What is g0v?

Lead-in: Puyuma Express derailment

• Story: driver was struggling with broken ATC
• Within 5 hours, disaster information centre was online, including:
  • Blood donation centers and their status
  • Search engine for hospitalized survivors
  • Places to stay near hospitals so families could be with their loved ones recovering
  • Translations of Mandarin-language material into English and Japanese

What parts of g0v culture need explaining?

• Leaderless decentralized culture
• Concept of the Nobody

What is g0v?

• Sunflower Movement
• NGO participation
• Ridesharing legislation
• Amis-Moedict
• iTaigi
• National Treasures Project
• Marriage Equality

• 1021 Puyuma Incident

  Campaign Finance Data

How do I help?

• Engineers: Plenty of code to fork
• Bilingual folks: Lots of translation required!
• Lawyers: Lots of folks need help understanding US law around Taiwan like the Taiwan Relations Act, Taiwan Travel Act, etc.
• Citizens: Get involved with public conversations

Questions for g0v Interview

• How do you think

It’s the tail-end of the first day of the g0v (pronounced gov-zero) summit in Taipei. The summit is this chaotic beauty of civic tech hackers and government workers from Taiwan, Japan to Singapore to the United States bonding over tea in-between speaker series by that are translated from Chinese to English by a team of huddled in a corner of each room.

At the centre of this? A team of volunteers scurrying around the conference floor, leading around speakers, translating in booths and all clad in the same shirt with a g0v logo and emblazoned with a single, confusing word:

Nobody

I approach the summit information counter and ask one of the white-shirted ‘Nobodies’ in a shaky voice: “Excuse me: How exactly does one join g0v?”

She cocks her head to one-side and replies: “…How do you mean? You’re already in it. This is g0v.”

As I’d discover over the next couple of days, g0v