“Let the morning sun lit up democracy. A new day will come.” A T-shirt from the March 30 protest. Photo by Facebook user Wayne Huang. CC BY-NC 2.0 Throughout the three-week occupation of Taiwan's legislative building by protesters angry over a secretly negotiated trade deal with China, citizen media played an important role in keeping the public informed. Members of the Sunflower Movement set up a number of websites dedicated to the protest and the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement (CSSTA), whose passage by the legislature in mid-March without a clause-by-clause review sparked the occupation. Some worried the trade agreement would make democratic Taiwan vulnerable to political pressure from the communist mainland. Thousands of people turned up and protested outside the Legislative Yuan alongside those inside. Half a million citizens also took to the streets to support the protest on March 30. Protesters left the Legislative Yuan, as the country's legislature is known, on April 10 after the speaker promised to pass legislation monitoring future agreements proposed by the executive branch before deliberating on the current deal. Live-streams were available for those who wished to follow along with the occupation. Tang Fong, a tech activist, explained on website 0th Sunflower Digital Camp how they created an online hub to collect all live-streams of the protests and improved the live broadcast system inside the occupied legislature to safeguard the protesters from police violence: On March 23, at the MoeDict Hackthon, we repurposed the domain name we registered a while ago, g0v.today, to collect all the direct streams for everyone, including the English translation task force. On March 28, a team from ITRI showed up, saying “there are still blind spots, like in some corridors in the Academia Sinica” [a code name for the legislative building], and helped set up six more cameras and capture videos from the blind spots. NO incident NOR brutal events ever happened after the cameras were up. We appreciated what they’ve done and hence shared much bandwidth. If it is even 1% due to what we did that few people were injured, and no one went missing, then I think it is worth it. Police aggression was indeed a reality that protesters faced. On March 23, demonstrators attempted to occupy the Executive Yuan, but were suppressed by riot police with rods and water cannons. Several protesters, doctors and journalists were injured. Transparency As the Taiwanese government did not inform the public about the details of the CSSTA, a number of citizen-initiated websites were created to explain the agreement and its potential impact. Tech blog Cool3c.com highlighted some of the initiatives: 服貿跑馬燈將所有服貿相關新聞直接一行一行排下來，雖然界面上沒那麼好看，但新聞的旁邊還增添了 Facebook 上貼文者的註解，反而更有由下而上的素人評論新聞效果。 CSSTA news ticker [zh] lists CSSTA-related news one by one. Although its interface is not very pretty, the comments besides the news taken from Facebook make it feel close to the common people. (自己的服貿自己審) 將服貿全文、公聽會逐字稿、產業評估報告全部整合和立法院專案報告全都整理起來。可快速查詢服務貿易協定和你公司的相關性。 (Let us review the CSSTA for ourselves) [zh] summarizes the full text of the CSSTA, transcripts of previous public hearings, evaluations of affected industries, and project reports from the Legislative Yuan. Now it is easy to check out how the CSSTA might affect your company. 國會無雙 […] 這個網站試題以「播報體育賽事」的方式來代替原本無趣的立法院實況，並在公聽會安排「主播」和「球評」，讓對政治冷感的一般公民可以用非常具娛樂性的方式來親近政治議題，是邁向「政治普及」的重要里程碑。 Our one and the only one congress [zh] […] tries to make the experience of watching real-time broadcasts from the Legislative Yuan similar to the experience of watching sports. They have anchors and critics for the real-time broadcast of public hearings so everyday people who usually don't care about politics can learn about these political issues in an entertaining way. This is an important milestone for “popularized politics”. To monitor the government and legislature and make sure they fulfilled their promise of setting up a monitoring mechanism for future cross-strait agreements, the tech activist Tang Fong set up a new platform together with her friends: On March 27, we set up another website, 123.g0v.today, where you can find the phone number of the legislator for your election area. You might call and demand for the legislation [for a cross-strait agreement-monitoring mechanism] before review of the pact proceeds, and invite the legislator to join the camp. Their g0v server also hosts a calendar for the Legislative Yuan so that citizens can easily know what is going on there. Appendectomy Project is a similar initiative dedicated to supporting the impeachment of unsuitable legislators.