June 19, 2020 The RadicalxChange Conference

1. Photo CC-BY 3.0-Kirby Wu
Inside Taiwan’s Digital Democracy
The Nobody Movement
Mei-chun Lee | RxC | 06.19.2020

2. slacktivism?revolutions?
CC BY 2.0-Elijah van der GiessenCC BY SA 3.0-Essam Sharaf
Digital Participation

3. Q. Can digital technologies
facilitate persistent participation
and produce scalable impacts?

4. Replacing the letter “o” in “government”
with the number “0” to indicate the
computer binary zero and one, the name
“g0v” signifies both their netizen identity
and the grassroots, bottom-up approach
of activism.
g0v (pronounced gov-zero)
g0ver (pronounced gov-zeroer)

5. Since Dec 2012…
40 hackathons
3 summits
100+ meetups
400+ projects
14000+ ppl on FB
7600+ ppl on Slack
200+ ppl on Github
Persistent Participation

6. Scalable Impacts
Taiwan’s first
digital minister
2014 Sunflower Movement

7. Background: The Lost Generation
(born in 1978-1993)
Born in 1985
birth 1970-90s an economic boom (became one of the Asian Tigers)
age 2 1987 the end of martial law
birth - age 5 1980-90s democratization movements
age 5 1990s the introduction of the internet
age 11 1996 first direct presidential election
age 15 2000s
economic stagnation (’97 Asian financial crisis, ’03
SARS, ’07-’08 financial crisis)
age 25 2010s low income and high house price

8. from anger to action

9. What is “g0v”?
g0v is…
• a community
• a movement
• a network
• open grassland
- leaderless - borderless - polycentric -
- self-organized - open source - grassroots -

10. Don’t ask why nobody is doing this.
You are the NOBODY (meiyouren).

11. Don’t ask why nobody is doing this.
You are the NOBODY (meiyouren).
NOBODY is to act

12. NOBODY is to connect in
a distributed network

13. LAW Photography
PythonPHP
Visualization
Gov
Politics
Humanrights Media
ExpertNewbie
Push
JAVA Javascript UX UI
androidiOSAngularJS
GoMUSIC
Economy
DigMedical Science LIVE
Language CopyrightIllustrationFilm
jQuery
CSS
HTML
Argiculture
TXT DESIGN Environment Nuclear
Fill
Ruby
NOBODY is diverse and inclusive
participants are not identified by social class
or status, but by skills and expertise

14. How do they organize?

15. How do they organize?
How do they take action?

16. Hacking!
Promote Idea
Know each other
do stuffBrunch
Lunch
Tea Time
Report
Talks
Morning
Night
0940
1030
1430
1700
5 Minutes
3 tags
3 Minutes
1330 Tour
do stuff
do stuff

17. The Fifth Anniversary Hackathon

18. The Fifth Anniversary Hackathon
agriculture
environment
news
misinformation
history
language
democracy
parliamentgovt
budget
land
labor
healthcare

19. Campaign Finance Digitization分身伐樹準備中

20. 分身伐樹準備中
Within 24 hrs, over 10,000 ppl completed
309,666 data entries
from 2,637 documents.
The govt started to amend
the Political Donations Act in 2014.
A new act was finally implemented
in June 2018.
Campaign Finance Digitization

21. Cofacts
a fact-checking chatbot on
messaging app LINE

22. Cofacts
a fact-checking chatbot on
messaging app LINEAs for June 4, Cofacts has 80,000+ users,
500,000+ forwarded msgs, 1000+ editors,
and 19 editor meetups.
In June 2019, Cofacts became a
fact-checking partner of LINE

23. vTaiwan
a deliberation platform for cyber laws

24. vTaiwan
a deliberation platform for cyber laws
In collaboration with the government.
Have dealt with 27 rulemaking proposals
including some famous ones like the regulations
on UberX, drone, and online liquor sales

25. bystanders active citizens
Crafting Digital Participation

26. Crowdsourcing
分⾝身伐樹 FENSHEN FASHU
chopping firewood with clones

27. Open
Technologies
open data transparency tools
collaborative tools

28. Make Fun of Politics and
Make Politics Fun!

29. Be timely
and sensitive to local politics

30. Face-to-face Interaction
food sharing as a ritual
Build a community!

31. Digital Democracy?
The Internet DOES NOT promise
decentralization, participation, and democracy.
Online + OfflineDesign + Translation
we need

32. https://summit.g0v.tw/2020/

35. Challenges and Limits
•Can g0v “lead” a political change?
Or does it simply provide tech support?
•Collaboration or resistance?
•Participation for all? Gender, class, age, ethnic
disparity?