The g0v community started at the end of 2012 by a bunch of hackers, and one of which is my very good friend, Chia-Liang Kao. They initially started this initiative to build a domain name g0v.tw, that provides an alternate shadow government website for every national ministry, so that it solves the discovery problem.
The environmental agency, for example, that would be env.g0v.tw. Everybody can change the O in the browser environment to a 0, and then get into this shadow government which presents the same information, except open source, and with good visualization, interactive, and participatory.
After a couple of months, I joined working with the ministry of education’s dictionary data. We eventually covered pretty much all the agencies that we care about for administration. We have a community code that basically says all g0v projects must be released with open source and creative commons licenses.
This means that when a government is happy with our work, then they merge with our work, which they did. That’s a very interesting no-violence competitive way of working with the government; then in 2014, the Sunflower occupy movement happened.
Before the Sunflower Movement, our hackathons are usually proposed by non-government organizations, and hacktivists, and artist, and professors, and so on. After Sunflower, we now gets people getting on the podium, and doing a three-minute pitch, who are actually government officials themselves.
The roles have become fused at that point. Basically, it’s the government officials, participating as individuals, saying that they’re engaging volunteers to improve their function in the government.
In exchange, of course, they offer binding consultation with their political power, and offers to allow the civil society to control the future of those projects, and keep everything open source. This is open multi-stakeholderism, to put it in simply. That has been true since 2015.