g0v

g0v (pronounced gov-zero; the name replaces the o in gov with a zero to signal rethinking government from zero) is a decentralised civic tech community founded in Taiwan in 2012 and now spanning Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Italy. The community describes itself as committed to information transparency, open results, and open cooperation as its core values, and is run as a polycentric volunteer movement without formal leadership — over sixty percent of participants are non-technical, the only membership condition is belief in open-source collaboration, and the community's organising rhythm is a bimonthly one-to-two-day "hackath0n" plus a biennial Summit that has drawn near a thousand participants. The community is in the make-AI-good corpus as the East Asian anchor of the deliberative-democracy and participatory-AI-governance movement-area: its vTaiwan process and the March 2024 Alignment Assemblies of AI it underpinned are widely cited as the longest-running national-scale implementations of Polis and as the leading public-record demonstration that randomly-selected citizens can be brought into substantive AI-governance deliberation at the scale of a national ministry.

Founding and origin story

g0v was established in late 2012 by software engineers Chia-liang Kao (known online as clkao), ipa, kirby, and other early collaborators, against the immediate backdrop of two civic frustrations with the Taiwan government's handling of public information. The first was the October 2012 launch of the official housing-transaction-price website — a portal that crashed under load and was rebuilt by four Google engineers from the same underlying data, after which the Ministry of the Interior responded by converting addresses to images to block reuse. The second was a vague Economic Power-up Plan advertisement that ran the same autumn; Kao Chia-liang, watching the advertisement, responded by analysing the central-government budget and producing his own Budget Maps visualisation of government spending, modelled on British open-source tax-tracking work. The team that gathered around the budget project at the Yahoo! Open Hack Day called themselves "Hacker #15" and pivoted toward sustained government-transparency hacking — the seed of the g0v community. The community's signature framing, "Don't ask why no one is doing a particular thing. First, admit that you yourself are no one" — sometimes rendered as "Ask not why nobody is doing this. You are the nobody!" — is the standing rhetorical artefact of this origin moment.

Community structure and values

The community runs as a decentralised, non-hierarchical grouping without formal leadership, formal membership, or formal funding structure — participation is by self-organising project teams, with sub-teams including the jothon hackathon-coordination group and the intl international-exchange initiative. The verbatim founding mission is "a decentralised civic tech community with information transparency, open results and open cooperation as its core values", and the European Democracy Hub case study renders this in g0v's own terms as "a polycentric community of self-organised contributors". The community's organising rhythm is a bimonthly large hackathon of one to two days plus a biennial Summit; the 2018 Summit drew more than six hundred participants of whom roughly sixty percent were first-time attendees, and Taiwan Panorama reports the Summit at scales near one thousand. The community has spawned international branches under the same operating model: g0vhk in Hong Kong (founded 2016) and g0v.it in Italy (founded 2019), and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement of 2014 reused g0v source code on the ground.

Signature civic-tech projects

The community's public-record project portfolio runs across government transparency, open-data publishing, fact-checking, and crisis response. The central-government Budget Maps project remains the founding artefact. Campaign-finance transparency — the manual digitisation of more than thirty thousand files of politician donations in twenty-four hours, against an underlying record-set of around three hundred thousand donation records the community ultimately freed "from the birdcage" — opened the political-money record to public scrutiny in a way that the official Control Yuan inventory had not. MoeDict (萌典) — initially developed by Audrey Tang — is a crowdsourced Chinese dictionary built from the Ministry of Education's reference dictionary, with more than four thousand corrections crowdsourced by g0v contributors. Disfactory is a citizen-reporting GIS application against illegal factories built on Taiwanese farmland — by June 2022 it had received more than four thousand two hundred citizen reports. Cofacts — described by the Reboot Democracy interview as foundational work for the later Alignment Assemblies — is a collaborative fact-checking bot used in election cycles. During the March 2020 COVID-19 mask shortage, Audrey Tang facilitated the government's release of real-time pharmacy mask-stock data to g0v programmers, who built the citizen-facing real-time mask-availability maps that the international press cited as a model of open-data crisis response.

vTaiwan and deliberative governance

vTaiwan is the multi-phase collective-intelligence consultation process the Taiwan government asked the g0v community to build in the aftermath of the March-April 2014 Sunflower Movement occupation of the Legislative Yuan, formally launched in 2014-2015 with an August 2015 pilot deliberation on ride-sharing regulation that resolved a long-deadlocked policy question. The process pairs an online phase running Polis — the open-source opinion-mapping platform that uses machine learning to cluster opinions and surface bridging statements — with offline stakeholder-meeting and government-response phases. The Computational Democracy Project records vTaiwan as the longest-running national-scale implementation of Polis worldwide, with twenty-eight deliberation issues completed and approximately eighty percent leading to legislative or regulatory action. After 2016 the operational running of vTaiwan was handed to the Public Digital Innovation Service (PDIS) under Tang's portfolio in the Executive Yuan, with g0v community contributors continuing as the load-bearing volunteer base. The state-side complement to vTaiwan is the JOIN platform (2015-onwards) on which citizens can propose policies; proposals reaching the five-thousand-endorsement threshold are entitled to a formal government response.

AI governance: Alignment Assemblies

The g0v-vTaiwan-PDIS deliberative-democracy infrastructure became the substrate for Taiwan's national-scale AI-governance deliberation in 2023-2024. In March 2024 the Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) — established in 2022 with Audrey Tang as inaugural minister — launched the Alignment Assemblies of AI in partnership with the Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) and named further partners including Anthropic, OpenAI, The GovLab, and the GETTING-Plurality research network, inviting hundreds of thousands of randomly-selected Taiwanese citizens by SMS to deliberate on AI evaluation guidelines covering AI-generated-content detection and labelling, falsehood-exposure protection, content-accountability digital IDs, and system transparency under citizen oversight. The first deployment of the Talk to the City deliberation-summarisation tool by the AI Objectives Institute ran at the moda Alignment Assemblies. The Reboot Democracy interview records Tang's framing of the Assemblies as a "recursive public" model in which AI-governance positions are continually updated against the deliberative input of the citizen base, and treats Cofacts and vTaiwan as the upstream infrastructure that made the Assemblies operationally feasible. The Assemblies are widely cited in the wider international participatory-AI-governance field — alongside CIP's parallel work with OpenAI on democratic-input-to-AI grants and Anthropic's Collective Constitutional AI experiment — as the leading public-record demonstration that AI-evaluation deliberation can be carried at the scale of a national citizen sample.

Posture in the movement

g0v's place in the make-AI-good corpus is as the East Asian anchor of the participatory-AI-governance and deliberative-democracy movement-area — the corpus's first Taiwan entity, and the clearest standing public-record example that a polycentric civic-tech community without legal incorporation, without a formal leadership structure, and without a traditional funding base can sustain a fourteen-year arc of substantive influence on national AI-governance practice. The entry is deliberately drafted at the community-network shape — there is no incorporated g0v organisation in any jurisdiction, and the community's deliberate refusal of corporate-organisational form is itself part of its public posture. The work the corpus tracks under this entry runs at three layers: the civic-tech artefact layer (Budget Maps, MoeDict, Disfactory, Cofacts, the COVID mask map) through which g0v engages non-AI publics in shaping how digital state and platform systems behave; the deliberative-process layer (vTaiwan, JOIN, the Presidential Hackathon for Social Innovation) through which the community has demonstrated that Polis-based national-scale citizen deliberation can carry weight on contested digital-policy decisions; and the AI-governance layer (the Alignment Assemblies of AI, the Talk to the City Taiwan deployment, the recursive-public framing) through which the same infrastructure has been turned on AI-evaluation guidelines and on the citizen-oversight question. The community's bimonthly hackathon and biennial Summit cadence — sustained without paid staff — is itself the apparatus other civic-tech communities (Code for All affiliates, the Hong Kong and Italian g0v branches, international participatory-democracy practitioners) reference when designing for sustainability. The Audrey Tang Person/Voice promotion remains a standing corpus gap; the working assumption for this entry is that her substantive public-record output on AI deliberation, the recursive public, plurality, and digital democracy will eventually be recorded under a Voice entry with a Person back-pointer to her g0v-, PDIS-, and moda-side affiliation chain.