Who are the people of g0v and vTaiwan?

The book Plurality gives Taiwan's digital democracy a great deal of space. But many people have made it work. This article briefly introduces, one by one, people named in the book and people who are not named in it but did the work on the ground.

In short

g0v (零時政府, pronounced "gov-zero"), vTaiwan, the petition website Join, Cofacts, where citizens check rumors, and the mask map: these examples the book tells from Taiwan have run on the cooperation of many civic hackers (citizens who use technology to act on society), civil servants and researchers. Kao Chia-liang (clkao), one of the founders of g0v, has a separate article.

Connection with Plurality

Chapter 2-1 of the book, "A View from Yushan", and chapter 2-2, "The Life of a Digital Democracy", describe how, after the 2014 Sunflower Movement, the government came to recognize g0v's methods, ministers invited young people as "reverse mentors" (young people teaching their elders), and government materials were increasingly made public through g0v's platforms [1][2].

The only people named in the book are Kao Chia-liang, Jaclyn Tsai (蔡玉玲), Simon Chang (張善政), Howard Wu (吳展瑋), and the first two authors of the vTaiwan paper cited in a footnote in chapter 5-4 [3]. The others are not named in the book, and are introduced here as people involved in the practical work or in research.

Key people and ideas

Jaclyn Tsai — the minister who brought g0v into government. The book calls Tsai "one of the world's first ministers in charge of digital participation" [1]. After the Sunflower Movement, the book writes, Tsai "recruited one of us as a youth 'reverse mentor' and began to attend and support g0v meetings, putting an increasing range of government materials into the public domain through g0v platforms". This was the start of Tang's public service [1][2]. In a 2017 conversation with Tang, Tsai said that just deciding which ministry would handle Uber took a long time [4].

Simon Chang — the minister who brought the rebuilt versions into government. The book writes that the versions of government websites rebuilt by g0v often became more popular, "leading some government ministers, like Simon Chang to begin 'merging' these designs back into government services" [2].

吳泰輝 — a co-founder of g0v. In an interview with The Reporter (報導者), 吳泰輝 described how, angered by a 2012 government advertisement, 吳泰輝, Kao Chia-liang and others changed the theme of a technology competition to making the budget visible [5].

Ipa Chiu (瞿筱葳) — a co-founder of g0v. Chinese Wikipedia lists Chiu as one of the founders [6]. In 2019, Chiu took part in judging the Presidential Hackathon [7].

Howard Wu — developer of the mask map. In 2020, when masks ran short early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Wu led the civic hackers who used the government's open data to map mask stocks. The book writes that "this allowed Taiwan to achieve widespread mask adoption by mid-February" [2].

The people of Cofacts (Billion Lee [李比鄰] and Johnson Liang). They are core members of "Cofacts 真的假的", where citizens check rumors circulating on LINE [8][9]. The book presents Cofacts as a project that grew out of g0v, and writes that research shows it can respond faster than professional fact-checkers and just as accurately. It does not, however, name any people [2]. In a 2019 blog post, Johnson Liang wrote that Cofacts had become one of the few sets of data for observing false information on closed social networks like LINE [9].

Yu-Tang Hsiao (蕭郁溏) and Shu-Yang Lin (林書漾) — who ran vTaiwan and recorded it. They are the first and second authors of the 2018 paper "vTaiwan: An Empirical Study of Open Consultation Process in Taiwan", which chapter 5-4 of the book cites [10][3]. The paper records vTaiwan's framework, the tools it used and the UberX case. Note that the paper gives only English names; the Chinese characters are inferred from speaker names in meeting transcripts [10].

Billy Lin (林雨蒼) — moderator of Join's meetings. Lin served as moderator of the "collaborative meetings" in which proposals that gathered support on the petition website Join were discussed with ministries [11].

Jia-Wei (Peter) Cui (崔家瑋) — who supports vTaiwan today. Cui is a central figure supporting vTaiwan after its ties with the government weakened (a Japanese report writes the name as 崔嘉偉) [12]. In 2023, Cui proposed using Talk to the City for vTaiwan's discussions [13].

Isabel Hou (侯宜秀) — a contributor to g0v since its early days. There is a record of Hou visiting Tang in 2022, before the Ministry of Digital Affairs was set up, and talking about matters such as the name of the "多元宇宙科" (Plurality section) [14].

Mei-chun Lee (李梅君) — a researcher of g0v. In a 2020 paper, Lee took up a g0v project in which citizens typed up paper reports of political donations by hand, and argued that the collaboration of "opening" data itself gave rise to a new form of civic participation [15].

What is debated

vTaiwan does not work today the way it once did. In on-the-ground reporting by Japan's Digital Democracy 2030, people involved looked back as follows [12].

• Billy Lin said that vTaiwan was reflected in policy because the minister of the time strongly backed it, but that its political power has now weakened and it has become a place for trying things out. Lin also said that online tools alone have limits for persuasion and building agreement, and that in-person discussion and facilitators are needed [12].
• Isabel Hou said that the reasons for its early success were a large budget and staff, and a system in which the officials responsible for policy reached conclusions at the meetings, and that it changed when the government changed and key people left [12].
• Jia-Wei Cui gave as reasons for its stagnation that from 2019 the government put its energy into other forums such as Join, that key members left, and COVID-19. Still, because the information had been published as open source, new people were able to take it over, Cui says. Cui's view is that the future lies in exploring forms of civic participation that do not depend on government [12].

Further reading

1. Plurality, 2-2 "The Life of a Digital Democracy" (English, book) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/
2. "vTaiwan: An Empirical Study of Open Consultation Process in Taiwan" (English, paper, 2018) — https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft
3. 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" (Tearing down government and rebuilding it in place: in three years g0v joins the world's top three hacker communities) (in Chinese, article, 2016) — https://www.twreporter.org/a/g0v-civic-tech-community
4. "唐鳳對談蔡玉玲：開放政府如何實現民意" (Audrey Tang in conversation with Jaclyn Tsai: how open government realizes the will of the people) (in Chinese, record of the conversation, 2017-01-14) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2017-01-14-%E5%94%90%E9%B3%B3%E5%B0%8D%E8%AB%87%E8%94%A1%E7%8E%89%E7%8E%B2%EF%BC%9A%E9%96%8B%E6%94%BE%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E5%AF%A6%E7%8F%BE%E6%B0%91%E6%84%8F.md
5. "現場取材からみえた台湾デジタル民主主義の理想と課題" (The ideals and challenges of Taiwan's digital democracy, as seen from on-the-ground reporting) (in Japanese, article) — https://note.com/digitaldemocracy/n/naaa818d919c7

Sources

1. Plurality, 2-1 "A View from Yushan" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-1/eng/ ［CC0］
2. Plurality, 2-2 "The Life of a Digital Democracy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/ ［CC0］
3. Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation", footnote — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/ ［CC0］
4. "唐鳳對談蔡玉玲：開放政府如何實現民意" (Audrey Tang in conversation with Jaclyn Tsai) (2017-01-14, in Chinese) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2017-01-14-%E5%94%90%E9%B3%B3%E5%B0%8D%E8%AB%87%E8%94%A1%E7%8E%89%E7%8E%B2%EF%BC%9A%E9%96%8B%E6%94%BE%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C%E5%A6%82%E4%BD%95%E5%AF%A6%E7%8F%BE%E6%B0%91%E6%84%8F.md ［CC0］
5. 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］
6. Chinese Wikipedia, "g0v零時政府" (g0v) — https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/G0v%E9%9B%B6%E6%99%82%E6%94%BF%E5%BA%9C ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
7. First-round judging meeting of the Presidential Hackathon (2019-05-02, in Chinese) — https://sayit.archive.tw/2019-05-02-%E7%B8%BD%E7%B5%B1%E7%9B%83%E9%BB%91%E5%AE%A2%E6%9D%BE%E5%88%9D%E9%81%B8%E8%A9%95%E5%AF%A9%E6%9C%83%E8%AD%B0 ［CC0］
8. Talk video "Ms. Billion Lee: Cofounder of the Cofacts" (Taiwan Ecumenical Forum webinar, 2023) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCoV9hU2LlU
9. Johnson Liang, "2019 第一天，來看看兩歲的 Cofacts" (On the first day of 2019, a look at two-year-old Cofacts) (in Chinese) — https://medium.com/cofacts/2019-%E7%AC%AC%E4%B8%80%E5%A4%A9-%E4%BE%86%E7%9C%8B%E7%9C%8B%E5%85%A9%E6%AD%B2%E7%9A%84-cofacts-d2330f01727b
10. Hsiao, Lin et al., "vTaiwan: An Empirical Study of Open Consultation Process in Taiwan" (2018) — https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xyhft ［CC BY 4.0］
11. 【兒虐死刑案】協作會議 會前會 (Preparatory meeting for the collaborative meeting on the death penalty for child abuse cases) (2019-03-28, in Chinese) — https://sayit.archive.tw/2019-03-28-%E3%80%90%E5%85%92%E8%99%90%E6%AD%BB%E5%88%91%E6%A1%88%E3%80%91%E5%8D%94%E4%BD%9C%E6%9C%83%E8%AD%B0-%E6%9C%83%E5%89%8D%E6%9C%83 ［CC0］
12. Digital Democracy Research Unit, "現場取材からみえた台湾デジタル民主主義の理想と課題" (in Japanese) — https://note.com/digitaldemocracy/n/naaa818d919c7
13. Conversation with Vehbi Deger Turan, Isabel Hou, Jia-Wei Cui (2023-11-03) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2023-11-03-Conversation-with-Vehbi-Deger-Turan,-Isabel-Hou,-Jia-Wei-Cui.md ［CC0］
14. Isabel Hou 來訪 (Visit by Isabel Hou) (2022-07-20, in Chinese) — https://sayit.archive.tw/2022-07-20-isabel-hou-%E4%BE%86%E8%A8%AA ［CC0］
15. Mei-chun Lee, "Free the Data from the Birdcage" (PoLAR, 2020) — https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12371