HackMD
TFD g0v Fellowship: patcon
Hi! My name is patcon, also known as ""Patrick Connolly". I'm in Taipei for a three-month non-academic research fellowship sponsored by Taiwan Foundation for Democracy (TFD).
Contents
About Me
I'm a long-time co-organizer with the Canadian civic tech community in Toronto. We run weekly hacknights in a similar spirit to g0v jothons. I officially have a university degree in biochemistry, but have been working in technology sector for 8 years. I get into Bitcoin in 2013, and used that money to leave my job and do open source work for 3 years. I worked mostly on 1) a crowdfunding platform that was trying to reimagine an economy based on gratitude and love, and 2) privacy/anti-surveillance software. Some of that time was spent living in Nicaragua. But I got home-sick for Toronto, and came back. But I still wanted to keep working on open source and other things that I didn't know how to get paid for. In pursuit of this, I slowly rebuilt my habits so that I didn't need an apartment, and started living in a hammock tent in the park, which co-organizing within our civic tech community and working with government and civil society partners.
Selection Process (that brought me here)
Have been interested in vTaiwan for the past 3 years, since reading Liz Barry's article. Joined g0v slack as I learned more about g0v, the community that vTaiwan seemed to come out of. Travelled to NYC to convene a meeting of others interested in g0v and vTaiwan, so that we could try to start a North American fork of vTaiwan. Through this, met @itsmisscs, @dzn, @lizbarry, @devin and others. We organized a small workshop in NYC and invited PDIS. We then submitted a proposal to RightsCon, an international human rights conference. We were accepted to do an interactive mini-vTaiwan workshop. Because both ttcat had also submitted a session proposal mentioning g0v, our workshop was merged with his presentation. While coordinating our session, ttcat and I spoke about the Toronto civic tech community, and he felt that I might be an interesting candidate to apply for the fellowship that he had been negotiating with TFD. He encouraged me to apply, and wrote one of the two required letters of recommendation.
@ttcat and I worked together to determine the research topic below, and the application was a success.
What is my research?
My research topic is answering a three-part question, as follows:
- What are the animating forces of the g0v movement, as understood from an outside perspective?
- How is the g0v community similar and different from the civic tech community in Toronto and Canada.
- How might it be possible, if at all, for the g0v community to spread to countries like Canada?
For more information, please see the full research proposal
What else have I been doing?
- Matterbridge: Translation/Chat Bridge -
#chat-bridge - Rhythm Badges: Sociometric badges -
#social-phyics- working with MIT media lab researchers to build a community around the project
- working with members of Taipei hackerspace to build the hardware
- attending jothon organizer meetings
- attending vTaiwan planning meetings
- doing interview (TBD)
