Civic hacking in Taiwan
My travels in Taiwan coincided with the 20th g0v (g-zero-v) hackathon in Taipei. I’d heard fantastic things about g0v from my Loomio friends, so I was excited to see the hackathon in action. The day-long hackathon gave me an insight into an activist community who are driving change in Taiwan. I’d also heard good things about the food — which is arguably one of the most important things to consider when running a successful event.
g0v is a collective interested in civic tech, open source, open data, Taiwanese culture, and improving the ways in which people can give direct feedback to the Taiwanese Government and be a part of policy and decision making. Their efforts have generated many projects over the years. They cover a range of areas: from data visualisations of Government information and data, to real-time tracking of air quality and alternative sources of news media.
The Hackathon!
The bimonthly g0v hackathons usually attract around 150 attendants. Each event has a focus topic, and this particular one focused on new labour laws proposed by the Government. I went with my friend Kevin Shaw, who knows a lot more Mandarin than me and thankfully was my translator for the day. The morning started with a welcome address by the organisers, followed by project pitches from attendants. Each of these pitches gave a brief outline of the idea, progress made to date, and what sort of skill sets they needed for their next steps.
After the pitches we broke for food. There was an abundant array of Taiwanese food — so much fried chicken (they LOVE fried chicken here), rice and noodles, and three types of iced tea on tap. Also on offer was European food, but with a definite Taiwanese twist, such as pizza with toppings like Chinese sausage or pork. I found that really amusing, and reminiscent of inspecting Chinese takeout restaurants at home. A feeling of “I get what you’re trying to do here… and it’s not incorrect… but it is delightfully odd.”
Mingling over food set the tone for the rest of the day, as there weren’t any more structured activities until the closing address. There were however two more rounds of food, including some amazing black sesame mochi desserts. I spent the morning talking to JackyCute, a Computer Science masters student at the National Taipei University of Technology, about his project, HackMD. HackMD is an open source, real time, collaborative markdown editor, much like etherpad. It has many features, such as autocompletion and a nifty present mode that turns your markdown into a slide deck for presentations.
Kevin spent most of the morning talking to Peggy Lo, who works for the Government in the Department of Health. Her project utilised a dataset of the nurse-to-patient ratio in Taiwanese hospitals — the metric that the Government uses to measure working conditions for hospital staff. Taiwanese hospital staff are typically over-worked, and they feel the nurse/patient ratio is not a good indicator of actual working conditions. Her project is a platform for hospital staff to give feedback about their working conditions, alongside a registry of information about other hospitals around Taiwan.
In the afternoon, Kevin and I talked to Alan Chen from the New Power Party, which was founded in 2015 out of the Sunflower Movement. The Party is headed by Freddy Lim, who is also the singer of political heavy metal band chthonic. Their project is based on the hackathon’s focus topic of labour laws as it aimed to create a tool for people to see their statutory rights under these proposed legislative changes. The proposed labour laws are really complex and have different effects on workers depending on the type of work, hours worked, overtime requirements, and various other factors. The Government does not explain this complexity adequately to the public, leaving people virtually uninformed about potential changes to their rights and pay. Alan’s project hopes to empower people with knowledge so they can navigate these new laws.
Alan also talked about the political aims of the New Power Party. Namely how Taiwan needed to start thinking about ways of moving their economy away from manufacturing industries and into other industries that were less environmentally destructive and more sustainable. This reminded me of another island nation, one with a large agriculture industry…
The day ended with presentations from each group about the progress they had made in the day. This was a good chance to hear from the people I hadn’t managed to talk to, and covered a much broader range of topics than I expected. One project generated new Chinese characters based on user inputs of existing Chinese characters. The app reflects the organic way the Mandarin language develops, as characters for new words are built from existing ones; for example, the character 森, for forest, is composed of three of the character 木, for tree.
Another project, itaigi, aims to preserve and promote the Taiwanese language, a variant of Hokkien. There are many regional differences in the pronunciation and representation of words in Taiwanese. Itaigi aims to crowdsource all of these, and provide a platform for new words to be created. Their aim for the day was to crowdsource new words for all 151 Pokémon, as Pokémon Go had just been released.
I felt that the entire event had a really relaxed and friendly atmosphere. The hackathon was a social event as well as an achievement focused one. Although the overall goal was to make progress on each project, this did not detract from everyone being able to hang out and have fun. Most of the projects had lifespans longer than a single g0v hackathon, so unlike other similar events I’ve attended there wasn’t as much pressure to create a tangible product within a short time. The emphasis was on reconnecting with members of the g0v community IRL and recharging project energy and momentum until the next one. Most of the event attendants maintain their projects during their spare time, so the hackathons are vital for keeping people in the community connected and motivated.
A key difference I noticed about this hackathon
After the g0v hackathon I video called my friend Sam Lay Yee to talk about her experience at Govhack Wellington, held just the weekend before the g0v hackathon. New Zealand has an active civic tech community too, but I don’t think it has the scale nor the results of the g0v community.
I think that this is because there is a key difference in the level of engagement that the New Zealand Government has with citizen led civic tech projects.
The Taiwanese Government are far more engaged with the work that hacktivists are doing and see the value and importance in it. Their Government often looks to g0v when trialling new pieces of policy, and for consultation, as shown with the recent introduction of Uber to Taiwan.
g0v project’s have shown that not only is it possible to include people in decision making, but that they want to participate as well.
In contrast to this, Govhack is more like a typical hackathon, where attendants come and form teams to produce a product within the weekend, then usually disband again. To me, this plays out more like a token attempt by the New Zealand Government to try something trendy, and so doesn’t bring about any tangible or long-term change to the systems of consultation within our country. Taiwan has shown us that it is entirely possible to do this, even though they have a population four times our size.
I had an incredible time at the hackathon, and the community was really welcoming and lovely. I would love for the New Zealand civic tech community to be as supported by our government. If you want to get involved with g0v, you can find out more information on their website, join their slack channel, facebook group or participate in person at one of their events. An ability to understand Mandarin is very helpful, though there are many English speakers within the community.
Happy hacking errybody!
