Workshop
Register for Open Parliament Hackathon on Dec. 6-7, 2024!
Have you tried to know what the congressmen, Members of Parliament, or legislators that we elected are doing, but in the end found it difficult to find the data you need from the websites of our congresses or parliaments? Come join our Open Parliament Hackathon on Dec. 6-7, 2024 Meeting Room 201 and 202, 2F, GIS MOTC Convention Center Taipei to find and create solutions with the help of technology together! Please click here to register.
The event will be mostly on-site and in Mandarin. However, we will offer online participation with English-Mandarin simultaneous interpretation for the session on December 6, 14:00-17:30.
What Problems Are We Going to Address?
A transparent, participatory, and accessible parliament or congress is a crucial basis for democracy, and accessible data of parliament or congress are the key to achieve that. For example, documents explaining how the parliaments operate, transcription and videos of what Members of Parliament (MP) say during discussion of bills, texts of bills, and introduction of each MP, are necessary for people to inspect whether these MPs are fulfilling their responsibility. However, those data are not necessarily easy to access in every country due to many reasons. In some countries, there may not be clear laws or guidance on how parliament should release data; in some countries, parliaments have established digital portals of data, but their user interface and experience may not be well-designed, or training programs on how to use those data are missing.
To tackle those problems, civil society, and civil tech communities around the world have paid a lot of effort to create solutions or launch advocacy of Open Parliament but still encounter some stumbling blocks. For example, in Taiwan, engineers in civil tech communities who want to contribute their technology expertise and civil society organizations who want to utilize technology for help feel it’s really too difficult to understand how parliament in Taiwan operates in real world situations. Additionally, the accessibility of the current open data portal in Taiwan’s parliament has been improved, but users–such as these civic tech engineers and CSOs–don’t really know how to effectively use them and the data behind them.
These are the problems that we are going to find a solution with our experts and from each other.
What Are We Going to Do?
We will host a two-day Open Parliament Hackathon to bring experts and civil tech members to exchange ideas and create solutions.
On the first day, our target audience will be most civil society organizations members and staff in MPs’ offices. The purpose of the first-day session is to:
- Identify the current problems. We will invite Mr. Ronny Wang and his team to present their report–Digital Tools for Parliament Information in Taiwan: A research report on the processes of obtaining and using Taiwanese parliamentary information through digital tools along with recommendations for improvement and QA session with the participants.
- Inspect the user experience and route of the current data portal of Taiwan’s parliament. Citizen Congress Watch will present their studies and lead the participants to join in a workshop to discover the problems by working through the route of a data portal on Taiwan’s parliament website.
- Encourage the user to utilize technology and data to tackle the problems by showcasing the Tainan City Council WatchBot developed by Tainan Sprout and FNF Global Innovation Hub and inviting Open Parliament TV to share experience from Germany.
On the second day, the participants will be mostly members from civic tech communities who want to contribute their technology expertise to improve the accessibility of parliament data. We will:
- Release and invite participants to try the quiz for enhancing citizens’ understanding on the data portal of Legislative Yuan that was developed by Ronny Wang and his team, and invite participants to give users’ feedback. The quiz is designed to help citizens to tackle the problem of finding the data that they need from the Legislative Yuan’s website.
- Invite the participants to form their teams to hack for a solution in the afternoon Hackathon session, and share their projects with all the participants.
Tentative Agenda
Dec. 6, Friday
- 9:30-09:50 Registration
- 9:50-10:00 Opening Introduction
Ya-wei Chou, Program Manager, FNF Global Innovation Hub
- 10:00-11:30 Open Parliament in Taiwan: What Has Been Done and What’s Next?
- Moderator:
Ya-wei Chou, Porgram Manager, FNF Global Innovation Hub - Speakers:
Isabel Hou, Seretary-General, Taiwan AI Academy
Freddy Lim, Former Legislator
Ronny Wang, Founder of OpenFun Ltd.
James Kan, Vice President, Citizen Congress Watch
Wei-chen Lin, Executive Secretary, Open Culture Foundation
- Moderator:
- 11:30-12:10 Present Digital Tools for Parliament Information in Taiwan: A research report on the processes of obtaining and using Taiwanese parliamentary information through digital tools along with recommendations for improvement report and QA session
- Speakers:
Ronny Wang, Founder of OpenFun Ltd.
Claire Cheng, Advocate of Open Government & Open Parliament
- Speakers:
- 12:10-13:00 Lunch
- 13:00-14:50 Unlocking the Legislature: The Ultimate Guide to Information Search.
Continuing from the previous session's theme, this session will be led by Citizen Congress Watch (CCW). CCW will share how the general public can find commonly used information on the Legislative Yuan's website, and lead participants to have a short workshop to share their ideas on how to improve the data portal of Legislative Yuan's website.- Speakers:
Chen Liyi, Director of Policy Department, Citizen Congress Watch (CCW)
James Kan, Vice President, Citizen Congress Watch (CCW)
- Speakers:
- 14:50-15:10 Break
- 15:10-16:00 Introduce Tainan City Council WatchBot*
- Speaker:
Billy Zhe-Wei Lin, Director, Tainan Sprout
- Speaker:
- 16:00-16:10 Break
- 16:10-17: 10 Experience of Open Parliament TV
- Speakers:
Erika Owens, Co-Director at Open Parliament TV
Joscha Jäger, Co-Director at Open Parliament TV
- Speakers:
- 17:10-17:30 Recap and Conclusion
*We will open online participation from 14:40 to 17:30 with English-Mandarin two way simultaneous interpretation.
Dec. 7, Saturday
- 09:30-10:00 Registration
- 10:00-11:00 Trial of the Quiz on Enhancing Citizens' Understanding and Accessibility on Data Portal of Legislative Yuan and Collect Users’ Feedback
- Speaker:
Ronny Wang, Founder of OpenFun Ltd.
Claire Cheng, Advocate of Open Government & Open Parliament
- Speaker:
- 11:00-11:10 Break
- 11:10-12:10 Introduction of the Topics for Hackathon and Find Your Team Members
- Speaker:
Ronny Wang, Founder of OpenFun Ltd.
- Speaker:
- 12:10-13:10 Lunch
- 13:10-15:10 Start Hacking for Solution!
- 15:10-15:20 Break
- 15:20-16:30 Hackathon
- 16:30-17:10 Presentation of the Projects or Achievements of Each Team
- 17:10-17:40 Recap and Follow up
Meet Our Speakers
Billy Zhe-Wei Lin is an open-source advocate, citizen journalist, and long-time participant in g0v. He has contributed as a facilitator in Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS), focusing on digital innovation and public service. Currently, he serves as the director of Tainan Sprout.
Erika Owens is Co-Director at Open Parliament TV. Previously, Erika was Co-Director at OpenNews, where she supported a thriving network and created inclusive, caring spaces for the journalism-tech community. Erika also serves on the board of the Movement Alliance Project, has trained as a donor organizer with Bread and Roses Community Fund, and recently completed a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. She is based in Sheffield, UK and loves nonprofit journalism, people watching, and laughing heartily.
Joscha Jäger is Co-Director at Open Parliament TV. As a Creative Technologist and Researcher, Joscha has over 10 years of experience working in the fields of interactive film and video search engines and has built up in-depth knowledge of open data standards, interoperability and open government policies. Joscha is a strong advocate for open source technology as a means to creating an openly re-usable ecosystem of components for digital democracy.
Ronny Wang, the founder of OpenFun Ltd., has been involved in the open government and open parliament movements for many years. He enjoys writing web scraping programs to collect government data and convert it into open data or open APIs for public use. Within the g0v.tw community, he has initiated numerous civic technology projects. For example, he launched the Open Campaign Finance project, which uses crowdsourcing to convert political donation data, only available in paper form by the government, into digital data and advocates for the government to publish this data online. He also started the Job Helper project, a browser extension that shows whether a company has a history of labor law violations while you are browsing job websites. Additionally, he initiated the Taiwan Parliament API project, which transforms various unstructured Word and PDF documents from the Legislative Yuan into structured data, aiming to help more people understand the workings of the parliament. For more related projects and works, visit https://ronny.tw/data or https://openfun.tw/.
James Kan currently serves as the Vice President of Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) in Taiwan, focusing on parliamentary oversight and promoting legislative transparency and accountability. He oversees the evaluation of legislators' performance and has acted as a consultant for the revamp of the Legislative Yuan's website. In recent years, James has led the implementation of Taiwan's first Open Parliament Action Plan and actively engaged in international collaborations with parliamentary monitoring organizations in Asia.
Chen Li Yi currently serves as the Director of the Policy Department at the Citizen Congress Watch (CCW). He has led four major legislative evaluation projects and organized over 40 press conferences and seminars focused on parliamentary reform and policy advocacy. Chen specializes in using parliamentary data for research, analysis, and policy advocacy. Additionally, he is actively involved in promoting parliamentary literacy education, using simple infographics and teaching materials to help the general public better understand the workings and logic of parliamentary operations.
Claire Cheng advocates for using technology to drive innovation, citizen participation, and deeper democracy. At the Open Culture Foundation, she promoted open government and parliament as a civilian member of the "Open Parliament Committee." She noted that while the commitments were well-intentioned, the implementation remained challenging. Later, she collaborated with OpenFun Ltd. on the research report focusing on the challenges and the demands of Taiwanese parliamentary data. This work focused on making legislative data more accessible, empowering citizens to understand, use, and engage with legislative processes more effectively.
Freddy Lim, the lead vocalist of the Taiwanese metallers CHTHONIC which was elected as a member of the Taiwanese parliament from 2016 to 2024. He is the first metal star who became a parliamentarian in Taiwan, and his story is reported by CNN, the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, and many other international media. When serving as a member of parliament, he strived to push for Open Parliament in Taiwan’s parliament by collaborating with civil society members. He was also a member of the Foreign and National Defense Committee, where he devoted himself to expanding Taiwan’s links with the international community and resisting China’s pressure over Taiwan. He is also a human rights defender: he pushed for the bills on marriage equality, gender equality, cultural policies, transitional justice, and justice between generations. What Freddy does as a parliamentarian echoes the works of CHTHONIC.
Isabel Hou is a Lawyer in practice, focusing on innovative technology, open source, open data, open government and other digital governance issues since 2000. She continuously contributed to the g0v civic tech community since 2012, and learned the skill of collaborating with multiple parties to promote social innovation. She served as a “committee member from the civic society” of the Legislative Yuan’s Open Parliament Committee from 2020 to 2022, and completed the first "Open Parliament Action Plan" of Taiwan. Recently, she collaborated with Taiwanese civic community partners to promote the "Digital Citizen Literacy" action plan as a social infrastructure for the new generation of Taiwan. Additionally, she is also the secretary general of Taiwan AI Academy foundation, which aims to democratize AI technology by providing AI technology training to workforce in Taiwan. Since 2017 until now, more than 10000 people from more than 2000 companies have received the training.
Wei-chen Lin is the Executive Secretary of the Open Culture Foundation, overseeing various projects and teams in the fields of open technology, digital rights, and internet governance. With a background in journalism and anthropology, Lin brings a unique perspective that bridges technical and social aspects of these issues. His recent work focuses on enhancing the cybersecurity of advocates and ensuring that privacy and human rights are protected within the evolving landscape of internet governance.
Who Should and How to Register?
- On Dec. 6, we will prioritize the registration of participants who are civil society organizations members who need to use the data of Parliament for their advocacy and staff in MPs’ offices.
- One Dec. 7, we will prioritize the registration from civic tech communities who want to contribute their technology expertise to improve the accessibility of parliament data.
- On the session on Dec. 6, 15:10-17:30, GMT+8, we will offer English-Mandarin two way simultaneous interpretation and allow participants to participate through webex; other than that, all the sessions will be conducted on-site and in Mandarin.
- Due to limitation of the spaces and quality of discussion, we reserve the rights to select participants and will close registration once the vacancy is full.
- Registration doesn’t mean acceptance. Only people who receive acceptance confirmation emails will be allowed to participate. Please check your email inbox after registration. Participants also need to present the confirmation email to the reception desk on the event day.
- Deadline of registration: December 04, 2024, 12:00pm, UTC+8. FNF will also close registration when we have a full number of qualified participants. Please register as early as possible.
- Please note that participants who fail to register on time or maliciously provide wrong or fake information will not be accepted by FNF.
- Participants should understand and agree that FNF will anonymously collect, compile, edit, summarize, and publish participants’ input of ideas during the Hackathon, including but not limited to their input during discussion, questions, or opinion expressed on FNF’s media. FNF will also publish the presentation of each team about their achievement of Hackathon, which will also include the photo and the names of the team.
- Should you have any question, please send an e-mail to ywc777@proton.me
- Please click here to fill in the registration form before December 04, 2024, 12:00pm, UTC+8