g0v

 In 2012, four "civic hackers"–that is, politically minded computer programmers with an activist ethos–in Taiwan built a citizen auditing system for the government's annual budget. They made data from the Accounting and Statistics Office accessible, easy to understand and interactive. The public could rate and comment on every item in the budget. This became the foundation of the g0v (“gov-zero”) movement, which is now one of the world’s most active civic-tech communities.

On March 18, 2014, hundreds of young activists, most of them college students, occupied Taiwan’s legislature to express their profound opposition to a new trade pact with Beijing then under consideration, as well as the secretive manner in which it was being pushed through Parliament by the Kuomintang, the ruling party. Shocked by such unprecedented, spontaneous eruption of anti-government sentiment by young people–which came to be known as the Sunflower Student Movement–the government came to g0v for cooperation. Several contributors from g0v responded by partnering with the government to start the vTaiwan platform in 2015. vTaiwan (which stands for "virtual Taiwan'') brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy. Since it began, vTaiwan has tackled 30 issues, relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders.

All told, there are currently over 600 projects on g0v platforms under discussion, modification, and being executed. Some exemplary cases this year alone include:

* Map systems showing mask availability in pharmacies over the country
* An agricultural land protection and factory pollution reporting site
* Dictionaries for Taiwanese dialects and aborigine languages
* A fact checker app and website  
        ...

Besides online events, g0v hosts bimonthly "hackathon" workshops that are open to all to come to share ideas or look for partners for their projects in person. g0v also works with businesses and government agencies to evaluate and award funding for projects deemed most impactful and sustainable for society.
 
All these are run by a group of less than ten young men and women, all but two of them on volunteer basis. I went to one of their weekly meetings the other day, and met Isabel, a cheerful lady in her late 30's whose career as a lawyer specializing in innovation and intellectual property started with the involvement of the open source movement in the early 2000's; Ronny, a software engineer who once obtained political donors information from the government and published them all–tens of thousands of names and numbers and links–in one day through the code he wrote that "outsourced" the data punching work to the public; Chewei, a spatial designer who coordinated with the City of Taipei to build a website listing all the vacant lands the city government owns for the public to inquire and make usage suggestions about; Sean, another software engineer with artistic and environmental design background, was creator of the "Watch Our Rivers" campaign that visualizes and publishes river cleanup contracts the government doles out to contractors for all to access and monitor; Bess, a young woman with nearly 10 year experience working with non-profit and cross-domain organizations, and Ichieh, another young lady in her mid 20's who joined the team right off school, were the only two full-timers there.

They started their meeting by each sharing one impressionable thing that came to their mind in the past week... Ichieh said she saw news of a new video hosting site that won't arbitrarily suspend access to videos people upload that she thought might be worth considering as a backup site for g0v's videos; Chewei mentioned an idea he heard that in some countries corporations are required to plant trees to compensate for the carbons they create when they hold physical conferencing events; Sean shared an aha moment he got while sitting in traffic on how to solve traffic problems with strategies he uses in one of the video games he plays... They bantered, they joked, they laughed... then they moved on to discuss the coming hackathon event in January, a tutorial workshop at the end of this month (December), people to invite, places to set up, software to fix, projects to coordinate, etc., etc.  Again, good naturedly, they riffed off each other's ideas, threw in witty remarks, made light-hearted complaints... No hardship looks on their faces, they were having a good time doing what they chose to do.

"g0v is not anti-government, just anti-cynics," (g0v不是反政府，而是反酸民) "Don't complain there's nobody doing anything, admit you are that nobody," (別再抱怨沒有人做，因為你就是“沒有人”)... are remarks seen on g0v's website and literature. Indeed g0v is a decentralized, grass root movement that puts together ordinary people who want to do good for society with innovative but practical ideas and digital technologies, and has affected tangible changes in societies over the past eight years. I hope and have pledged my support for it to go many more years and do much more good for Taiwan and the world. I hope many will do the same too.

​g0v manifesto:
We come from everywhere
We are a polycentric community of self-organized contributors
We are citizens collaborating to bring about change
We live open-source
We have fun and want to change the status quo
We are you

g0v 宣言：

我們來自四方
我們多中心運作、打造自主貢獻文化
我們實踐公民參與，創造改變
我們成果開放，取之開源，用之開源
我們很歡樂，也想改變現狀
我們就是你

Related news articles:

Wired Magazine:

Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: 

Taiwan’s Tech-savvy Citizens Helped Flatten Its COVID-19 Curve

quarantine

Because of Covid-19, all visitors to Taiwan are required to self-quarantine in designated hotels or secluded residence for 14 days. This is how we went through it Oct 14 - Oct 28.

A certificate was sent to our phone to be shown to the Immigration officers after we filled out a health questionnaire 48 hours before arriving in Taipei:

A "home quarantine pack" that included thermometers, masks, trash bags--we got two sets of each for two people--was hand-delivered to us after we arrived at our apartment in Taipei:

and two bundles of cookies, cereal, peanuts...

crackers, candies, drinks, cup noodles, etc.

We were instructed not to step outside our apartment (they could track us through our phones' GPS), so my sister, who lived in the same building as we, brought us meals every day. This is some dim-sum she bought:

Bento sets:

Sushi & roast fish:

View of the world outside from my study:

The “Neighborhood Watch Officer" (里幹事) sent daily "how are you doing" (are you healthy?) greetings to us, one in the morning, one in the afternoon/evening:

So did the Taiwan CDC, texting us every morning:

They would arrange garbage pickup for us too:

Our quarantine ended on the same day Dodgers won the World Series; I kept my weight in check, gaining only 0.2 pound through 14 days of delicious food and no workout. The secret: skip the dinners:

We went for a walk in the park, a hot soy milk breakfast and fresh sandwiches on our first day out:

And a real dinner at a nice restaurant the second day:

As of end of October, Taiwan (pop. 23 million) has reported no new Covid-19 cases for more than 200 consecutive days since April 12.

sunny

Sunny and I were elementary school classmates from grade three through grade six. He was a typical bouncy perky kid of his age, if a little more on the wild side, with a mother who's a bit on the over-worried side, that a well behaving, good grade earning kid like me became a "role model" she wanted her son to "hang out" with, in today's term, which he did, as he genuinely liked and admired me, even though he later confessed in our adult years that there were times he told his mother that he's with me just so she wouldn't worry when he's actually out somewhere else playing.

We went to different high schools and universities, but stayed in touch as occasions kept us to. One such occasion was when I asked him to be my courtesy door-knocker before I started dating my future wife who happened to go to the same department/university as he. He did it and would be forever claiming credit for the pivotal role he played in the successful union between me and my wife!

He came to the US about the same time I did, went back to Taiwan after finishing his study, then back to the US again a few years later and settled down not too far from where I lived in South Orange County. He told me he was doing well working for one of those up-and-coming furniture companies in Taiwan until he realized there were irreconcilable differences in business thinking between him and his boss/owner of the company that he decided to come to the USA to strike out on his own .

Strike out did he! From a humble home office with phones and fax machines pre internet times, he built a multi-million dollar business empire that owns factories and offices in China and Vietnam, Taiwan and US, in a short couple decades right in front of my eyes!
 
He's not your typical Fortune 500 slick talking CEO, but an old fashioned head-of-the-family boss that took care of his workers and they in return stayed loyal to him. The lady secretary he hired when he started his home office is still with the company, so are managers of the factories he took over decades ago.

Once he overheard a customer talking abusively to one of his employees and he grabbed the phone and told the customer if he continued to talk like that they didn't want their businesses.

He had a trademark sunny smile that lit up the room and charmed the people he met, and a pair of sparkling eyes that seemed to reveal where his artistic furniture design ideas and business smarts came from.

He spent almost half his time overseas, but we managed to stay in touch throughout the years: Winter mountain outing with his wife and kids when they were little, birthday/Christmas parties, golf rounds, country club dinners, or just some happy hour drinks at his office when he had long stay in Southern California.   

He was diagnosed with terminal stage brain cancer about five years ago. Though it came as a shock initially, with the extraordinary care of his super wife and top notch surgeon doctors, and their strong Christian faith, he made it through two major surgeries, various therapies and treatments, and had a miraculous recovery when doctors projected he had only three months to live after his second surgery more than four years ago.

He'd lived a healthy, functional life for the past four years. Even though in a wheelchair, he traveled to his factories in Vietnam for year-end celebration banquets, his son's graduation in San Francisco, and daughter's wedding in Italy.

He donated more money and sponsored more Christian ministries, including setting up summer camps in his factories in China and Vietnam for his employees and their families to spread the Gospel and be its witness.

I got to meet him more often, at the monthly women's ministry his wife organized and my wife helped out at his office in Irvine, and functional/fundraiser meetings for the ministry we both sponsored.

His smile was as sunny as ever, if not warmer and gentler, with an avuncular ring to it.

His cancer relapsed early this year, and he passed away just last week here in Taipei.

Farewell Sunny, my dear childhood friend forever... You've become the role model for many... See you on the other side.

free will

Do we have free will or it's all just an illusion? Modern sciences would like to tell us it's the latter. Your body and mind are just one big complex machine that acts according to the laws of physics, the neurons in your brain were fired up long (nanoseconds) before you think of an idea or make a move, the end result of a long chain of events that trace back all the way to the day the universe started.

But like the behavior of flowy water cannot be described by the particle-like movements of its atomic components, and deterministic events in microcosm do not transpire to deterministic outcome in a "chaotic", complex system (having full knowledge of all the meteorological parameters does not guarantee accurate predictions of the weather, for example), such reductionist deconstruction of human psyche is fallacious and even unscientific.
 
The philosophical determinism and religious predestination theory, on the other hand, are more about fancy thought-play and mystical after-the-fact statements than honest reporting of human state of mind as it happens.

Free will, in common sense term that you and I can understand and experience, is the capacity to weigh different options and make decisions without coercion (such as someone holding a gun to your head), to do things we desire.

A sovereignty that some may prefer not to have, for some reason. In a psychological experiment, one group of people were asked to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion, and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then both groups were subject to a variety of temptations and observed their behavior. What researchers found was, with the opportunity to cheat being equal, the former group took more illicit peeks at answers during a math test and took more money than they should from an envelope of $1 coins than the latter.

  

So, if you are free, what will you do?

President Eisenhower once quoted a Stoic-ish statement in one of his State of the Union addresses that "Freedom is the opportunity to do the right thing;" ancient Greek philosophers--Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--believe that seeking truth is the same as seeking good, helping people becoming virtuous in the process. 

And devout believers seek God's will to replace their own; contemplative "deep silence" prayers try to will nothing but hold an implicit intent to be in union with God during meditation; naturalists think they see the Creator's will everywhere or nowhere in the world.

Flipping the coin to the other side, free will could be hijacked by the basest of human instincts--aggression, possessiveness, self-aggrandization--to an abysmal end as deep as their superego would take them. All the ruthless rulers and mad men in history...

Free will may be overrated, after all. As relational creatures living in an interconnected world, none of us has absolute freedom but all depend on the freedom of others and the complex makings of a fragile world for our well-beings. Instead of insisting "my way or highway," "your wish is my command" may be a wiser approach to harmonious living.

Your good will will always trump my free will, that is.

    

a hectic fall

It was a Monday evening, I just started off my home on my way to Mel & Jo's for our recently resumed weekly meditation meetup. This was the third week in a row I bicycled instead of driving to my meditation friend's home. Evelyn's and Annie's were both in San Clemente, Mel & Jo's was in San Juan Capistrano, closer to my neck of the woods but the route I chose for this bike ride had some up and down, wind-around road challenges I felt a bit anxious to check out.

Maybe too anxious, I forgot the steep slope that led down our community exit that I always needed to maneuver through first, and careless, for I had been riding down this slope so many times before, I didn't apply much brake, and instead of rolling over the speed bump I swerved to its side to bypass it... next thing I knew I saw my wheels hit the seam between the curb and the pavement and start to rattle and wobble and I reckoned I was losing control of my bike and decided to let go the handlebars and fell to the ground...

When I came to, there were a couple of people sitting beside me by the roadside (some Good Samaritan neighbors happened to drive by and saw the accident), a man and a woman, I thought. The woman asked kindly how I felt, I said I was all right, "what day is today," she continued, and I felt funny, because I couldn't answer that question, nor could I figure out why I was there and where I was headed...

They called the ambulance for me and minutes later I was in the Emergency Room of Mission Hospital. They took an X-ray on my left shoulder and a CT-scan on my head and left me resting there for a few hours before returning with the result: A broken collarbone on my left shoulder and a minor concussion on my head. Neither was too serious and should heal themselves in days, they said. They then gave me a prescription for pain-killer medicine and a sling for shoulder support and dispatched me home.

I had a couple nights of very bad sleep not only due to the broken shoulder but also the left wrist and fingers that were red hot swollen and excruciatingly painful. I also experienced morning headaches and dizziness and nausea at times.

But these gradually let up in the following days, to the point when I visited my primary care doctor a week later for followup check, as suggested by the ER staff, I spent about equal time catching up with him (he's been our family doctor for decades and we don't get to see each other except on "special occasions" like this) as talking about the accident and its after-effect on me.

My sense of recovery and well being got even stronger a few days later when I visited an orthopedist referred by my primary care doctor. As a precaution, and to know exactly how my injury was and had been healing, he ordered another X-ray on my shoulder, as well as an MRI on my wrist.

He called me the next day with a somewhat alarming tone: The X-ray report he just saw showed the fracture of my collarbone was much worse than he originally thought, the bone was split far apart and out of alignment, a situation that called for immediate surgery the sooner the better.

I was surprised to hear that and started looking for second opinions on whether I should do surgery or not. After talking to a couple of fellow cyclists who had similar accidents and injuries and had gone through surgeries, a regenerative (non-surgical) medical doctor, and another orthopedist, I concluded I should do the surgery and set up for it the following week, a little more than three weeks from the day the accident happened.

It was a minor surgery--as the doctors liked to say, comparing it to knee replacement or open heart surgeries, I suppose. I was put under general anesthesia, though, and slept through the two-hour operation. What the doctor did was put in a metal plate, drill holes on my bones, fasten the plate and bridge the bones together again.

The post-surgery recovery was quite manageable, the inconveniences I had to live through came from needing to avoid wetting the bandaged surgical cut on my shoulder when taking a bath, and the restricted movement of my left arm and hand that forced me to wash my face with one hand, like a cat, for example.

All these were lifted after I paid my post-op visit to the surgery doctor last Friday. They removed the bandage and stitches from the wound, and said I could start moving my arm and hand around like normal again... no swimming until a couple weeks later, though. 

Neither bicycling, I suppose.

* How to fall off a bike the right way? Believe it or not, I've been cycling off and on for over 8 years, including a 9-day round-the-island tour in Taiwan a couple years ago, and this was the first time I ever fell off a bike. Here is the belated tip I learn from online: 

When sensing an imminent fall, tuck your chin to your chest, keep your hands on the bars or as close to your body as possible, roll when you hit the ground to spread the forces of the impact across a larger surface area, so to reduce your chances of a fracture.

One thing I certainly did not do was holding on to the handlebars, but instead letting it go so easily, maybe subliminally thinking about or trying to apply the fall-down skills I learned from Judo or snow skiing practices, when what's waiting for me down there was not a tatami mat or a soft pile of snow, but hard rugged ground of asphalt pavement!

* Many thanks to those who came to my aid after the accident: From Christine who picked me up at the ER, to Richard who took me to the many doctor visits and the surgery, to Dr. James who referred me a fine orthopedic specialist and gave valuable after-surgery advices, to my across-street neighbors who sent me comfort foods, to my meditation group and book group friends and all others who expressed condolences and good wishes after hearing the accident. Your acts of love and kindness, good thoughts and prayers are more powerful and spread wider than whatever pandemic virus out there is and could!

relationship

No one is an island. We are born attached, literally, umbilically, to our mother, and father, and siblings, genetically and emotionally. We then go out and create our own ties, making friends, joining organizations, forming families, weaving a social web work that comes to define who we are, or at least how people perceive we are. On the day we die, many would feel the greatest regret of their life is the failure to reconcile some of these relationships they have with others.

A Utopian Confucian society is one based on all the "proper" relationships–father and son, man and wife, ruler and subject, the old and the young–properly performed by all its members, facilitated by rites and rituals, motivated by everyone's original good heart of love and kindness. Easier said than done. When the original good doesn't come out original or good enough, society becomes disingenuous, rites and rituals turn into "man-eating decorum" (吃人的禮教), civilization loses luster. 

A smack of intimacy is detected in the word relationship, versus the word relation. That's probably why nations have "Foreign Relations" Department not "Foreign Relationship" Department, and she says she has "sexual relationship" with him while he says he does not have any "sexual relations" with that woman.

Essential as emotional attachment seems to be, some wiser guys choose to keep as little of it as possible. "The gentlemen's friendship is as bland as water (君子之交淡如水)," says Confucius. Some, like the hermits or the monks, go further, severing all ties with the world, their only remaining one being with nature or God. That's keeping it very simple, smart! I don't go extreme, but I think sometimes a proper break from a long stalemated relationship helps you see things clearer and move on better.

Perhaps the most precious, sought after relationship is the one prefixed with the adjective "personal". It is a relational super highway that cuts through all the hierarchical byways to get wherever you want–a special treatment, undivided attention, etc.–fast. Shouldn't/can't we make all relationships personal, then?

How you see your relationship with another tells how you know them and how they affect you. When Jesus asked his disciples "Who do you think I am," Peter hit the jackpot ("You are the Messiah!") and got the key to the gate to heaven, while others–like many still today–consider him just a prophet, a sage, or a great teacher, and don't get the magic a Savior endows the saved ones with.
 
Much has been said about virtual relationships in today's info-media world: Facebook friends, Twitter followers, celebrity groupies... But I say all relationships are virtual, for the simple fact that no two persons can be physically close by 24/7, so we all have to rely on thoughts and prayers, memories and imaginations, to keep the connection going in our mind, with all those we cross paths with in life, short or long, near or far, dead or alive.

That's why relationship never dies.

a home project

The side yard door we had since the house was built some 8 years ago had been sagging on one side and the wood panel deteriorating with age, I decided to replace it.

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I ordered a metal gate online and got it in a week. Assembling was not too hard, except they sent wrong screws for some parts I had to figure out and get the right ones from a local hardware store.

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Dismantling the old door was not too hard either.

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But I had to get rid of those big long bolts sticking out from the concrete block columns after the old wooden posts were removed.

A little hacksaw blade could do the big job of sawing off the bolt, given time; but I didn't really need to saw it all the way down, just about one third of the way, then knocked it off with a hammer.

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Now came the hard part: carving out a seam between the concrete block column and the ground for my new metal post's base to tuck in.

I made my own “improvised cutting device” after learning it from a YouTube video by attaching a disc blade to a drill gun. 

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It worked for a while, giving me some headway into the hard solid block column I wanted. 

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But then it kept breaking down: the rickety home-made device just not sturdy enough to stand the constant jerking and shaking my forceful cutting action created.

After some online research, a couple visits to the local hardware store, and advice from a kindly store helper, I bought this power oscillating tool, along with a diamond grit concrete cutting blade to attach to it.

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That did the job, cutting a seam about 5 inches wide, 2 inches deep, at the base of the column.

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So I could tuck the metal post in.

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Along with the gate.

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The only problem now was my opening was just about one inch too narrow for the door handle and its backstop to "kiss" and close properly. 

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So I detached and reattached the backstop plate to the other cheek of the post, and now the door handle and its backstop clap flawlessly together.

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Welcome to my yard!

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