In 2012, four "civic hackers"–that is, politically minded computer programmers with an activist ethos–in Taiwan built a citizen auditing system for the government's annual budget. They made data from the Accounting and Statistics Office accessible, easy to understand and interactive. The public could rate and comment on every item in the budget. This became the foundation of the g0v (“gov-zero”) movement, which is now one of the world’s most active civic-tech communities.
On March 18, 2014, hundreds of young activists, most of them college students, occupied Taiwan’s legislature to express their profound opposition to a new trade pact with Beijing then under consideration, as well as the secretive manner in which it was being pushed through Parliament by the Kuomintang, the ruling party. Shocked by such unprecedented, spontaneous eruption of anti-government sentiment by young people–which came to be known as the Sunflower Student Movement–the government came to g0v for cooperation. Several contributors from g0v responded by partnering with the government to start the vTaiwan platform in 2015. vTaiwan (which stands for "virtual Taiwan'') brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy. Since it began, vTaiwan has tackled 30 issues, relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders.All told, there are currently over 600 projects on g0v platforms under discussion, modification, and being executed. Some exemplary cases this year alone include:
* Map systems showing mask availability in pharmacies over the country
* An agricultural land protection and factory pollution reporting site
* Dictionaries for Taiwanese dialects and aborigine languages
* A fact checker app and website
...
Besides online events, g0v hosts bimonthly "hackathon" workshops that are open to all to come to share ideas or look for partners for their projects in person. g0v also works with businesses and government agencies to evaluate and award funding for projects deemed most impactful and sustainable for society.
All these are run by a group of less than ten young men and women, all but two of them on volunteer basis. I went to one of their weekly meetings the other day, and met Isabel, a cheerful lady in her late 30's whose career as a lawyer specializing in innovation and intellectual property started with the involvement of the open source movement in the early 2000's; Ronny, a software engineer who once obtained political donors information from the government and published them all–tens of thousands of names and numbers and links–in one day through the code he wrote that "outsourced" the data punching work to the public; Chewei, a spatial designer who coordinated with the City of Taipei to build a website listing all the vacant lands the city government owns for the public to inquire and make usage suggestions about; Sean, another software engineer with artistic and environmental design background, was creator of the "Watch Our Rivers" campaign that visualizes and publishes river cleanup contracts the government doles out to contractors for all to access and monitor; Bess, a young woman with nearly 10 year experience working with non-profit and cross-domain organizations, and Ichieh, another young lady in her mid 20's who joined the team right off school, were the only two full-timers there.
They started their meeting by each sharing one impressionable thing that came to their mind in the past week... Ichieh said she saw news of a new video hosting site that won't arbitrarily suspend access to videos people upload that she thought might be worth considering as a backup site for g0v's videos; Chewei mentioned an idea he heard that in some countries corporations are required to plant trees to compensate for the carbons they create when they hold physical conferencing events; Sean shared an aha moment he got while sitting in traffic on how to solve traffic problems with strategies he uses in one of the video games he plays... They bantered, they joked, they laughed... then they moved on to discuss the coming hackathon event in January, a tutorial workshop at the end of this month (December), people to invite, places to set up, software to fix, projects to coordinate, etc., etc. Again, good naturedly, they riffed off each other's ideas, threw in witty remarks, made light-hearted complaints... No hardship looks on their faces, they were having a good time doing what they chose to do.
"g0v is not anti-government, just anti-cynics," (g0v不是反政府，而是反酸民) "Don't complain there's nobody doing anything, admit you are that nobody," (別再抱怨沒有人做，因為你就是“沒有人”)... are remarks seen on g0v's website and literature. Indeed g0v is a decentralized, grass root movement that puts together ordinary people who want to do good for society with innovative but practical ideas and digital technologies, and has affected tangible changes in societies over the past eight years. I hope and have pledged my support for it to go many more years and do much more good for Taiwan and the world. I hope many will do the same too.
g0v manifesto:
We come from everywhere
We are a polycentric community of self-organized contributors
We are citizens collaborating to bring about change
We live open-source
We have fun and want to change the status quo
We are you
All these are run by a group of less than ten young men and women, all but two of them on volunteer basis. I went to one of their weekly meetings the other day, and met Isabel, a cheerful lady in her late 30's whose career as a lawyer specializing in innovation and intellectual property started with the involvement of the open source movement in the early 2000's; Ronny, a software engineer who once obtained political donors information from the government and published them all–tens of thousands of names and numbers and links–in one day through the code he wrote that "outsourced" the data punching work to the public; Chewei, a spatial designer who coordinated with the City of Taipei to build a website listing all the vacant lands the city government owns for the public to inquire and make usage suggestions about; Sean, another software engineer with artistic and environmental design background, was creator of the "Watch Our Rivers" campaign that visualizes and publishes river cleanup contracts the government doles out to contractors for all to access and monitor; Bess, a young woman with nearly 10 year experience working with non-profit and cross-domain organizations, and Ichieh, another young lady in her mid 20's who joined the team right off school, were the only two full-timers there.
They started their meeting by each sharing one impressionable thing that came to their mind in the past week... Ichieh said she saw news of a new video hosting site that won't arbitrarily suspend access to videos people upload that she thought might be worth considering as a backup site for g0v's videos; Chewei mentioned an idea he heard that in some countries corporations are required to plant trees to compensate for the carbons they create when they hold physical conferencing events; Sean shared an aha moment he got while sitting in traffic on how to solve traffic problems with strategies he uses in one of the video games he plays... They bantered, they joked, they laughed... then they moved on to discuss the coming hackathon event in January, a tutorial workshop at the end of this month (December), people to invite, places to set up, software to fix, projects to coordinate, etc., etc. Again, good naturedly, they riffed off each other's ideas, threw in witty remarks, made light-hearted complaints... No hardship looks on their faces, they were having a good time doing what they chose to do.
"g0v is not anti-government, just anti-cynics," (g0v不是反政府，而是反酸民) "Don't complain there's nobody doing anything, admit you are that nobody," (別再抱怨沒有人做，因為你就是“沒有人”)... are remarks seen on g0v's website and literature. Indeed g0v is a decentralized, grass root movement that puts together ordinary people who want to do good for society with innovative but practical ideas and digital technologies, and has affected tangible changes in societies over the past eight years. I hope and have pledged my support for it to go many more years and do much more good for Taiwan and the world. I hope many will do the same too.
g0v manifesto:
We come from everywhere
We are a polycentric community of self-organized contributors
We are citizens collaborating to bring about change
We live open-source
We have fun and want to change the status quo
We are you
g0v 宣言：
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Wired Magazine:
Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attentionThe Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania:
