It’s started from a bad law…
The year is 2012, there is a document circulating among the geek community. It is a leaked copy of the proposed bill for Board of Computing Profession Malaysia aka the BCPM bill. In short the law it have big impact on the tech industry. It make doing work on some sector hard among many other issues.
So the community stand up go to different meeting. Talk to different stakeholder, organize a big social media campaign. The bill finally got withdrawn. It seems like a success, we as a people can do the changes we want to see!
But this story did not end, it is not even about the bill we fight so hard. Instead it is a beginning, a beginning of something bigger, something different.
Happening roughly the same time is the Bersih Rally, people march on the street to demand better democratic process. Many people participated, many new people previously not involved in protest. Among the participants are the tech people, the engineers, the software developers, the sysadmin etc. The same group also protest BCPM bill.
For some of us, we finally understand what government can do. We get democracy, partly we still learning. We can’t really avoid participation, the politics many of us try to avoid finally catch up to us. We decide to get involved.
We the engineers, the software developers, the sysadmin finally meet. We decide to get involved in the way we familiar with, we hack around. We want to focus on Open Data! We want to scrape information! We want to get bills out to public! We want to talk to government! But we hit a wall, turns out that we lucky! A bills are not reveal to citizen before vote, we are lucky that someone leaked the bill, we are lucky because it doesn’t happen often.
With this not just we hit a wall, we hit wall so high it is hard to scale. We scale back and spend time learning. Turns out that most of us knows nothing. We can’t just talk to the government, there is a step by step process. We can’t get information many information is not structured and more importantly not online!
We can’t do the change we want to see quickly. So we start smaller, we do small’ish project. We deploy a FixMyStreet Instance, we build site for representative. With this project we can finally start.
