---
title:
tag: disfactory, 農地違章工廠
---
# Application to TICTeC Shows and Tells 2021 - Disfactory

- https://tictec.mysociety.org/showandtells/2021
- Accepted, presentation date: **25th May 15.00-16.00 GMT+1.**

### What to include in your proposal

When you make your application to present via this form, you’ll be asked to choose the topic area that best suits your proposal. You can choose between these topic areas: Community empowerment; Democracy; Transparency; Climate; Accountability; Information rights and data ethics; or you can select ‘Other’ if your proposal doesn’t fit into the above themes. Please also indicate which dates you are available on.

We’d really like it if submissions could include things like:

Research on particular civic technology tools and their impacts

We will prioritise proposals that can demonstrate data or evidence of how civic tech has been impactful in some way. Narratives or descriptions of tools or services will not be accepted. Submissions should include:

- A brief overview of the research and its purpose
- The research questions
- The methods used
- The results you plan to share
- Learning outcomes for participants of your proposal

#### Lessons learnt from designing/building/running civic technology tools

For example:

- What went well and how?
- What didn’t go well and why?
- What failed?
- What led to success?
- Etc.

#### Experiences from civic tech users

For example:

- Real-world impacts of using civic technology tools
- Reflections on user experiences and how they could be improved
- Etc.

You are also welcome to submit further presentation proposal ideas that are relevant to the impacts of civic technology theme, but we will prioritise the above types of submission.

## Proposal form

We invite individuals to submit presentation proposals of no more than 300 words by 14 February 2021 23:59 GMT. If accepted, you will be given 7 minutes to virtually present your proposal at one of the virtual TICTeC Show and Tells (see dates below), followed by a Q&A session after all speakers have made their presentations.

Before submitting your proposal, please refer to the Call for Proposals Guidelines: https://tictec.mysociety.org/showandtells/2021#guidance

We encourage presentation submissions to focus on the specific impacts of technologies, rather than showcase new tools that are as yet untested.

Those selected for inclusion in the Show and Tell programme will be notified no later than 16 February 2021.

Presenters will be required to confirm their attendance and speaking slot by 26 February 2021 at the very latest.

The data collected on this Google form will be used only by mySociety to review proposals, build the TICTeC Show and Tell programme and send you event communications in accordance with our privacy policy (https://www.mysociety.org/privacy/). We will not sell your data to anyone or share your data with an unauthorised third party.

**Email address***

**First name***
Ael

**Last name***

**Affiliation***
`Share with us where you work or study. If you are not affiliated with any institution, you can write in “Independent.”`

g0v.tw community

**Your location**

Please choose the most relevant topic area(s) for your proposal *

- [x] Community empowerment
- [ ] Democracy
- [ ] Transparency
- [ ] Accountability
- [ ] Climate
- [ ] Information rights and data ethics
- [x] Other

**Title of your 7 minute presentation***

Build civic tech that really helps advocacy in open collaboration of g0v community and CSO — experiences from Disfactory

**Please provide a description for your presentation (max. 300 words)***

`To maximise your chances of your proposal being accepted, please refer to the Call for Proposals Guidelines, which provide advice: [https://tictec.mysociety.org/showandtells/2021#guidance](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://tictec.mysociety.org/showandtells/2021%23guidance&sa=D&source=editors&ust=1611734933530000&usg=AFQjCNET6ZdLXogv76txx6zbZddm4kN8Cw)`

Lessons learnt from designing/building/running civic technology tools

For example:

- What went well and how? => high developer engagement, community engagement, remote collaboration. Launch on deadline, realㄓ users. NGO empowerment
- What didn’t go well and why? => marketing, not closed enough to users in countryside
- What failed? => keep everyone. Built on existing open source projects. Cost too much? How to be sustainable?
- What led to success? => NGO knows the issues and stakeholders and make affective strategies. Excellent developers and designers. Good team spirit
  

Experiences from civic tech users

For example:

- Real-world impacts of using civic technology tools => 6 factories have been tore down, government released new open dataset
- Reflections on user experiences and how they could be improved => how to get into local networks? Unexpected users. Complex local stakeholders

Disfactory is a crowdsourcing reporting platform on illegal factories on farmlands in Taiwan, in order to decrease factory pollutions and accidents on farmlands.

Within 10 months, Disfactory has received >1500 report records and filed >200 official documents to local governments, resulting in demolition of 7 illegal factories and ~150 factories under examination out of ~55k illegal factories in Taiwan. In response, government agencies have allocated more resources in inspections along with clearer policy implementation agenda and open data in machine readable formats; land brokers and factory constructors are using Disfactory to convince stakeholders to comply regulations.

Disfactory was initiated in g0v.tw hackathon by Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan (CET)— a small crowd-funded environmental advocacy CSO without any prior web development knowledge. Disfactory later has attracted a core developer team of ~12 volunteers and >40 community contributors in weekly meetups for the past 18 months across 4 countries. The current product is an integration of anonymous and convenient reporting interface, data visualization and a CRM system that automates filing and tracking official documents to the governments to scale up crowdsourcing reporting.

In the talk, we will examine the key factors, UX methods and product development strategies used in iteration not only of success in 1) open collaboration momentum and culture integration of floating open source community participants and an organized CSO with intense advocacy agenda and 2) empowerment on CSO’s digital transformation and on civic tech community to design digital solutions embedded in advocacy, but also in ongoing challenges 3) to outreach and engage more rural users on the ground as an urban-based product team and 4) to raise public awareness under shadows of COVID-19.

https://disfactory.tw
https://about.disfactory.tw

**Explain how your proposal is relevant to the impacts of civic technology theme, and the learning outcomes for participants of your proposal***

While some civic tech researches or narratives are around government, large NGOs, corporates, analysis from academic disciplines or the technology itself, I care more about HOW ordinary citizens can create technologies that strengthen grassroots civil society.

From civil society side, we have tried “how to” build impactful civic tech products with limited resources in complex social contexts, especially for grassroots CSOs, who can’t afford A/B testing nor throughout user researches. The product development models are hence so different from startup, corporate software development or even hard core open source projects such as Linux.

Disfactory is an attempt to leverage open source community power and culture along with grassroots CSO’s advocacy expertise and energy to create visible and incremental impacts on environmental issues. We are in fact still struggling to create larger impacts and pivoting advocacy and product strategies. However, we would still like to share some learnings from our small success so far. The talk tries to conclude the methodologies we have tried and how we tested and revised our product hypothesis and development as a loose community. The research methods may not be very solid, neither is the impact measurement. Nevertheless, I hope this sharing can be a starting point to inspire more discussion on civic tech product management and community collaboration models for grassroots communities. I am looking for experience sharing and learning from other communities. May the littles have the power to act via technology.

Learning outcomes from our experience sharing:
- What makes civic tech products useful? Professions on research, networks, advocacy and stakeholders management + always align product development with advocacy goals and strategies(shared visions, North Star, scoping and metrics setting)+ be closed to the users (UX research and prototype testing)
- How to deliver features on deadlines with a constantly changing team? Small milestones and tickets with clear user stories and clear documentation. Raise the Bus Factor. Good developers and designers.
- How to build an energetic team? Build a comfortable working environment —fun, open source, rewarded, personal growth, autonomy and self-initiatives from individual contributors. Be agile and retrospective. Remove communication obstacles.
- How to empower CSO’s digital literacy? Culture integration instead of culture conflicts or invasion. Digital literacy is about mindset and collaboration culture changes not only tools. Create an experimental case to demonstrate the value and practice the new process and strategies.

**Please tick the dates you are available to present on***

- [x] 23 March 2021 (15.00 - 16.00 GMT/23:00-00:00 GMT+8)
- [x] 20 April 2021 (15.00 - 16.00 GMT+1/22:00-23:00 GMT+8)
- [x] 25 May 2021 (15.00 - 16.00 GMT+1/23:00-00:00 GMT+8)

**If your proposal is accepted, do we have permission to list information about your presentation on the TICTeC website and public programme, including but not limited to, the title, description, and speaker(s)?***

YesNo

**If your proposal is accepted, would you be happy for your presentation to be recorded and then published on mySociety's YouTube channel and the TICTeC website?***

YesNo

**If you have any video footage of you presenting at previous occasions, please share that with us here***

> TICTeC recording

**Anything else you'd like to tell us that is relevant to your proposal?***

**All TICTeC events are guided by our Code of Conduct: https://www.mysociety.org/code-of-conduct/. By submitting this proposal, I agree to abide by this policy.***

I agree

#### Past drafts
==> Draft

impact

Disfactory is a crowdsourcing reporting platform of illegal factories on farmlands in Taiwan. The platform requires only photos and location to report, keeping the process anonymous and convenient.

The system has been co-developed by g0v.tw community and Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan, an environment advocacy CSO.

10 months after launch, Disfactory has received over 1500 report records and sent out over 200 official documents to local governments resulting in demolition of 7 illegal factories.

The collected data is also used in collaboration with other CSOs in advocacy and successfully pushed the government to open more related datasets in machine readable formats.

Collaboration model and CSO empowerment

Beyond advocacy impacts, Disfactory also demonstrates a hybrid liquid collaboration model between CSO and open source community and empowerment of CSO digital capacity through the project.

Unique collaboration dynamics between NGO and open source community participants

- Weekly core participants ~10,
- overall contributors > 40
- 18 month so far

Product development circle, roadmap and milestones. User research (Persona, usability testing)

How to build a team: How to recruit and make people stay. Motivations

Make product development methodology into Liquid collaboration.

//compared to several open source collaboration models?

Limitation -> experiments -> solutions

Challenges and rooms for improvement

- Gap between countryside users and urban developers
- Marketing to local networks
- Monitored data -> really accountability
-

Merge design

Iterative development ( so common)

Crowdsourcing

Impacts:

- Reports number: in 10 months -> 3 factories down (?)
- Campaign
- NGO empowerment: remote friendly collaboration, learn data driven thinking. Make NGO staff be a product manager

(Crowdsourcing report platform )

to everyone to join the movement to protect the farmlands from illegal pollution or accidents.

Links:

https://about.disfactory.tw
https://disfactory.tw

> Maybe I should record a demo video in English?

Claudia feedbacks:
> build coalition outside of civic tech community, only with government not NGO. building partnership , local org collaboration => submit this to Code for America.
> Culture change in NGO
> able to crowdsource (give out power) with an NGO
> here is the problem we still have so far
> Code for America CfA
> mask application fall apart, peopledon't think about sustainability, no volunteer management system, what di i do after joining Slack, too much on personal glory
> real reasons people are doing this: fun and profession growth+ project growth
> want to be hero without knowing what community really needs
> not willing to share decision making power => OpenAPI
> Show expertise and controls in US
> Competition
> Humidity
> Be aware of what you don’t know