Who is Kao Chia-liang (clkao)?

A Taiwanese programmer who in 2012, with fellow hackers, started "g0v" (零時政府), a movement in which citizens rebuild government websites to show how they could be. The book *Plurality* names him as one of the founders of g0v, the starting point of Taiwan's digital democracy.

The story of Taiwan's digital democracy usually begins with g0v (pronounced "gov-zero"), a gathering of civic technologists. When the book Plurality tells how g0v began, this is the name it gives.

In short

Kao Chia-liang (高嘉良, also written Chia-liang Kao) is a Taiwanese programmer who in 2012, with fellow hackers, started g0v (零時政府), a movement in which citizens rebuild government websites to show how they could be [1][2]. In the community he goes by his ID, "clkao", more than by his real name [2].

Connection to Plurality

Mentioned in the book. Chapter 2-2 of the book, "The Life of a Digital Democracy", presents g0v as the civil-society foundation of Taiwan's digital democracy, and writes that it was "founded in 2012 by civic hackers including Kao Chia-liang" [1]. This is where his name appears in the book.

How g0v began. According to a 2016 article in the Taiwanese outlet The Reporter (報導者), in October 2012 the government ran a policy advertisement that repeated the same empty phrases. Angered by it, Kao and three others hastily changed the theme of a technology competition they had entered to "visualizing the government budget", won a prize, and used the prize money as g0v's first funds [2]. Kao himself said in a 2017 talk that after seeing this advertisement he and his friends began visualizing the budget and started holding hackathons (events for building things intensively over a short time) [3].

The name g0v.tw. The book Broad Listening writes that the domain Kao registered for this budget site was "g0v.tw", one character different from the government's "gov.tw" [4].

vTaiwan and Polis. Colin Megill, a developer of Polis, a tool that organizes opinions like a map, said in a 2016 talk that the first Polis conversation in Taiwan was started by clkao. When an online flare-up of 200 comments broke out over a speaker at a technology conference, Megill said, clkao finally posted a Polis conversation [5]. The book Broad Listening writes that in vTaiwan's discussion of Uber, Audrey Tang and clkao were responsible for translating the legal issues into plain language for ordinary participants [4].

Links with Audrey Tang. The Chinese-language Wikipedia writes that when Audrey Tang was young, Tang built a community of open-source users with Kao and others [6]. In 2016, about two months after Tang became a minister without portfolio, Kao held a public discussion on open data with Tang in Tang's government office [7].

Abroad. According to his own 2018 essay, from 2013 he traveled to many countries introducing the experience of g0v, and in 2017 he held Civic Tech Fest in Taiwan [8].

Main ideas

"Forking" the government. To fork, in the software world, is to copy an original work and make a separate version of it. In a 2017 talk, Kao explained g0v's idea like this: government websites are hard to use and look bad, so change the "o" of "gov" to "0", release information that is already public in a more complete form, and let everyone understand what the government is doing [3]. Chapter 2-2 of the book writes that these "forked" versions often ended up being more popular, and that some ministers began "merging" these designs back into government services [1]. → Taiwan's digital democracy

Not an organization but a gathering with many centers. In the same talk, Kao said that g0v is not an organization but a multi-centered community in which anyone can start a project. He also said they had held a large hackathon every two months for four years, 24 in all [3].

If information is readable, people get involved. He told The Reporter that the starting point was realizing that when information becomes readable, people come to look at it and try to understand it [2].

The responsibility of technologists. In his 2018 essay, he asked how technologists deal with what they build being used to spread hatred or for mass surveillance. Even g0v projects that only published information, he wrote, had to consider, once more people were looking, whether the very way of publishing carried a particular interpretation [8].

Sources

Plurality, 2-2 "The Life of a Digital Democracy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/ ［CC0］
The Reporter, "拆政府原地重建，零時政府3年躋身全球前3大黑客社群" (2016-05-17, in Chinese) — https://www.twreporter.org/a/g0v-civic-tech-community ［CC BY-NC-ND 3.0］
United Daily News Group Vision Salon, "開放政府" (2017-03-16, in Chinese) — https://sayit.archive.tw/2017-03-16-%E8%81%AF%E5%90%88%E5%A0%B1%E7%B3%BB%E9%A1%98%E6%99%AF%E6%B2%99%E9%BE%8D-%E9%96%8B%E6%94%BE%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C ［CC0］
Broad Listening, 11-1 "The Evolution of Deliberative Democracy in Taiwan" (in Japanese; English translation in the same repository) — https://github.com/digitaldemocracy2030/broad-listening-book/blob/f69c60c838a91b91668abf109d7093b240610139/en/11_01_taiwan.md ［CC BY-NC 4.0］
Colin Megill, "pol.is in Taiwan" (2016) — https://medium.com/polis-blog/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5
Chinese Wikipedia, "唐鳳" (Audrey Tang) — https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%94%90%E9%B3%B3 ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
"與高嘉良討論開放資料" (Discussing open data with Kao Chia-liang) (2016-11-25, in Chinese) — https://sayit.archive.tw/2016-11-25-%E8%88%87%E9%AB%98%E5%98%89%E8%89%AF%E8%A8%8E%E8%AB%96%E9%96%8B%E6%94%BE%E8%B3%87%E6%96%99 ［CC0］
Kao Chia-liang, "寫在 g0v summit 2018 之前" (2018-09-30, in Chinese) — https://medium.com/@clkao/%E5%AF%AB%E5%9C%A8-g0v-summit-2018-%E5%89%8D-5869b6afe462

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Who is Kao Chia-liang (clkao)?

In short

Connection to Plurality

Main ideas

Further reading

Sources