Civic Community Fund and Ecosystem, Korea & Japan (Fireside Chat) - Tokyo 2024

okay everybody we're back let's please give a warm welcome to our next panelists uh they will be discussing Civic Community Fund and ecosystem for Korea and Japan um and we have Hal SEI from code for Japan here um we also have uh Wan so Bim from PSC ethereum foundation in econ or I'm sorry econ Korea um we also have Vienna ly joining us uh from eth koala Lomar and yeah let's please give a warm welcome to our panelists [Applause] today hi everyone I will first briefly introduce myself and then invite our two panelists to introduce themselves uh so my name is Vienna I'm from Malaysia and I'm organizing the ethereum qualum for conference later this year October 4 to six and we also have a hacker house there and I'm also with this uh uh inspiring friends part of pagoda um Network so yeah uh yeah hello uh I'm on up uh from PSC I'm doing a applied cryptography research for my uh day job and doing community activities for my hobbies like some hosting some conference or helping others yeah hi uh I'm haliki from Cod of Japan uh Cod of Japan is uh 11 years old and we have been promoting Civic Tech in Japan uh and uh my personal uh story about the Cod of Japan is I I have been working for the startup many startups and uh yeah built some open source tools but I experienced the earthquake in Japan in 2011 uh I realized that that we need to build some kind of the the public goods at that time there that there was no word about public digital public goods but I felt we need to I want to contribute to something good so that's why I started kood Japan and this leads to like a natural extension of like um me wondering like what kind of efforts are you both of you putting into public goods funding right now um okay actually I am very new to this Civic hacking community and the public goods funding stuffs um but actually what I'm doing now is that I am actually um trying to have a some Civic hackers club uh which is a participating in hackathons but actually we have a fund which is donated uh by people who wants to support the journey to uh let students uh explore abroad by participating a global ethereum hackathons and our model is something like uh if the students actually participate in global hackathons they can learn a lot there and also uh if they win any prize they should fund back 100% of the price to the Public Funding pool because of that actually they can learn also if they win they can be the donor automatically and so and also we can keep the sustainability this is something a very some experimental uh beginning thought and this is actually what I am doing in Korea cool yeah uh in Japan uh Cod of Japan has three focusing area one is a building eot participation tools uh we localized uh the uh e participation platform called DM born in Barcelona and provide to the local government so it's very important to uh to to invite citizens to say something to the uh the city's City Planning or some other uh opportunities to uh create build our policies and also second is uh building public goods uh digital public goods so we uh most we have many projects and most of the uh software the created by the projects were go is open sourced so uh we want to uh build uh the uh infrastructure for the uh Civic uh Technologies and also SD is providing opportunities for the citizen to start the their projects and also uh create environment for the uh people who want to uh help someone who are trying to build something so uh we organize monthly hon and we not just like a competitive haakon we invite people who want to uh share their ideas or projects and people other people uh have help the uh the leaders so that and build the community stronger and I wanted to emphasize that when you hear how rousan talk about it I feel like um both of them are often very humble like I feel like that their work actually very inspiring you know for me like from Malaysia like I look at like cod for Japan have been working for more than 10 years uh on all this community and cod for Japan is in so many cities uh around Japan as well so so um I feel inspired and that's why I feel like I we are also learning you know that's part of U why U I'm interested in this like discussion so in Malaysia you know we also have our own Civic Tech Community where um before this is very weap to but now there's recently like even the groups that uh I was a part of more than 10 years ago are starting to adopt um things like nft uh to um to to it's like even for ethereum K there are members own an nft of their local Parliament uh member so uh but then you are monitoring what they are doing so but there's a lot more but I can share later um but I'm so curious about you know har ran already mentioned that you started code for Japan because of the earthquake and the natural disaster right and um and I'm also curious for One Stop like what got you into this and you can also expand as well um yeah actually I sure that I'm Rel atively new to the public goods funding in the Civic hacking Community uh the reason actually I started got into this field is that because of the um intersection with the open source thing um for me open source is say one of the most important thing for me the reasons are because um in Korea it's a kind of a some our unique situation but the comp competition level is really high in Korea so because of that we are marking the lowest uh birth rate in the world like 0.78 is something that we can believe and also we have a the most high suicide rate which is a twice of the average of the oecd countries and the these kind of a social problems mainly I believe believe caed because of the zero some games because we compete with each other and always we are under that circumstance but actually around 2017 I just started to get into the open source culture and figured out oh this is super different with the start of culture because everything started from donating and giving something for especially we are donating the one of the most produ productive means of production the source code uh to the community so that was my uh main point that I started to got into the open source community and the culture and recently actually in Pagoda I learned from har and the other communities Malaysia that oh we can actually expand it more broadly we can start to give something not only for about the source code but also many things and because of that oh there's a interest section that transitioning the Zero Sum game to a positive positive sum game is something related to more a Civic hacking so that is the reason why I got into this field um yeah and I have one more thing but maybe you would love to share this later yeah okay I'll invite you later um and I also wanted uh haran to share like you talk about Japan like disaster management and you earlier today you also asked a question about like what are the use cases um so what do you see like use cases we we have many use cases well so actually Cod for Japan is the Citizen Community and also we help the government uh to uh to let uh for for uh creating some kind of open environment uh within the government and also so let them to give opportunity to invite citizens to work together so uh we have both side of the projects and one of the big use case was is uh the open the uh covid-19 dashboard uh for the Tokyo metrop Metropolitan government we built the software for the government and the government used that software to show the covid-19 statistics and and very beautiful way and also we uh published the source code on the GitHub and asked the contributions for the developers and so many contributions came uh after uh publishing the source code and uh the software the website was dramatically uh improved for example improving the uh the improving the accessibility and so on and also fored to the many regions that kind of use case is very was the very uh eye openening uh uh uh eye opening uh things for the local government officials so uh that kind of uh yeah creating the are using open source software is really important uh very really uh the effective way to work with the various people so yeah we have many use case about one of that yeah and and in this like regard like how like sharing like use cases abroad I think it's very helpful like even like what onop was working on like it was also very quickly Fork uh in the Taiwan Community like what your public Punk project uh I'm sure you'll tell us more and um and also yeah maybe you can share share with us first yeah um uh I briefly shared uh that yeah we are having a public fund so people can donate it into the fund and this fund is used to sponsor students to go to the hackathons so that's all and then students if they win they actually fund back in in our case we are letting them 100% give back to the fund again and uh very fortunately and luckily uh Taiwan Community forked this approach experiment and we are having a uh multiple iterations in parallel so at the end we're going to okay see a more data and we can we can learn many things from a various exper experiments so this is so important that this is about the openness and this is about the the my main motivation that I started to do more things in the Civil TCH thing because this is also related to my uh Cypher pun philosophy because I'm a Cypher pun actually who considered our word as a dystopia and I am trying to resolve this thing uh using cryptography for example we have a so many cctvs and and things and actually we are just giving our data to the trustworthy looking parties a lot for example chat GPT and then let's assume that you have a basic income because of the AGI and that we at the end we're going to finally lose our motivation to learn to work to create because they're much better than us and also because of that we're going to have some basic income and then what happens then if chpt changes their mind to rule the people actually we lose all the registability so because of that to increase the resist stability and the resilience it is super super important to share the knowledges and make things open and spreading this openness culture is a kind of very crucial things for Humanity so this actually is a my second very biggest motivation that I'm doing this yeah and I I just wanted to share we only have a five more minutes left but uh last questions yeah um and this kind of like experimentation like and in a way that is uh suitable to local context in a way that is aligned to Asia values and philosophy I think is really important um where like we are seeing right now I mean changes are always happening right like in Malaysia um we are seeing like for the ethereum K conference we are trying to bring the digital Minister um and all the minister who uh the agency that actually develop digital economy and um uh issues digital nomad Visa at the same platform with the web tree community and the Grassroots community and these are nft artists who used to be uh like banned and jailed by the government because uh back then uh we still have a colonial law like the British law like where you cannot say anything bad about a government um that's why Malaysia had the same government for 60 years um it's stable but it was corrupted and uh eventually but you know being Asian I feel like we took the the slow path of changing the government peacefully so we had to use the electoral system to beat the government which means that we had to convince like more than 90% of Malaysia population to vote against the government just to win the election so it took a lot of like mobilizing but that is now the Grassroots level in Malaysia so um we are now uh trying to do a conference where we bring the Grassroots the nft artists who are you know uh often in prison for insulting the king or insulting the government uh but also bringing the government there too because now it's also a unique opportunity in Malaysia so uh I'm curious like what are the next steps for both of you yeah yeah for me so I I have been actually I have been struggling with uh sustain how to build a sustainable Community because Civic Tech Community is mostly the voluntary based and it's difficult to create the uh so it's easy to build the prototypes by Community but it it's very very difficult to uh build the actual software which can help the uh actual people so uh we need uh support from the government or uh compan private companies so we want to have a uh I'm I'm going to create a build a new uh endowment fund which I I will collect the uh certain money from the private entities and uh and generate incomes from the the fund and and also we provide uh the the uh we share the uh in generated income to the uh each Community such kind of uh yeah so funding system we want to build yeah definitely the finan thing is the most challenging part um actually I personally I think I am focusing much more on the cultural thing and also this is also related to what uh taka raised up and also related to Pagoda that uh I think that I mean pagura people think that we can expand this a positive sum game experiment not only the local community level but to a cross Nation level so because of that I can give some help to Malaysia Community or maybe Japan Japan Community or somewhere else and actually this kind of giving something first will actually trigger the positiv some game a lot and having this kind of culture and sharing this culture and making this culture more Prosper will actually uh can be a some more different approach for the sustainability yeah so I was told that we have a minute left but uh if there you have last thoughts you're welcome and um I think this is just us trying to show that hey ecosystemic wellbeing is really important and we can learn from each other and experiments are good and also um knowing your local culture and context is really important not just to uh import uh all the Western technology uh without considering that maybe it will get uh people uh addicted or depressed or suicidal any last words yeah I feel so sharing the uh knowledge is really really important uh each Civic Community each Civic Tech Community in the uh Taiwan and Korea and uh Japan is different yeah so the also the sustainability model is also different and social issues is close but different so uh but we can uh reproduce the structure model and as a open source this is really important important so just not just sharing the knowledge but also the sharing the way to solve so that is really nice Community to have yeah so I really appreciate Hall that actually sharing the experiences for the last 10 years because we are kind of a toddler and we need to learn a lot and this sharing experiences helps other communities so much so actually this can be yeah a really important thing sharing experiences and appreciate call that's it then thank you thank you very much [Applause]