Science, Technology, and Citizenship - Tokyo 2024

[Applause] Hello, we have another really special guest joining us today. Her name is TAK from CodeforJapan and will be talking about Science Technology and Civic Technology in Japanese. Hello, it's okay, I'll start in Japanese. Yes, in this session I will talk about Civic Tech and Civic Science, using concrete examples, and the society that can be realized by combining the two, as well as a decentralized society that we can think about together with you, and I will also be weaving in the concept of Seasonship. Thank you in advance.

Okay, excuse me, please wait a moment. Okay, so the first time I encountered the concept of prarity was at the Civic Tech GavZero Summit held in Ohira in 2018, where Mr. Ohira had put the word "prarity" on the last slide, and at that time I thought it looked really fun and interesting. Actually, that was theきっかけ (trigger/reason) for me to join CodeforJapan. I was originally a volunteer, but it became a contract position, and then, with the coronavirus, in 2020 I became an employee and now I work in that team.

Currently, I am affiliated with a PhD family and I am working on how to connect civic tech and academia science every day, so I would like to talk a little about this. So, I would like to talk with you all about how this can be done in a digitized society or a decentralized society, as I think most of you here are probably familiar with it, so I am a little worried about whether it is necessary to talk about it from here, but originally the term civic tech refers to projects and approaches in which civic citizens use tech technology to solve urban development and social and regional issues. In the past, in a centralized society, it was taken for granted that public services would change or increase after monographs or decrees were issued, but the government officials are also dealing with various issues. Given the current situation, the idea is that we should all use technology and work together with educational institutions, research institutions, private companies, and NPOs/NGOs to improve our lives. Citizenship has been used since around 1610, and until then, nobles and privileged people were nominally nothing.

People other than nobles and privileged people were labeled and recognized as citizens, and only then did they begin to receive public services with rights and responsibilities. However, in a society with the internet and the internet being updated, we are required to create an infrastructure and think about what it means to be a citizen and their rights. This is the civic tech community, and Kobo Japan is an organization that operates the civic tech community in Japan. There are many civic tech communities both domestically and internationally, and the communities that started in America and have spread all over the world are not centralized, but rather each is an independent, loose alliance. So, the people of Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, who are very close neighbors and share the same sea, have been holding a joint Haka village for three years under the name Fende Oshin.

And in the domestic regions as well, in Kanazawa, there is actually a history of Kodoho Kanazawa being established before Kodoho Japan was started, and there are already big tech communities all over Japan with various names such as Kodoho something or Open something, with Kanazawa as the base, and this fall, we are planning to hold a summit, an annual conference, together with the people of Kusa in Shiga Prefecture. Now, I would like to introduce two examples of civic tech, some of which you may already know, but since we have the opportunity, I would like to introduce them. The first is called Higmap, which was born from the idea of ​​an engineer who participated in the Open Data Hall at the 2013 Open Source Conference to create something using GIS called Ushihiri. By collecting and accumulating information about the appearance of kigu on the platform, information from citizens is being used in the work of town hall staff, and at the same time, it is also useful for improving students' research. This Fushihedi is also open-source software that was active in information gathering and sharing during the Great East Japan Earthquake, before the establishment of C4JAPAN, as part of the Disaster Earthquake Info project.

Another thing is the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's COVID-19 countermeasures website, which I believe some people from Tokyo were present at the beginning of today's event. Audrita, who is also participating in this event, committed to it, and it has become a hot topic, mainly among engineers. In the three weeks since its release, 224 people have collaborated, proposed 750 improvement suggestions, and 671 have been adopted. I think this was a moment when the worldview of C4JAPAN, which is to think together and create together as civic tech, was realized. And, well, the use of colors that match the specifications, easy Japanese for non-native Japanese speakers, support for other languages, and these kinds of initiatives...

I believe this would n't have been possible without the cooperation of designers and academically gifted individuals. It started as a Tokyo version and has since expanded to prefectural and four town/village versions. As it was a temporary express service, high school students, teachers, university students, and young engineers who were in difficult situations took this opportunity to play a significant role. To summarize from these two examples, civic tech projects involve everyone gathering to identify problems, discussing them, and then creating prototypes. This cycle is repeated by everyone.

We hold a monthly event called Social Hak, usually on the fourth Saturday of the month, and I would love for you all to come next time. Last weekend marked our 63rd event, and some of you who came today were also there. Thanks to the efforts of these individuals, various problems are gathered, ideas are brought forth, and people who resonate with them become partners, engage in dialogue, and create prototypes. In this particular case, there happened to be a local government official from that region. It often happens that there are experts in that field around, and we ask them to tell us more, or they say, "If you're doing something this good, I'd like to try it in our municipality," and so on.

Projects expand from these kinds of chance encounters. Civic tech is often associated with emergencies and disasters, but in reality, there are a lot of diverse projects like the Code 4 project to protect Sakakura sake brewery, or the Code 4 kit to consider the relationship between community cats and citizens, all over Japan and around the world. I'm speaking quite fast, is that okay? I'm sorry, I tend to speak quickly when I get nervous. Okay, let's take a breath.

Next is Shizu Science. The organization that's currently coordinating this has recently changed its name to Advanced Participatory Science, so for convenience, I'll refer to it as Shizu Science here. As the name has changed, the concept and how to proceed with it are still in the trial-and- error stage, so please understand that. So, there are said to be four levels of citizen participation in the research process, and the simplest is to participate in data collection and leave the rest to professional researchers, but there are also ways to participate more deeply in the process, and in some cases, citizens can take the lead and do it independently. So, there is the Seven Science Research Center at Fukuoka University, and the other day, or rather a little while ago, I was interested so I sent a DM on Twitter and asked them to teach me a bit, and we all had an offline meeting at a library where you can play, held at Y-Cam in Yamaguchi, and we exchanged various opinions, so I will introduce some of the examples I learned about then.

Yes, you may all know this, but there are opportunities to do Shizuscience in various fields such as astronomy, natural science, and the application of science and technology, and the first is an app called COICE, which is based on a manga and allows you to search for undiscovered asteroids, and everyone looks at the images taken with the Sabal Defense Scope. 。 You input how much you like or dislike something, and the app shows you the current distribution and a chart of the ideal distribution proposed by the algorithm. Yes, and you can reconsider the division of labor just by answering simple questions, so it provides an opportunity to have casual family meetings without using difficult words like gender issues, household chores, or family relationships. This project started in Haka Village, which is linked to an NHK Special feature on child-rearing, and we formed a project team with Professor Iarashi, who studies equity, and the research team of the professor from JST that I mentioned earlier, and proceeded while having repeated dialogues, conducting user interviews and user tests. Yes, next is Jibungoto Planet.

This app is designed to make environmental issues and climate change personal, so by answering 10 simple questions about housing, food, transportation and services, it shows the amount of carbon footprint estimated from the person's lifestyle and proposes specific decarbonization actions that are tailored to that person. And, the National Institute for Environmental Studies has independently created an algorithm for Japan, and it is a linked project to the Volleyball World Cup. It was also used during the broadcast of the match. Yes. Next is the project I'm challenging myself with called "Gussuri" (sound sleep).

Gussuri is a word that was written in Edo period texts and means "sufficiently" or "completely." But in Japan, it's often used to mean "sleeping soundly," so I'm using the word Gussuri. This project started when I was trying to do research and collect data on children's sleep, but because of COVID-19, I was contacting researchers remotely. It seemed like the measuring equipment would get lost, or it would take a long time for them to come back, or it would take a long time for the record sheets to come back. I realized how difficult it really is to collect data, so I consulted with people who are researching sleep, as well as engineers and designers who suffer from insomnia or sleep disorders, and this project began.

And, before starting app development, we made the discussion process in the preparation stage open, and we had researchers, doctors, psychologists, and people who have experienced sleep disorders. We've been doing a podcast for a year, rotating different personalities, and we've started this project by drawing inspiration from the conversations and Q&A sessions within that podcast. This character, Buck-chan, is Buck, the dream-eating Buck, and a designer on the project created him for us, and we're using him as a character. We also brought the Facing Deschamps project, a joint project between Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, to Haka Village, which I shared at the beginning, and we've received cooperation from overseas contributors, and we're currently working on multilingual support. The content is very simple: it tracks whether you slept, the time you fell asleep, the time you went to bed, the time you slept, the actual time you slept, the number and duration of times you woke up during the night, the time you were awake, and the time you got out of bed, and it can be shown on a weekly or monthly basis.

People here who are tech-savvy might think that you can just get that data from a device without having to write it down, and I thought so too, but as I talked with experts, I learned that sleep Because physical and psychological states are deeply involved, it's necessary to take not only objective indicators but also subjective indicators, looking at both whether the person slept well numerically and whether they feel they slept well. That's what I was taught, and that's where this initiative started. So, since we're taking subjective data here, we're thinking it would be good if we could combine it with objective data taken from a device. We're simply turning the sleep record sheet, which is already used by experts at an international standard, into an app, making it easier to fill out. With notifications and alerts, you can prevent omissions or forgetting to fill it out, which would result in losses.

And since it's a portable app, you won't forget to bring it to your counselor, and counselors or doctors won't need to transcribe, copy, or scan it. I think there are a lot of people interested in the fields of medical welfare and hygiene training. However, I think the biggest obstacle for such people is the transfer and handling of data. When we talk about creating open-source software related to personal health records, I think there are a lot of people who are worried about whether it's really safe. So we are trying to create a system that can hold personal health records without acquiring personal information as much as possible.

Yes, handling personal information is difficult and there are legal restrictions, but if we don't use these things well, we won't be able to advance research and development successfully. So at this stage there are two things. First, although we link the recorded data with the device, we are trying not to acquire too much of the holder's personal information such as name, age, and address. If we were to collaborate with a large organization, it might be necessary to some extent, but at present it is being created on the premise of personal use by the user. Second, we are entrusting the management of the data to the user.

The user can view and check the records, and if necessary, the user can decide for themselves whether to export the data to CSV or PDF and use it at their own discretion. We are making it possible to pass this on to doctors and counselors. Yes, it has been a bit rushed, but that's all for now. I have talked about the fusion of civic tech and private science. Finally, I would like to talk with you all about citizenship, citizen science, and civic tech, considering them in the context of building infrastructure for research and development and a decentralized society.

So I am posing a question, so if you are interested, please let me know later. Um, regarding science science and open science, when we think about what we have to challenge ourselves with, in Japan, the idea of publishing open-access papers among the six principles of open science is quite widespread, but compared to other countries, there are still areas where we are not progressing, and there are also quite large differences in awareness depending on the research field, so I would like to talk with you all about how we can make the entire scientific community understand this and take concrete actions. There is a great need for this, and there is a framework called OSF provided by the Center for Science, but there is a big gap between those who know about it and those who do n't, and there is also SS in the direction of psychology, but professors who are familiar with technology know about it and use it, but professors who are not familiar with it do n't understand it at all and don't know what to do, so I think a movement is needed so that everyone can use it, create it, and think about it. And also, I think that the imbalance of data and the problem of intersectionality are things that we have to take on a big challenge. Research and development has always been designed based on the Northern Hemisphere and Caucasian men, and I don't think that was necessarily a bad thing, but when you look at it in light of today's society, it is reflected in real society, such as car airbags not conforming to the shape of a pregnant woman's body and causing injury, or women getting motion sickness with VR, so Asians I think we need to work towards a situation where data from Japanese people, women, children, and people with disabilities are routinely incorporated into research, as we move towards decentralization.

In 2005, a university like Stam proposed gendered innovation, and it's also being researched at Ochanomizu University, so I think it would be good if we could work together on this. And when we bring this challenge from the perspective of civic tech, as Odori-san mentioned, there are three F's: fast, fair, and fun. I think it's necessary to be able to respond quickly, to be structured in a way that makes it easy for everyone to participate, to think, to work together, and to incorporate fun and Yuma. And in terms of social structure, I don't think there used to be a division between professional and amateur scientists, so if everyone just uses IT and data to make things like finding, gathering, talking, and creating, which have been done since ancient times, more fun, faster, and fairer, then I think society will progress in many ways. And I think we need to make this into a more sustainable and advanced challenge.

To that end, I would like to challenge myself with all of you to incorporate DAO, open source, open data, civic tech, and citizen science, and integrate these tools into the everyday life of civil society. Yes, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Cup, the deadline for entries is the day after tomorrow, so if you'd like, I would be happy if you could start various challenges with us from here. Yes, I'm sorry, I spoke really fast so it might have been hard for you to hear, and I feel like I caused some trouble for the interpreter, but let's have fun together, thank you very much.