 Hello, everyone. Welcome to my talk, Civic Tech and Asian Perspective. My name is Wei Yu. I am Associate Professor working at Department of Communications and New Media, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore. I'm also the Director of the Civic Tech Lab. The lab had a long history dated back to 2008, but we only recently launched its website thanks to the generous support from two grandpas. So here I'd like to acknowledge their support. First is a US ODPRT collaborative grant which enabled this Civic Tech in Asia project. I also want to thank a US and University of Sydney partnership grant which allowed us to explore Civic Tech from an Asia-Pacific perspective, adding Australia to our research sites. The Civic Tech Lab, as I said, has been there for a while, but it was only recent that we were able to come up with this website. You're welcome to check out our website and see whether some of the research projects we do interest you, and you're welcome to contact me for any potential collaborations. Other than our website, we have two other channels where you can find interesting content. One is our Twitter channel, Civic Tech Lab, and the other one is our YouTube channel, the Civic Tech Lab. There have been some very exciting and, I think, videos uploaded to this channel. For those of you who don't know this web, allow me to play a short video to introduce our lab to you. What is Civic Tech? Civic Tech refers to solutions that involve information and communication technologies to benefit citizens. Who are we? We are academics researching and facilitating Civic Tech processes and technologies. Our vision, we envision taking an interdisciplinary cross-sectoral and collaborative approach to tackling civic challenges. Our missions, generate the highest quality research about civic technology, strengthen the civic core of public sector, private sector actors and citizens, design critical processes and technologies for the public good. Our team, Civic Tech Lab at National University of Singapore is a research hub. Our team includes social scientists, computer scientists, and digital cultural analysts. Our history, the Civic Tech Lab, formerly known as the Media Psychology Lab, was established in 2008 as a central location for research projects on civic engagement and information communication technology. Our focus, Civic Tech in Asia, citizen science, online deliberation, digital culture. Our home, www.CivicTechLab.org. Before I start, I'd like to first introduce the concept or the term of civic technology. The definition I introduce here is not necessarily academic, normative. So, Civic Tech here, the understanding of it comes from how the practitioners who claim that they are doing Civic Tech understand this particular term. So, in this term, there are two words. The second word, technology, is actually quite straightforward. Technology here often refers to information and the communication technology that became readily available to the public in the later half of the 20th century. So, this basically refers to the internet, mobile phones, and all kinds of technologies built upon that. What seems to be controversial is actually the definition or understanding of Civic. So, what is a Civic? I tried to layered the understanding of the word into a hierarchy, a three-layered hierarchy. On the bottom of the hierarchy, you see that the people who are doing Civic Tech think that as long as a tech is for the citizens, then the tech can be called Civic Tech. For the citizens, it seems to be straightforward, but it involves some disagreement points as well. For instance, who are citizens? Immigrants, especially illegal immigrants are citizens. Public servants are citizens. How can we define who deserve, are qualified to be called citizens? Well, when we say for the citizens, most of the time we assume that we are trying to benefit the citizens. We are trying to bring something that is good for the citizens. But the controversial point is who can define what is really good for the citizens? Who can make the decisions? Well, the second layer of this hierarchy of the concepts focused on bi-citizens, the engagement of citizens in building and developing Civic Tech. So, when we talk about engaging citizens, the natural question is how do we engage the citizens? In what manners? From which kind of channels? So, at the top of the pyramid, we see democratic engagement. It refers to a particular way of engaging citizens. Well, even when we say democratic engagement, there are different kinds of democratic models as well. In electoral democracy, most likely means that the citizens will elect the delegates who can represent their views in making the decisions regarding Civic Tech. We also have other models of democracies such as a deliberative democracy, whereas the citizens are expected to actually rationally discuss with each other in order to reach the decisions. So, as you can see now, Civic Tech, regardless whether people disagree with the definition of Civic, we have seen a lot of Civic Tech practices or Civic Tech initiatives across the globe. So, the phenomenon is truly global and across the sectoral. You know, if you look at this aggregation side, the Civic Tech guide, the sites already collected over 4,000 Civic Tech cases for initiatives. And these initiatives actually come from different kinds of access. Through our research, we decided to roughly categorize these Civic Tech initiatives into, first, the Gov Tech, basically technologies built by the government to interact or to engage citizens or to serve citizens. Second type of Civic Tech is CSO Tech, Civil Society Organization Tech, or NGO Tech, Techs used to help CSOs to do that job. Lastly, we have Civic Tech entities. So, these are organizations that primarily use Civic Technology tools to solve the problems to reach their goals. Okay, now it's time for me to introduce to you several interesting examples that represent each of the three categories of Civic Tech. All right, so we actually held an ICT for Good in Asia workshop in November last year, and in this workshop we featured a number of very interesting cases to illustrate the variety or the diversity of Civic Tech initiatives. So, I drew my examples from this workshop, the first kind of Civic Tech is definitely Gov Tech. So, governments actually have designed numerous pieces of Civic Technology. Some of these technologies are aimed to help the government agencies, the government departments themselves to run faster and more smoother with better coordination among different departments. In our workshop, Yang Ling, the director in digital design and development from Singapore's Gov Tech, has introduced several great examples. For instance, here there's a system called Bootping SG. This booking SG is a booking system that's open to government officials. So, the government officials can book facilities in different parts of the governmental offices to share resources, to make the best out of the existing facilities. Well, some of the other Gov Techs are actually facing the citizens and directly engage with the citizens, providing services to them. This example comes from a series of information websites called Expo Well. In Singapore, these information websites tell citizens where to go for different kinds of resources, such as where to go for masks, where to go for vaccinations, where to go for clinics that treat COVID diseases, so on and so forth. So, Gov Tech apparently has been doing a lot in the space of Civic Tech. Now, let me continue to the second type of Civic Tech. CSO Tech here refers to technologies that can help civil society organizations, such as NGOs, charities, to do their job better. In our workshop, we have Dong Xie, the Secretary General from ngo2.0.cn. So, ngo2.0 is a typical example of CSO Tech. ngo2.0 helps in promoting ICT usage and implementations in NGOs in China. The entity was established by MIT Professor Wang Jing as early as in 2009. ngo2.0 is a national organization. It helps NGOs all over China to adopt and use information technologies. So, those technologies ngo2.0 has promoted, included building NGO data sets from the entire country, drafted a digital map featuring different kinds of NGOs in this big country. And ngo2.0 also developed digital tools, provided training to more than 3,000 NGOs from China in learning how to use these so-called 2.0 tools. ngo2.0 also were involved in running hackathons to help NGOs to get their problems solved. So, this is a typical example of a CSO Tech. The last type of Civic Tech entity, I call them purely Civic Tech entities. So, if CSO Tech still aims to empower CSOs, these Civic Tech entities primarily rely on a digital tool to solve the problems. So, they often do not really exist before the tools are designed or completed. So, in our workshop we had Naxin Matali. She is the director of Viyasen Tata Bankana Disaster Map Foundation. So, this disaster map foundation was based in Indonesia and their main work is to develop software infrastructures for community-led disaster co-management. So, in this picture you see the platform they have built for real-time reporting about floods in Indonesia. Auditory people can actually use this platform to report the severity or instances of floods in their neighbourhoods. So, they can upload pictures, they can leave comments. There will be also a team of people verifying these inputs. So, this kind of map has been helpful, very helpful in saving lives during these sudden disasters. The map was now used in Philippines and Vietnam. Well, if you still remember the life-thaming Excel sheet during the He Lan flooding last year, you can imagine if those people or volunteers who can have access to a map like this, to a tool like this, maybe their life-saving efforts can be even more efficient and successful. So, that's another type of civic tech entities. Well, other than these specific organisations aiming to solve particular problems, we also have what we call the community-building civic tech entities. These are also very important type of civic tech entities. So, FOSF Asia stands for Free and Open Source Software Asia. It's such an organisation. In our workshop, we invited the co-founder of the organisation, Hong Fadang, to join our presentations. So, Hong herself is from Vietnam and since she funded FOSF Asia in 2009, FOSF Asia has organised numerous events, including the yearly very influential summits for the community members. They also organised workshops, projects, programmes to basically help the community members to know each other and to work with each other. The most important thing is whatever they do, they do it through open source tools. Even their biggest event, the FOSF Asia summits, you know, is completely organised through open source platform. The event actually features hundreds of talks, so the open source platforms were actually quite effective. All right. I think I have given you some senses about the definition, the practical definition of civic tech and different types of civic technologies you can see in the practice space.