Full article(Google Doc)   Prototype Github Repo

Civic Coding Collector (CCC) a tool designed for creating long-term engagement in civic coding activities. It encourage cross-sector (coder, designer, activist; new-comers, veterans) participation around civic coding topics.

CCC focuses on building a space for Digital Civics. It support self-organizing, deliberation, and long-term engagement for DIY/Entrepreneurial citizenship. CCC help builds identities among civic coders, and it solving some problems such as reusing existing work in civic coding activities. It exploits agencies within interfaces such as Google Chrome browser, allows users to create categories to sort out civic coding projects, encourages critiques around projects, creates opportunities for everybody to contribute, and provides incentives of participation through gamification.

CCC allow user to collect Github repositories(repos) related to civic coding. After installing a Google Chrome extension, users can bookmark Github repos in the repos’ project pages by clicking a button. After that, users may add descriptions, add the repo to one of the lists, and discuss with other users.

This project also includes a web backend, allowing users to create lists, reply in discussions, and submit ideas related to civic coding.

(In Blogged response to “Pick a recent online social movement and describe the ways digital media or new technologies were used to organize activists. …)

[due to time constraint, I cannot link to all sources mentioned in this article. ]

The “Umbrella Movement” in Hong Kong and “Sunflower Movement” in Taiwan are actually not good examples in this topic. The are not “online” social movements. In the contrary, they are quite “offline” because the central activities are limited in the city level, the core leadership is formed at the beginning, and students really don’t need to log on to the Internet to know how their revolutions are going on. However, multiple online storytelling/organizing tools are still used in these movements. And the transmedia organization elements are rich. There are Twitter hashtags, live streaming in Google Hangout and Ustream, Facebook pages and articles, themed songs, Youtube videos and Instagram pictures. Branding icons – yellow umbrella icon and yellow ribbons are used across multiple online/offline media. There are some unique elements such as bluetooth-based mobile apps used to maintain communication channels when Internet is jammed. But overall, the transmedia techniques used in these movements are “standard” or even predictable. For example, one professor asked me for collecting songs written at the beginning of the Umbrella Movement, and he got them just 2 days after.

But since they mainly relied on offline communications, what difference did digital media make? One answer is amplifying the movements’ influence. Thanks to digital media, journalist no longer need to risk themselves going to the protest sites, and they can constantly know what’s happening in the movements in real time. The stories have been in the headlines in both western media and mainland Chinese media (of course in a different way) for weeks. Even today, the Facebook page of the Umbrella Movement is still there and updates nearly everyday, reporting “everything evil from China mainland”. Digital technology helped extend the communities (and hatred) beyond the movement themselves.

Students built their fortress in Facebook and Twitter, whereas their enemies erected their outposts in Weibo and Wechat. There were few exceptions from mainland who jumped over the Firewall and say “hello” on those Facebook pages, only receiving “get out” in return. Students in the protests may think that mainlanders have nothing to do with their affairs. But in reality the fate is never totally at the hands of Hong Kongers and Taiwanese: Service Trade Agreement is about cross-strait relation, and students in Hong Kong cannot have their objective achieved without the decision from Beijing. However, digital media make people feel empowered – since we have the attention and support from (seemingly) the whole world, why do we need politics and dialogue? Optimists think that even though movements failed, “the seed of democracy” is planted in the heart of Hong Kongers and even people in Mainland China. At least the latter part is not the case: I was nearly annoyed by my parents telling me how ignorant the students are during my telephone calls.

What if things happen in another way, saying protesters did not enjoy the hype brought by digital media at first and start to work on their initial cause? There is much nuance in the Service Trade Agreement about how different social classes benefit from the articles, and nomination method is a complex idea. Maybe there is a tiny hope that each party may reach a mutual accepted solution. However, the monsters named “ideology” and “politics“ are so strong and they may be the ones who laughed at last – especially if one does not will or learn to play with them.

(A student-drawn picture depicting the Umbrella Movement as a war against communis Source)

 

(A poster in the Umbrella Movement drawing the Chief Executive of Hong Kong as a wolf. Source)

 

 

(A poster from the Umbrella Movement. Source)

“Under the Dome” is a documentary produced by Chai Jing, an ex-anchorwoman at CCTV. This documentary covers topics such as the seriousness of air pollution in China now, the scientific nature and cause of air pollution, the international practice of reducing air pollution, why government agencies cannot stop air pollution, and what citizens can do for air pollution. The whole video (with English subtitles) can be found in Youtube. Chai Jing funded the filming herself.

This film is freely accessed online, soon reached 200 million viewers[1]. Discussions in social media are heated, and many political figures (such as government officers and congress members) jumped into the discussions. There are several reasons why this film is influential: it is made of high quality, with a Steve-Jobs style keynote setting and animations for scientific concepts; it has some sorts of support for the Department of Environment (DoE), with which it can have interviews with governmental officers; it has a personal storytelling style, which could effectively spur emotion and empathy; and it has clear call-to-action message (such as which phone number should they call, which app should they install on their phone, and what people can do if they see a restaurant without a air filter), telling people what should they do to stop pollution instead of just raising awareness. And finally, this film is censored (just before the Meeting of the People’s Congress) as a result, which adds to its mystery and interestingness.

This is an interesting example of citizenship, because it is a monitorial action by a group of citizens (filmmakers), and its final purpose is to turn a larger group of people into monitorial citizens. In fact, after the film is released, the servers of the air quality monitoring app is so overloaded that they sought help from IT experts in the technical community. The telephone number of the Department of Environment is also well known through this process (although I have no data how many people actually called). But there is more to be said about this film. It concerns about environment – a basic right of citizens, and the film cannot be made without help from scientists, communication professionals, policy experts (it involves a study of how pollution is regulated in other countries), and government officers. The filming crew act more or less like a professional NGO in finding experts and lobbying / cooperating with government to put forward policy issues (which may be one reason why it is censored). Speak of the complexity of environmental issues, this film also did some science publicity work that try to inform the citizens about the cause of this issue, and raise some deliberative debate (although many members in science communities are critical about its presentation of data and research results). Instead of challenging the government as a whole, the filmmakers tries to play with the power dynamic: it speaks against the state-owned fossil energy companies; it criticizes local governments for pursuing GDP despite of environmental costs; it calls for more power to the Department of Environment; and it is first released in the people.com.cn, an official media. This deep engagement goes beyond simple binary citizen-government relationships, such as ruling or being ruled, support or oppose etc.

The film has been on (and off) for days[2]. it certainly raised some awareness – it is said that one of three Chinese citizens having access to Internet have seen this; environment protection became a top topic in the Meeting of People’s Congress; the local DoE officer is investigated by the Commission of Discipline Inspection of the local government; the new minister of DoE of the central government personally thanked Chai Jing, although any part of the government refused to comment on this film later; the film itself is censored, resulting a “no search result could be shown due to laws and regulations” in various search engines despite some discussions and news articles are still there. By who, in what way, and why this film piece is censored is still unknown.
1 – source
2 – more information and sources could be seen in this Wikipedia page (in Chinese)

It is nearly impossible to find a single inclusive civic technology that suits all my needs. This is because some needs may conflict with others, and additional attributes are needed for a technology to survive and reach a critical mass. Hereby I will provide the “shopping list” for civic technologies and potential candidates in this civic technology competition.

1. This technology needs to be cheap enough so people from most social classes can afford.

2. This technology needs to be easy enough to use, with nearly zero learning curve so there won’t be a huge gap between new comers and veteran users.

3. This technology should suit all kinds of personalities. Outgoing people and introvert people should get similar quality of experience; the same applies to people fat and thin, female and male, quiet and active, young and old.

4. This technology should equalize new players, which means new comers won’t get too much advantage because of their economic or social capital in the real world.

5. This technology should have a anti-monopoly mechanism. The rich in the system won’t get richer too fast than the poor.

Beside these equality requirements, the system need to be “civic” – which means it needs to have the potential to reach civic goals. Therefore this shopping list continues with follows:

6. This technology should be participatory. It should be able to foster dialogs among participants. And although it is allowed to form local communities, but it shouldn’t go too far that people only talk to their peers in their local groups.

7. This technology should be able to make an impact, no matter it’s forming a consensus among its participants or bring changes to the real world.

8. This technology should be democratic. The purpose of the technology should not be promoting some certain ideas. The reward system should not prefer one set of ideas while discouraging another.

9. This technology should be creative. Participants should be able to experiment freely with in the system: create new ideas, and remix with existing ideas.

And finally:

10. This technology should survive and thrive. If it is a public project, it should have easy and clear maintenance procedures; if it is run by companies or organizations, it should have a business model to keep the system alive.

Here are some instances that may suite some parts of the criteria:

1. Songs/Music. Songs are affordable, have a great penetration in all kinds of marginal communities. Songs are easy to remix, or one can just change part of their lyrics to express their ideas. Certainly there are good singers or bad singers, but you don’t need to record a perfect version to create some influence. There are already many songs on politics, and they frequently appears in events such as protests. The problem with songs is that it cannot convey dialog – you can either follow the crowd or refuse to listen to them.

2. Cameras. Cameras are good at monitoring the environment, and they are native storytelling machines. Cameras today are affordable and usually preinstalled in most phones. Most people can use a camera without proper training. It doesn’t have penalty on any specific personality type, and in terms of news photos, the gap between professional photographer and amateurs are shrinking. However, the photo ecosystem still rely on editors to filter “good” photos from mediocre ones. Traditional media power structure still work on these new devices.

3. Radio. Radio seems to be a traditional media, but it runs perfectly in a local community. When used properly, it is easy to generate discussion within a community and have everybody’s opinion represented. However, as media consumption habit change over time, there are fewer people listening to radio and this diminishes its inclusiveness.

4. Apps, particularly Facebook, Line, and Wechat. Owning a smart phone seems to be prestigious five years ago, but is not any more since the price went down so rapidly, and it is foreseeable that they will be the standard equipment for people from all social classes. The problem with these tools is that those who got a hand on social media skills always have an advantage in using these tools.

5. Scratch and alike. Scratch is a tool developed by Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT Media Lab. It is used in science classes at schools, and it encourages expression and experiment at the first place. The current user base is small, but it is possible that after several generations these tools might be as popular as Facebook or Wechat. Only by then can we see whether they follow the same fate as social media.

Blog response to “Find and describe an example of a “collaborative technology” designed to improve a flaw in government…, or, is “collaborative” always be the solution?

After I received the topic, I found that it is really hard to find a “collaborative” solution to address a governmental law. Surely there are tons of citizen data project came out from numerous hackathons here and there, and the Kenyan platform Ushahidi has really made many achievements in filling the blank left over by the government in disaster relief domain; but are they really solving the problems? And how much is collaboration contributing in solving the problem?

In hackathons, data citizens gathered is mostly helpful for city planners; in the Ushahidi platform, it is the disaster relief supporting organizations (NGOs) really utilizing the generated data and delivering help. They are far from the networked public sphere ideal in which citizens collaboratively filter information and set priorities.

Another good example is the “I Paid a Bribe” website in India. citizens can report where or when they paid a bribe to an official, in hope of reducing corruption in India. It has comprehensive visualizations of corruption status, and you can also report “I did not pay a bribe” or “I saw an honest officer”. I’m not sure how much they are moving out of “generating awareness” comfort zone now, but when similar websites appeared in China, the first who jumps out to stop them is the anti-corruption bureau – it said these websites alerted those corrupted officials and ruined the effort of covert agents collecting evidence for corruption. After all, you need evidence (not blog posts) in the court to take down corrupted officials.

 

(Screenshot: India’s corruption monitor)

I am not saying the effort of these projects is meaningless, but I argue that we should not value these projects solely in terms of values such as “generatively, openness, the importance of data, and individual liberty”. These values are valued much in western world, and they do exist in some successful projects; but it does not mean that citizen data projects that are not generative, open, and promoting individual liberty cannot make an impact. On the contrary, it is entirely OK if the data is owned by somebody else other than citizens, no matter it is government, NGO, or specialist group. Back to the examples, city planning data help city planners covering their blind points; disaster information in Ushahidi helps NGOs a lot in distributing relief resources. If president Modi or some other groups in India want to track down corruption, what harm could it be if data in “I paid a bribe” is not open to everybody? Being absorbed in “openness” itself is a closed mind.

However, I totally agree with Benkler that “different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform”. I will give another Chinese example. The Pollution Map is an app designed by a environmental organization, it shows which company is polluting more then allowed by the law, and when did they promise to address their problems. What happens if they don’t change? Well, the app as another function – it display the brands having green supply chains. Consumers can refuse to buy the products who do not guarantee they are made with greenness in mind. After it is reported by independence investigative report (Chai Jing), the downloads surges and their servers soon experienced an overload. In this example, users of the man cannot contribute any information, but they can act according to the data neatly presented by the user interface – the data itself is not democratic, but the civil action is.

(Screenshot: the pollution map)

At last, open data is a solution, but not everything needs to be open. A white dog is adorable, but it is not necessary to have white paws, white nails, white eyeballs, and a white bark.

Sina Weibo is often referred as the “Chinese Twitter”. However, when compared to twitter, Sina Weibo has more attributes of a public sphere, here’s some reason why:

1. the tweet limit is 140 Chinese characters. That could express a lot of meaning in Chinese. Besides, lots of people stuff a long article as an image. Longer content makes deliberation possible.

(Screenshot: a Sina Weibo post and its translated form)

 

(Screenshot: “Long Weibo Tweet” image)

2. Comments and Retweets are separated. Long comments encourage discussions, and showing all comments of a thread in the same place makes discussions discoverable. Users can choose to “leave a comment while retweeting”, and “retweet while leaving this comment”, thus deciding whether to forward the discussion to their own social sphere.

3. The “hashtag” function is richer and more neutral. There can be a moderator to facilitate discussion, and people don’t need to know how to use hashtags: when you debate in the hashtag (named “topic”) pages, you automatically tweet with the specified hashtag. Trending hashtags are both hand picked and populated by popularity. In this way, Hashtags in Weibo are mostly (neutral) discussions topics, not advertisements or political agendas. In a time, there is a debate page for some hashtag topics, listing all the opposite ideas and reasons for people agree or disagree.

(Screenshot: the hashtag page for the National Congress meeting)

4. Wechat has taken most personal matters away. People start to post their selfies and food pictures in Wechat, leaving Weibo a discussion place for public affairs.

5. Equality. There are public intellectuals, news media, government agencies in Weibo, but they have no privileges and they are not immune to attacks. They could swing between opinions and it is often that media companies has a different face in Weibo (for example people’s daily), for the runner of social media accounts in these organizations tend to be young and they are often allowed to take a different strategy than its ordinary PR section. In fact, Sina (the company running Weibo) has a trainer team and training materials for government agencies of how to interact with people in Weibo.

6. Reachability. This is not a part in public sphere theory. But Sina Weibo managed to have a large user base including working class, school kids and elderly population. It’s mobile app allows groups like migrant workers handily join an online discussion.

7. Interaction with traditional media. Local TV stations in China start to read or show content from Weibo. They have TV programs with anchormen/anchorwomen just browsing Weibo content (with a large touchscreen) with his/her audience, which increase the influence of discussions happening in Weibo.

8. Social impact. Several campaigns, such as “Weibo finds lost children”, “free lunch for pupils in remote regions”, and several anti-corruption cases are done in Weibo, making its users somewhat feel empowered.

However, as a web platform, there are other characteristics discredits it as a open public sphere. Here’s some:

1. Inequality. Everybody follows figure with the most followers. Nobody listens to the unknown. What’s worse, the system recommends every new comers to follow those news agencies or ones with the most followers. What’s worse, discussions seem to form around those who are the most welcomed. What’s the worst is, the ones who have the most followers are the ones who know best on how to raise a debate.

2. Social marketing and big data guys. Weibo is one of the most heavily data-mined online space. Those people could spend their entirely life in drawing attention, manipulating opinion, and killing discussions. And usually they cares monetization more than public good.

3. Partisanship. Users in Weibo are often categorized into one or more parties, such as the supporter or objector of some person, Wumao (communist supporters) or Meifen (United States lovers). Sometimes they join a party by them by their will or they are just being labeled. In either way, this makes it costly to shift opinions and it discourage deliberation in specific public affairs.

4. Censorship. Weibo is run by a private corporation, which means they censor more content than needed in name of keeping their business running. You don’t need to speak against the central government to get yourself censored – just appear in the wrong topic or attack the wrong person. Censorship happens when it says “sorry for the internet traffic jam, your comment will appear after xxx hours” but you know that it will never get passed. This could be quite discouraging, if not more than big data guys. The situation could be better in smaller or more distributed websites such as Baidu Tieba or other websites such as Anime sites, but it is a different problem.

After all, Sina Weibo is designed to harvest attention, not to foster public discussion. But it is still a good example to see how design decisions decides what kind of discussion space (and its disappointments) technology could form; and Sina Weibo surely takes some functions we anticipate in public sphere.

When talking about civic crisis, I was thinking what is the civic crisis in China, or is there a civic crisis in China? In summary, there are three types of civic crisis discussed in this class;

1. People (especially young students) are lack of basic knowledge (arguably) required in public life;
2. People no longer care about politics, and they do not show up in votes.
3. People no longer gather in community meetings such as Bowling Clubs.

The first two problems seemingly do not exist in China: Chinese students are quite fluent in civic knowledge, partly thanks to the “inhumane” education system around examinations. Writing around policies and public affairs is an essential part of Chinese language/literature test (which is a tradition since the era of dynasties), and taking College Entrance Examination is the only way for Chinese students (especially those from rural areas) to enter a college. In a high school in Hebei being heavily criticized as “test-taker factory”, the school “put news stands and kiosks in every floor of their buildings”, in hope of getting their students familiar with public topics that may appear in tests.

The second problem is a bit of tricky. In one side, Chinese people are eager to talk about politics, no matter they are students, office workers or taxi drivers. However, does it mean that if China hold a national election as western countries, people will show up and vote? Unlikely. Looking at other asian places like Taiwan and Japan, general citizen’s engagement in politics are quite unsatisfactory. There seems to be a gap between “showing interest in politics” and “taking civic action”, especially “taking the action as scholars and intellectuals expected”.

This connects to the third “crisis”: how do people gather together, form a public, and take actions? This could be a problem for Chinese people.

China offers a governance system different than most of the countries. Instead of considering Chinese Communist Party as a political party to promote a certain ideology I would like to analogize it to a big corporation. It has a HR sector (Zuzhibu, department of organization), where officials are (often quantitatively) evaluated and promoted all the way towards the president; it has a customer support sector in each level (Xinfangchu, correspondence and visitor department) to respond to complaints of the people; it has a PR sector (Xuanchuanbu, department of propaganda, or advocacy) to promote its ideas and services. It has lots of good and evil traits of a big enterprise: it is stable, well strategized, respond to changes swiftly, while customers seemingly do not have a say on its management at current stage.

So in this sense, is civic still relevant in China? My answer is yes. There are many cases in business world that a company fails its customers, either by producing sub-standard products or ignoring the demand of consumers (which could be a severe problem when there is no competitors). And in the ideal form of Chinese government (if you agree that there MAY be a different political system from the western world), the public should be the board members of the state. A Cafe, or bowling club is still in need. This is where Baidu Tieba come into play.

(image: a screenshot of Baidu Tieba: the Gay forum)

Baidu Tieba (meaning “Posting Cafe” in Chinese) combines search engine with forums. You search for any keyword and it will lead you to a discussion board, either an existing one or a new one to be created (synonyms are automatically redirected, and users can choose to merge two boards into one). Forums are not a new thing, but the key success of Tieba is creating a long tail for forums: everyone can find the forum and its interest group. Tieba soon became the favorite tool for fan communities in comics, animes, popular figures, and TV shows. Till now, it has more than 1.5 billion registered users, 8.2 million forums, 3.5 billion discussion topics, and over 64.6 billion posts.

But what’s powerful in public life is that local governments soon found people are creating forums for their towns, districts, and villages. People start to comment on any affair in their neighborhood, and start to complain about injustices. Tieba was the start of several collective actions (what Chinese call for things like protest) and government start to monitor and respond to what people say in their Tieba, since they can’t just censor it because they do not have the authority to censor a national web platform.

Long tail also benefits marginalized communities. Gays and Lesbians found their groups, and patients of any common or uncommon diseases can easily form a group online and seek for help. After the user formed the habit of using Tieba, they start to search for other things they may be interested in. This further break down discussion silos haunting most of online platforms. Another device to break down silos is the “friend forum” function: a forum can invite other forums as friends. In time of vacation, it is a ritual that forums send “ambassadors” to post on other forums to maintain their “friendship”.

Baidu Tieba is an excellent example that what civic tech can foster something that is not possible before, even though the technology is not designed for civic use at the first place, and the company is still trying to shift its focus to entertainment which is more profitable.

If you start a Google search for “citizen journalism”, mostly it will lead to Bowman and Wills’ definition (maybe just because somebody wrote this on the Wikipedia). My definition is much simpler: it needs to be citizen-driven, and it should be journalism. In particular, the more a activity responses to journalism needs, sticks to journalism value, engage citizen participation, the more compelling it is as a form of citizen journalism. In this sense, I think the best candidate to this time is cameras in everybody’s mobile phones (I will refer them to “Phone Cameras” from now). And here’s why.

1. Phone cameras are journalism
Mobile phone cameras meets with most of the (boring) news value criteria in journalism schools. It is fast (remember the plane in Hudson River?), it is relavant to everyday life, and in most cases, it tells the truth.

[pic: the first twitter photo of the plane landing on Hudson River. Source]

 

2. Phone cameras are pervasive
It cannot be a “compelling” citizen journalism form if its user base only a smallest portion of the population. However, it is not the case in mobile cameras. Even the not-so-smart cellphone can take pictures now, delivering live news from every corners of the world.

[pic: the most popular camera in Flicker 2014. Source]

 

3. Phone cameras are democratic
Mobile Cameras really give power to the people. Those who have power, no matter physical or political, could no longer abuse their power in front the mere possibility that somebody may take up their phone and take a picture. In fact, the action of “taking out the phone” could be a straightforward demonstration that “we are not afraid of you, we are the public.” Mobile camera is the first surveillance technology at the hand of the people.

4. Phone cameras are “authentic”
Mobile Cameras have a natural attribute of being authentic. Seeing a crude picture from middle east(probably from a outdated phone), most people will believe this is the truth and the picture is taken as it is. Strangely, the worse the quality of the photo, the more authentic it seems to be. In this sense, manufacturers should really consider produce phones with worse cameras.

5. Phone cameras provoke actions
When conditions of a city’s infrastructure are shown with crude pictures taking by cellphones, city administration can no longer ignore them; when the cop beating protesters is caught with phone cameras, anger arise among people. The fact that phone cameras can document anything at anytime makes mass social monitoring possible, leading to more sophisticated use such as the promise tracker.

6. Phone cameras are non-professional
Other citizen media ideas often require some expertise, from technology familiarity to communication skills such as writing, and that is why they are (almost) all failed. But phone cameras are the perfect media for non-professionals – no skill needed (even photographic skill), just tap the button. An intellectual or professional media worker gains no advantage in using phone cameras (as shown in #4).

7. Phone cameras makes “professional” journalists
In the same time, ordinary citizens are trained into a habit that is often seen in professional journalists: they quickly pick up scent of news; they share photos as if there’s a deadline pushed by the editors; and in scenes of emergency, they take pictures before they run away or call the police.

[pic: photo showing people taking pictures of an ebola patient, from Reuters]

 

8. Phone cameras set agendas
Agenda setting is considered the modern form of control (by government of ruling class or whatever). But thanks to phone cameras, we gradually stop talking about “big events” or “big figures” in the newspaper, we start to talk about who appears in selfies of whom; who visited which places; and who tasted what food. Citizens’ mind are no longer “void of information” waiting for news agencies to fill in. Somebody may say that there is less civic engagement here, but there is not much in the traditional way too.

[pic: people taking photos of their food. Source]

9. Phone cameras invade privacy
Journalism has always been the enemy to privacy, if you see it as a way of selectively making personal affairs public. Phone cameras are the best tool for making something public without leaving a trace. The new iterations of phone cameras such as narrative clips and google glasses will further ensure that privacy is the least concern.

10. Phone cameras are promising
Unlike most of journalism tools that does not change for a long time, phone cameras evolve constantly. Phones can take picture more rapidly, and can take more pictures in a fixed time; Phone cameras now come with built-in editing tool to make sure that photos are as biased as news; and new attachments such as selfie poles let you take selfies during a parade.