[1] Quoting from the interview with Nicola Smith:
A hacker is someone who immerse themselves into a system, and knows its details. If someone then exploits those details, that is a black hat hacker. If someone then makes a better system by patching the old system, that is a white hat hacker, but I’m neither. I make entirely new systems. I don’t even touch the old system.
Basically, I’m a hacker in the sense that I’m trying to learn where the public service works or not, but we’re not patching it or exploiting it. We’re trying to come up with a different way of making policy, starting small but gradually expanding, so that people can learn there is a different way, a more inclusive way to make policies, so more and more policies can be made this way.
That’s essentially what we call open-source governance. Just taking the lessons we learned from Internet community, and see whether its applicable to public service as well.
[2] Quoting from the interview with Javier C. Hernández:
The PDIS team is all volunteers and I’m an anarchist, meaning that don’t give commands. Everybody just determined which part of this roadmap they’re interested in, and then just go ahead and do it. Every week we have a roadmap ‑‑ I mean quite literally a roadmap, so you can see that we have…and that’s last week.
We’ve been doing this for half a year now, so everybody knows where everybody else is on the weekly roadmap. It’s a very dynamic, organic team. If there’s anything that really needs doing, and nobody’s willing to do it, I do it. [laughs] That’s how I run the team.
As for the larger picture, I think because we have a participation officer, every ministry, for 32 ministries ‑‑ some ministries have up to four of these people ‑‑ we’re just trying to spread this process through collaborative workshops and so on. Then they can also establish these teams back in their ministry.
Some of them, like Interior, or Health and Welfare, or Agriculture, they already have something like that, because they need to face angry people on the street or on the network all the time. But some of them are more internal‑facing, and they didn’t need to do that before.
One of our projects is Internal Join, where we get all the career public servants and contractors a forum also to do their own petitions. Once they reach 300 people, also they will be given the same treatment that is pertaining to career public servants’ welfare. There will be a new platform, naturally, that will enjoin. We’re calling it Internal Join.
The stakeholders will be public servants themselves, and they can feel the [laughs] thrilling challenges of being an advocate and activist and calling to petition and so on. That’s how we’re trying to spread a culture, but getting career public servants to also see the value of participation by improving their own welfare and maybe forming labor unions or associations.
[3] This is answered in detail in the interview with Amaëlle Guiton.
[4] This is answered in detail in the interview with Martin Legros.
[5] This is answered in detail in the conversation with Nick Budden.
[6] This is answered in detail in the interview with Kevin Peraino.
