected to that is something I’m very interested in.

There’s one professor who I’m really gunning towards. He does social media in conjunction to the 2016 US election, for example, and with political polarization in general. I think I can convince him to also advise me on any work that is related in this way, which is taking data ...

I’m going to Dartmouth College. It’s pretty small, and there isn’t a lot of computer science professors who are doing works other than pure algorithmic theory.

It also depends on the kind of professors I can find at my school who will support my project.

Yes, if possible. I’m more interested in the social aspect, but because my major is computer science my department is going to push me into doing more computational work.

I was trying to look for something like that, where there is something that is an existing problem for these projects and would benefit from having someone with computational background and a year’s worth of research resources to tackle.

For example, in the algorithmic bias. A couple years before ProPublica had issued an article that made the claim that these algorithms were racially biased. That thesis took that claim and proved it in a computational way.

My main issue is since coming to g0v I’ve been learning a lot about these very different and very broad, interesting projects, but I’m not sure how to formulate research questions surrounding them because in some way a thesis is trying to solve a problem in some way.

Definitely.

Yes. I’m American born and raised, so I’m kind of...

Oh, in the US.

Right. I’m particularly interested about indigenous rights. Both in the US and both in Taiwan, that’s a really big issue, but I think in marginalized communities, in general.

Sorry, [laughs] I was reading through a couple of the interviews that you’ve done before and you’ve spoken a little bit about indigenous rights, and especially in compliance to technology. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about specific projects or areas in civic tech or tech for social ...

...but specifically how to make it do that without leaving behind the most marginalized communities.

Right. Specifically, I’m excited about using tech to change the world, and all of that...

Yes, that one. I was just really inspired by how that thesis project could lock onto this problem and raise a bigger discussion about it.

I’m inspired by a previous thesis that was done by a student at my school, which it was in the news a couple years ago. It was about the algorithm that was used in criminal justice courts.

For my thesis, I want to be able to focus on a research topic that I actually care about, or might actually make a difference in the world in some way.

I’m a student from the US with an interest in civic tech. Specifically, I wanted to ask about two things. One is because I’m a junior in undergrad, I’m trying to make plans to do a thesis project for my fourth year.

You might have seen me at a couple of the g0v meetings.