This was presented by Virgile Deville from Democracy Earth at the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC@Taipei) in Taipei on 12th September 2017. You can find out more information about the conference here: http://civictechfest.org/agenda Abstract: Hong Kong’s 'small circle' election system means that only 1,200 people had a vote for the Chief Executive of the city, from a population of 3.77 million. Prof. Benny Tai, leader of the Umbrella Movement, working with more than 20 civic communities in Hong Kong, led a campaign against this lack of inclusion, and commissioned the building of the PopVote application. Seeing that the referendum provided an extraordinary opportunity for a large scale experiment, Democracy Earth were happy to collaborate to see how blockchain technologies such as Bitcoin or the IPFS network could best be leveraged to make the election process secure from cyber attacks. Popvote aimed to collect a million citizens’ votes for the Chief Executive election, but it looked to future reuse, too. On a low budget, it was built as Open Source software that could also cater for future referendums. Crucially, based on previous experiences, it also had to be able to withstand cyber attacks. Virgile shares the project’s outcomes, some encouraging; others disappointing. He also spells out how such collaborations are becoming more and more relevant to civil society, especially in a world of cyber attacks, data leaks and electoral fraud.