The New Citizen Newsletter #18
“It’s the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.” Cory Doctorow
🍴 Hacking government services 🔓
Taiwan has one of the highest levels of digital literacy in the world, but the government is still mostly shrouded in secrecy. After participating in the Sunflower Movement in 2014, Audrey Tang decided to set up g0v.tw — a coding collective that provides open source alternatives to government services. Most recently, they used their transparent decision-making platform, vTaiwan, to crowdsource regulations for UberX and get them passed into law.
Source: Apolitical.
🦖 Uncovering Bangalore’s forgotten history 🐄
Bangalore’s history is carved into ancient inscription stones, but so far few of these artifacts have been documented or examined by archeologists. Wanting to understand more about his heritage, local resident Vinay Kumar started an initiative to sell metal replicas of the inscription stones to tourists. The money is then used to document all of the stones and create 3D scans of them, which can be sent to archeologists, historians and translators.
Source: The Hindu.
🍞 Decriminalizing toaster repairs 👩⚖️
Last week, we covered the celebrations for the second annual International Repair Day. Currently, US copyright law prohibits people from modifying embedded software on devices, but new rules proposed by Congress would allow people to legally repair their smartphones, tractors, cars, and sentient toasters.
Guys from the Right to Repair Movement say: “We just want to fix our stuff. We’re pleased with the progress being made, and ultimately we want to settle this by establishing Right to Repair.”
Source: Motherboard.
🤖 Rethinking citizenship 🚀
This week, we’ve been at the annual Reshaping Work Conference in Amsterdam 🚲. The event brought together policymakers, academics, entrepreneurs and gig economy workers to discuss how digital technologies are changing work. For better or worse? Nobody can agree on that.
As usual, you can tweet us if you find a story that you think we should include in next week’s newsletter.
