（以下是初稿，完稿將刊出於 2014 年春季號的 TAHR-PAS 人權季刊上。）
2012 年初，臺灣人的生活與社群媒體已密不可分，高達 75% 的網路使用者都在使用臉書。儘管社群媒體如此普及，當時的網民卻不看好網路對公民培力，乃至公民參與，能起到什麼作用。作家張大春接受訪問時，點出其中落差：
2012 年末，一群網路公民對政府持續忽視資訊不透明的問題感到失望，於是集結起來成立了零時政府，希望改善公民參與的環境。經過一年的努力，針對上述問題，我們做出以下貢獻：
我們的努力源自一個簡單、明確的想法：秉持行動主義、開源模式和公民精神，就能結合自由軟體、群眾媒體和社運團體的典範，打造出致力於資訊透明化的社群。
「實價登錄」事件 [§0.1]
在民眾由於房價炒作上漲而人心惶惶之際，總統馬英九將「居住正義」作為 2012 年競選連任的主要政見。為了制止投機行為並建立公平稅制基礎，朝野兩黨共同通過「地政三法」，規定所有房地產交易都必須登錄實際成交價格。
為推行這項法令，內政部委託廠商建立「實價查詢服務網」，讓民眾鍵入街道地址來查詢登錄資料。該網站於 10 月中旬上線後，立刻被龐大的查詢人次淹沒，到月底為止都處於間歇運作的狀態。
網站上線的第三天，由羅永杰、鄭依桓、蔡旭程、吳光哲四位臺灣 Google 工程師組成的團隊將內政部的資料併入民間版「實價登錄地圖」網站，在 Google 地圖上顯示彙整過的平均房價，並提供各式各樣的過濾功能。這個網站一推出立刻聲名大噪，以每秒處理上百次請求的速度順利運作。
一週後，曾任職於 Google 的政務委員張善政邀請團隊見面磋商。團隊做出了友好回應，也針對民間和政府的合作模式、資料格式與回饋機制，提出了詳細的建議。
然而，在媒體大肆渲染「只花 500 元」的地圖網站勝過「耗資 90 萬卻被塞爆」的政府網站之後，雙方關係便急轉直下。內政部將官網當站的責任推卸給民間的整批下載行為，並申明批次複製必須事先繳費申請，否則可能觸法。
11 月中旬，政府網站將所有的街道地址換成圖檔，大幅增加了擷取的負擔，也讓對立的情勢加劇。雖然有高手黑客使用文字辨識技術公佈爬梳過的資料，但這無異於將事件演變成消耗戰，顯然只會兩敗俱傷。不久之後，民間版的「實價登錄地圖」就關站了。
(上圖：媒體對民間版實價地圖的報導)
「經濟動能推升方案」 [§0.2]
在實價登錄事件發生的同時，政府推出了一支 40 秒的〈經濟動能推升方案〉宣導短片，頓時成為新聞焦點。短片中完全沒有任何具體資訊，只有不斷重複的旁白：「短短幾句話，無法說明這麼多的政策。這些方案實在很複雜，很多事情正在加速進行中。說破嘴不如跑斷腿，拚經濟，做就對了！」
這支廣告在網路上廣為流傳，激起民眾的輕蔑與反感。許多人在 YouTube 按下「檢舉不實內容」以示抗議。YouTube 的自動化系統很快就將影片判定為詐騙廣告下架，行政院的頻道也因此被停權兩天。
停權恢復之後，短片在 10 月 19 日再次上線，正好是 2012 Yahoo Open Hack Day 的前夕。在這一年一度的活動裡，六十四隊開發者要在 24 小時之內，各自實作出創新作品。為表達對這支廣告的憤怒情緒，「Hacker 15」團隊的高嘉良、吳泰輝、陳學毅、郭嘉渝四人臨時取消了原本要做的線上櫥窗計畫，將題目從電子商務換成「稅金都用到哪裡去了？」的視覺化網站。
最後的成品「全民審預算」運用互動圖表，依比例呈現中央政府各部門的預算，讓民眾為每項開支的效益評分。在每組兩分鐘的 Hack Day 展示時，他們以「無用的預算（例如某支廣告）應該交給全民刪除」為號召，成功贏得了新台幣五萬元的佳作獎金。
群眾通常很快就會把這類計畫淡忘。有鑑於此，高嘉良靈機一動，註冊了「零時政府」（g0v.tw）這個非常好記的網域，專門給各式「民間版政府網站」使用：只要把內政部實價查詢服務網（lvr.land.moi.gov.tw）改一個字，就可以連到民間版實價登錄地圖（lvr.land.moi.g0v.tw）。而他們的作品「中央政府總預算」（budget.g0v.tw），也就此成為零時政府的第一項專案。
（上圖：g0v 中央政府總預算網站）
第零次動員戡亂黑客松 [§0.3]
註冊了 g0v.tw 網域之後，四人決定把五萬元獎金拿出來辦黑客松，來集結更多公民資訊專案。這次聚會採用「由參與者主導議程」的 BarCamp 模式，定名為「第零次動員戡亂黑客松」，展現了 1949 年內戰時期的叛逆形象。
結果報名者反應熱烈，不久便超出了原定場地所能容納的人數，幸好中央研究院 MMNet 實驗室主持人及時伸出援手，答應出借資訊科學研究所舉辦活動。12 月 1 日，黑客們坐滿了該院可容納 80 人的一樓大廳，展示各自的專案，範圍涵蓋大大小小的政府職能，包括國會、標案、地理、氣象、電力、醫療等眾多領域。一整天的活動結束後，他們在線上平台 Hackpad 和 IRC 上繼續進行熱烈的討論。
為了支援努力寫程式的眾人，幾位作家和部落客在臉書上組成「文案配送中心」群組，為任何需要文字的專案提供協助。設計師吳逸文也發起了「設計配送中心」群組，為黑客們提供各式視覺產出。也因為看不下去原本草率成形的「零時政府」標誌，他在會後繼續反覆修改，最終完成了一套視覺形象準則，成功把 g0v 提升為易於識別的品牌。
（上圖：視覺標誌的演進歷程)
基礎建設 [§1.1]
隨著各專案在網路上持續運作，參與 g0v 的寫作者及設計師們發現臉書群組缺乏「共享書籤」或「任務追蹤」等必要的功能。另一方面，開放源碼常用的開發工具，像是 Git、IRC、Wiki 等，在非資訊人參與時造成不小的入門障礙。
為了處理這個問題，hack.g0v.tw 在 2013 年 1 月上線。作為線上計畫及實體活動的共通入門處，它結合了幾種不同的工具，形成協作的空間：
由於專案及參與者來自四面八方，我們偏好輕量的描述「標籤(Tags)」，摒棄制式規定的結構「分類樹(Taxonomy)」。也因為我們許多活動都是面對面進行，我們較常使用即時共享文件（例如 Hackpad 及 EtherCalc），而非為遠距協作設計的版本校訂工具（例如 Wiki 及郵件群組）。
還文於民 [§1.2]
2012 年 12 月的聚會非常成功，下一場活動於是接踵而至。「第壹次公地放領黑客松」於隔年 1 月 27 日在臺北、臺中、高雄等三個城市舉行，現場吸引了上百位黑客，遠端參加的人更多。
其中一名線上參與者是葉平，他是開放源碼的長期倡導者，在 2011 年移居美國。他在黑客松前夕發布了一篇部落格文章，呼籲零時政府的黑客把《重編國語辭典修訂本》從教育部的老舊網站系統解放，以便「用開放的文字 API 釋放出來，加上索引和搜尋的功能，讓任何想加值的個人或公司都可以使用。」
《教育部國語辭典》擁有超過 16 萬筆詞彙，包含豐富的歷史用法，充分引用經典文本作為書證。自 1945 年首次出版以來，它一直是繁體中文的權威定義參考。在 1996 年推出的網頁版《重編國語辭典修訂本》，即使在接下來 17 年裡幾乎未曾升級，依然吸引了近 2 億人次使用。
如何才能把這部辭典發展成擁有固定網址的現代網站、使用 Unicode 字碼，甚至適用於行動裝置呢？葉平認為，教育部應提供開放的字典資料，讓民眾自行決定如何呈現這些內容。由於教育部持相反立場，明確禁止重製，葉平決定親自動手設計所需的資料結構，讓公民黑客可以擷取辭典資料以「還文於民」。
超過 30 人參與的「萌典」團隊在黑客松期間組成，並且連夜趕工。翌日，團隊成員不但以 JSON 和 SQL 格式發表了完整的內容，而且還完成了適用於各大平台的網站和應用程式雛型。由於當時民間版實價登錄地圖關站事件記憶猶新，我們搶先透過兩個法律程序避開版權問題：
經數月審議，教育部終於同意這項合理使用聲明，並與我們合作，把以創用CC授權釋出的《臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典》與《客家語常用詞辭典》整合進可交叉引用的萌典多語文應用平台。這個網站目前每月提供數百萬人次的服務，至 2013 年年底，也有超過 10 萬用戶將萌典應用程式安裝在自己的行動裝置上。
求職小幫手 [§1.3]
2013 年 1 月，適逢宏達電拒發加班費風波，有感於勞資雙方資訊不對等的問題，王向榮提出「求職小幫手」的應用程式概念：「若我們能在網路找工作時，就知道這家公司是否有違反過勞基法，我們應該會更警覺，甚至知道工作的風險後，會對待遇的要求更加小心。」
其實早在 2011 年 6 月勞基法修正後，公司只要有違反勞基法的規定，各縣市的勞工局就可公佈出來讓人查閱。但對於求職者來說，首先得瞭解去應徵的公司登記在哪個縣市下，再去勞工局網站下載 PDF 等各種格式的公告，逐一開啟用肉眼找尋——更不用說一般求職者根本不知道勞工局定期公佈的資訊，對個人求職可能有莫大幫助。
因為人力仲介網站並沒有呈現這些資訊，因此「求職小幫手」在開發時，採用瀏覽器外掛程式的方式，讓上網者只要安裝，在看到求職網站中的工作機會時，就會自動跳出該公司的勞基法違規資訊。
違規資訊要如何取得？這部份除了手工處理，別無他法。王向榮與網友 nansenat16 於是整理出對應的資料統一格式，用程式擷取各縣市政府勞工局的違反勞基法公司名單，再定期更新到求職小幫手的資料庫裡。
雖然耗費時間心力，但辛苦沒有白費，「求職小幫手」截至目前為止，共有 3 萬多位使用者安裝，支援的求職網站囊括國內各大人力銀行，也得到 Chrome Store 使用者好評 4.88 顆星，將近滿分的感謝。
福利請聽 [§2.1]
聽障開發者陳柏儒苦於各級政府門檻繁複且法條眾多的福利政策，希望能夠設計一個簡明便利的「聽障福利網」，讓民眾可以快速的鍵入自身的條件後，便篩選出適當的管道、法源依據以及適用的福利內容。
在公地放領黑客松展示概念、紀錄於 Hackfoldr 平台後，「病後人生」部落格站長羅佩琪從網路上看到這個計畫，覺得和自己網站的宗旨「醫療、照護、社福、喪葬，一站式資訊服務網」不謀而合，於是主動寫信，希望加入開發團隊。
在 3/23 「第貳次九大建設黑客松」時，團隊的六位成員決定擴大關懷範圍，從聽障延伸至老人、幼兒、低收入戶、身心障礙、榮民等族群，並納入民間組織提供的補助方案，而專案名稱也正式改為「福利請聽」。
福利請聽經過四個月的開發之後，於七月正式上線。網站的座右銘「一個成功的社會並不是看富裕的人過得多優渥，而是弱勢者如何自在的生存」，以及 NPOst 等公益媒體的後續追蹤報導，都擴大了 g0v 專案關懷的層面，更讓後續黑客松裡經常出現社福相關的議題。
開放源碼開發者研討會 [§2.2]
自 2003 年首次舉辨跨社群的 Perl/PHP/Python Party 大會以來，每年春天的 OSDC.tw 十年來一直是臺灣開源界規模最大的開發者年度研討會。零時政府此次發表了兩項主題演講，有系統的提出了技術和運作方向上的具體論述。
在「PgREST — 萌典」簡報裡，唐鳳透過萌典的開發過程，顯示「關連式資料庫、試算表、多人協作文件、前後端網站、行動裝置應用」等乍看之下截然不同的技術領域，如何透過新的「無中介層全端開發」整合模式，在短時間內用同一套工具完成，大幅降低了非專職網站工程師的進入門檻。
吳泰輝的「g0v 黑客松 — 寫程式改造社會」則提出了三個運作概念：
在演講結論時，兩人都肯定了「待用政府」的路線：與其批評施政，不如一起動手做出更合適的版本，再以「提供補綴」的角色促進公部門改變——這也成為日後 g0v 與政府單位合作時的基調。
從震怒到政誌 [§2.3]
如果你在網路上偶然看見一條精美的時間軸網站，卻發現這是財團做出來的自圓其說版本，無比美侖美奐、卻只為自己發聲：掩蓋不同立場的說法、隱藏傷害土地的事實、將需要關懷的文化傳統風乾下酒。你是一個網頁程式設計師，除了覺得哀傷、鄙視財團之外，又會怎麼作？
化悲憤為力量，這就是促使黃雋開發「政誌」網站構想的初衷：他希望能簡化複雜的脈絡，以時間為順序呈現事件始末，用一個沒有財團在背後的網站，讓大眾能更瞭解貼近真相的資訊。
2013 年初夏時，以對政治憤怒的意象為出發點，原名「怒政」的時間軸專案，經過參與者的腦力激盪，改成為與政治諧音的「政誌」，希望人們可以記得這些努力走過、熱情爭取過，以血淚行動創造出來的歷史；無論結果如何，很多事情都在進展中，不該被輕易遺忘。
目前政誌上的資料，由維基百科的條目整理而來，一方面能夠繼承既有的歷史資料，另一方面也藉由 Wikipedia 任何人都可以編輯的特色，希望一般人就有辦法參與「政誌」事件或政治事件的紀錄。
從八月初開站迄今，共有 21 位成員參與程式開發及首頁編輯，而內容更是來自無數維基百科的撰寫者。熱門的政誌內容有「同性婚姻、九月政爭、大統油品、白衫軍運動、大埔事件、核四公投、日月光廢水、毒澱粉」……等 2013 年發生的重大事件。這些事件雖然都還在進展，但很快就會被媒體、大眾遺忘。「政誌」不但需要程式開發者，更需要一般人將見證過的歷史從腦袋中掏出來，紀錄在維基百科，讓我們不會忘記臺灣發生過的事情。
動民主 [§3.1]
除了關心臺灣社會事件，我們也受歐洲風起雲湧的民主運動啟發：冰島全民制憲、芬蘭群眾立法、義大利五星運動、德國海盜黨等先例，讓零時政府在促進政府資訊透明化之餘，也看到由網路集結眾智、形成公共政策的可能性。
有鑑於此，零時政府成員將海盜黨的 Liquid Feedback（流動式民主）線上議決系統譯成中文，並取名為「動民主」。這套系統在 6 月 8 日「第參次客廳工廠黑客松」初次試用，以排序投票法定出該次黑客松的最佳專案——獎品是一票難求的「開源人年會」門票四張。
動民主團隊在 6 月底與德國、義大利海盜黨舉行線上會議，並參考奧地利海盜黨的 Polly 系統之後，決定擴充現行的議決平台，納入前期提案討論、後期成效追蹤等功能，成為公民團體參政的「線上基礎決策系統」（Basisentscheid Online）。
對系統藍圖取得初步共識後，規劃符合需求的界面便成為首要之務。設計師藍一婷從繪製議決頁面開始，逐步規劃出創制權平台的三段樣貌：
零時政府與公民團體、政黨、公職參選人、獨立媒體多次討論、收集需求之後，新的「動民主 2.0」系統於 2013 年底正式邁入開發階段。
開源人年會 × 公民 1985 [§3.2]
COSCUP 是臺灣開源使用者、推廣者、開發者的年度盛會，2013 年 8 月於國際會議中心舉行，共有 1800 人與會，以「開放平台、開放資料」作為大會主軸，八軌議程同時進行。其中「社群議程」共有七場演講由零時政府擔綱，涵蓋基礎建設、萌典、求職小幫手、福利請聽、中央政府總預算等專案。
8 月 3 日開幕的「Open Data 面面觀」座談由葉平主持，戲稱「產官學宅四界代表」的和沛科技創辦人翟本喬、政務委員張善政、創用CC計畫主持人莊庭瑞、零時政府高嘉良等四人，就政府與社群如何互動展開討論，達成了「由民間主動向政府提出資料需求，政府才會知道哪些資料是有意義、有價值的」這個共識。
依照往年慣例，各大社群在 COSCUP 第一天晚上，都會在附近地點舉行同好聚會（BoF）。以「拆政府原地重建」為號召的零時政府 BoF，這次選在凱達格蘭大道舉行，與會者身著白衣，與 25 萬人一同加入公民 1985 行動聯盟發起的「萬人送仲丘」活動。
公民 1985 和零時政府一樣，都是由網友自發結集、結合線上協作與實體集會的組織。這次遊行之後，我們主動提供軟體支援，介紹防監聽通訊、分散式加密網路等技術，雙方展開互動，隨後於 10 月「公民覺醒聯盟」成立時正式合作，協力開發一系列監督國會的專案。
8 月 4 日閉幕前的「閃電秀」五分鐘短講，一向是 COSCUP 年會的高潮。講者林雨蒼在介紹由陳信屹發起的 g0v 長期專案「鄉民關心你」時，以「脫韁的政府，來自於未盡監督責任的鄉民」為號召，呼籲開源人投入零時政府的行動。
這段話在 PTT 出現後，隨即受到網友熱烈支持，譽為「公民運動的下一個武器」、「+9 公民之眼」；零時政府的 IRC 聊天室流量頓時爆增三倍，累計上線人數超過 500 人，臉書按讚人數也在一個月內突破萬人。
新聞小幫手 [§3.3]
8 月 10 日舉行的「第肆次國民大會黑客松」，由於報名踴躍而臨時增額 30 席，共計 111 人參加。不但有許多初次加入的夥伴，構想涵蓋的範圍也更廣，包括 Petneed.me 線上認養、服務貿易協定受災地圖、發電成本計算機、即時雨量視覺化等十餘項新專案。
王向榮提出的「新聞小幫手」，堪稱是當天進展最快的項目之一。由 10 位黑客組成的團隊，分別負責後端服務、前端網站、瀏覽器外掛、動線設計、資料收集、回報規範等任務，於 8 月 19 日正式上線，很快就超過萬人使用。
這個專案的構想，來自臺灣盛行的網路謠言亂象：主流媒體經常發佈未經查證、以訛傳訛的問題新聞，如「月球發現古文明」、「北韓宣布登陸太陽」、「北京霾害嚴重，播日出感受日夜變化」等等。因為社群媒體按讚、轉貼的周期極短，即使來源網站事後更正或刪除，也幾乎沒有人會注意到。
針對這個問題設計出的「新聞小幫手」瀏覽器外掛，只要頁面上出現錯誤報導，就會自動顯示「注意！您可能是問題新聞的受害者」的警告字樣，並附上真相連結作為佐證。此外，使用者曾經讀過的新聞一旦受到勘誤，也會彈出「您於 10 分鐘前看的新聞被人回報有錯誤」的訊息提醒。
為了鼓勵網友舉報勘誤，外掛程式在臉書「分享」連結旁邊，自動加上「回報給新聞小幫手」按鈕。如此「一鍵回報」的設計，有效逆轉了社群媒體助長網路謠言的歪風，不僅提供方便的查證工具，更促進了「只要貢獻一點時間，就能幫忙增進閱聽品質」的參與式協作文化。
國會大代誌 [§4.1]
零時政府立院專案（ly.g0v.tw）於 2012 年 11 月成立，是歷時最久的長期計畫，迄今已有 40 人投入開發。
立法院每天都會產生各式各樣的文件（公報、會議紀錄、會議預報、會議紀要、立委行程、議事日程、議案關係文書、議案、質詢、法律提案），以 Word、PDF、HTML 等格式透過四個線上系統發布，但可供程式處理的結構化資料卻付之闕如。
從 2013 年 1 月的「公報閱讀器」開始，專案團隊陸續製作出「投票結果一覽圖」、「提案版本比較」、「會議預報」等展示應用。8 月中旬，「立委投票指南」網站作者駱勁成加入開發團隊，並將網站源碼以 CC0 貢獻至公眾領域。
爬梳文字資料、建立 JSON 格式開放界面的工作至此大致完成，團隊接著處理影音資料。立院的 IVOD 議事視訊系統，原本只支援 Internet Explorer 瀏覽器，且紀錄保留三年之後就可刪除。自 2013 年 8 月起，我們與公民監督國會聯盟合作，將影片自動轉檔上傳到公督盟的 YouTube 頻道，讓議事過程更容易分享、保存，甚至可以連結到議事影片裡特定時刻的片段。
延續以上成果，「立院影城」的構想於 10 月 20 日「第伍次美麗島黑客松」 首次提出，加入群眾參與成份，可任選段落觀看、即時討論，使監督國會變得既方便又有趣。這個構想在 11 月 3 日的 Yahoo Hack Taiwan 活動中實作完成，添加丟鞋抗議、獻花護航等互動元素，不但獲得最佳人氣獎，更受到海內外華文媒體的廣泛報導。
影城上線不到一星期，就吸引了數萬人次的觀眾收看。立院團隊隨即整合一年來陸續建置的議案、預報、質詢、公聽會、立委資訊等應用，重新設計成美觀大方、適合行動裝置使用的網站界面，定名為「國會大代誌」。其中的「法案修訂對照表」功能，在 12 月婚姻平權修正案激起社會關注時，也成為社群媒體廣為引用的參考資料。
（上圖：立院影城院會直播。）
媒體互動 [§4.2]
零時政府去中心化、沒有單一發言人的特性，讓傳統媒體很不習慣。雖然每場活動都有完整的影音和逐字稿，但要做報導時，往往還是得連絡到專案發起人，才能取得第一手資料。
隨著立院影城受到主流媒體關注，「截稿前找不到人採訪」的情況愈發明顯。我們因此發展出兩套策略：
除了文字及圖片說明之外，廣宣團也積極製作一系列短片，以介紹開放協作精神為主軸，讓大眾能更深入瞭解我們的文化背景。
藝術與文化 [§4.3]
從第零次黑客松的「設計配送中心」開始，許多設計師與藝術工作者陸續加入零時政府，為各項專案繪製插圖、題字、設計虛擬代言人與視覺標誌。
隨著作品日漸增多，配送中心在 8 月初轉型為長期專案「零時政府文化部」，並於 12 月 21 日「第陸次勞動基準黑客松」時成立授權中心，將成品以創用CC方式公開釋出。文化部目前分為數個小組：
另一個長期專案「零時政府教育部」則以提供社群入門資源為主軸，先後製作出協作工具教學、「零時通關」經驗分享文集、「新手村」互動遊戲等專案。2013 年底發起的「g0v 小學校」專案，計劃引入成就系統、技能樹等概念，以循序漸進的方式，帶領新手進入主動參與的情境。
（上圖：「新聞小幫手」虛擬代言人。）
OpenData.TW 計畫
由青平台資訊長張維志組織的論壇，自 2010 年 9 月成立，是臺灣最早致力於開放資料討論與推廣的線上平台之一，舉辦多場演講、培力營隊等活動，凝聚民間對於開放資料的認知與素養。
此計畫期望推展成「不只是公部門資訊透明，也不只是民間整理資訊發佈，而是以開放政府為最終目的，促進相關法令修改的政策團體。」
Code for Tomorrow 基金會籌備處
由徐子涵、劉嘉凱、陳映竹於 2012 年中創立，以「鼓勵利益相關者交流、培育新興人才、促進國際發展」為宗旨，2013 年與精誠資訊合作開設訓練專班，分梯次為社會培養資料科學人才和團隊。
CfT 籌備處未來希望成立正式的財團法人，促進政府效能提昇，並持續國際開放資料組織接軌，形成相互銜接的生態鏈。
作家 Clay Shirky 在 CfA Summit 會議致詞時說：「黑客松的主要產物，並不是會動的程式，而是參與者之間發展出的人際關係。」反觀臺灣的 BBS、臉書世代，常被說成「彼此取暖的小圈圈」，就連資深的社會運動者也難免這樣想。
零時政府這一年來，透過線上、線下的交叉協作，循著自由軟體界二十年來確立的模式，成功將社群媒體（Social media）轉變成社群產出（Social production）的平台。其中的關鍵，就是徹底落實開放、分權，建立起「隨時暫時離開都有人接手」的文化。
展望未來，我們希望更多人能夠從協作的過程中確立自己關心的事物、從合作的空間裡汲取克服無力感的養份，並且聯合其他致力資訊透明的團體，創造出更清澈、更美好的未來。
⸎
---------------- Meta ------------------
動機
目的
體裁
附錄
主文不需收錄，但可以鏈結作為延伸閱讀的：
---------------- 社群意見採集 ------------------
----------------- 以下作夢區 (au, venev, bp) -----------------
希望可以延續下去擴充成的：
First-person narratives representing outward-facing messages, delivering timely results & actionable items to the general public, in a reusable way (newsroom-like) that complements traditional 3rd-person interpretative reporting.
TL;DR: 「能往 PTT 貼的，宜宅宜麻瓜的，多媒體形式的公報。」
----- 以下為英文版 ----
By 2012, Social Media has firmly entrenched itself in Taiwanese everyday life, with Facebook alone claimed 75% of online users. However, netizens remained pessimistic about the potential of existing social media outlets and portals to spark civic empowerment — or even engagement. The writer Chang Ta-Chuen explained this disconnect during an interview:
According to TH Schee’s analysis, the problems were five-fold:
In this article we present g0v.tw, a civic movement by informed netizens toward participatory self-government. Borne out of frustration at the government’s blithe lack of transparency at the end of 2012, in one year we have made these ongoing contributions:
The unifying idea behind our contributions is a simple one (illus. 1): Taking a hands-on, open-source and public-spirited approach, we combine best practices from Free Software, Civic Media and Social Activism into an active community around Information Transparency.
The “Real Price” Incident [§0.1]
Amidst popular unrest regarding speculative housing inflation, President Ma Ying-jeou made housing justice a key component of his 2012 re-election platform. In an attempt to counter speculation and enable fair taxation, the parliament passed a bipartisan bill mandating that all real estate transactions register the actual price.
As part of the mandate, the Ministry of the Interior commissioned a website on which people can find transaction records by street address. The site went live on October 16 to a flood of requests and remained only intermittently accessible for most of October.
Three days after the launch, a team of four Google.tw engineers incorporated the Ministry’s data into their “Real-Price Maps” website, overlaying aggregated pricing information on Google Maps with a plethora of filtering features. Their remix was an instant success, serving hundreds of requests per second from Google App Engine without a hitch.
A week later, Minister without portfolio Simon Chang (a Google alum himself) invited the remixers to a round table. The team responded amiably, offering detailed suggestions about how they would like to collaborate with the government.
However, after sensational media coverage pitted the team’s shoestring budget of NTD$500 against the official site’s “million-dollar disaster”, the relationship between the two soon turned sour. The Ministry used the crawling activity as a convenient excuse for their own server’s downtime, while critics questioned the legality of scraping and remixing government data.
The incident came to a head on November 14, when the official site replaced all street addresses with image files, dramatically increasing the burden of crawling. While a skilled hacker eventually published parsed data using OCR techniques, it is clear that the attrition is of no benefit to anyone. The Real-Price Maps site closed shortly thereafter.
“Power-Up Plan for the Economy” [§0.2]
While the Real Price incident was still unfolding, a new government production took the spotlight: A 40-seconds propaganda video titled “What’s the Economy Power-Up Plan?”
Entirely devoid of information, the clip simply repeated the following monotonous refrain: “We have a very complex plan. It is too complicated to explain. Never mind the details — just follow instructions and go along with it!”
Met with widespread incredulity and mockery, the video went viral as viewers on YouTube rushed to click “flag as spam” in protest. The automated system quickly classified the video as scam and suspended the government’s YouTube account for two days.
The video went on-air again on October 19, just before Yahoo Open Hack Day 2012, an annual 24-hour event in which sixty-four teams show off their innovative creations. Infuriated by the controversial ad, the four members of the “Hacker 15” team made a last-minute pivot from their “online window shopping” project. Rather than displaying merchandises, they resolved to create a bird’s eye view of how taxes are spent.
The resulting “Budget Maps” presented each agency’s annual spending in the form of interactive shapes of proportional sizes, inviting participants to review and rate each item’s usefulness. Calling upon citizens to “strike out rip-off spending (e.g. the Power-Up ad)”, the two-minute demo won NTD$50K in Hack Day prizes.
While demo day crowds are known to quickly forget such projects, team member CL Kao came up with an elegant hack to keep this one alive. He registered the catchy domain name g0v.tw, dedicated to citizens’ remixes of government websites. The Real-Price Maps thus became accessible at lvr.land.moi.g0v.tw - literally just a fingertip away from its official counterpart at lvr.land.moi.gov.tw. Meanwhile, the Budget Maps lived on at budget.g0v.tw as the inaugural g0v.tw project.
Hackath0n [§0.3]
Equipped with the new g0v.tw domain, the four hackers agreed to spend the NTD$50k prize on their own Hackathon to enlist more projects into this newfangled syndicate of civic remixes. Modeled after participant-driven BarCamp events, they named it the 0th Hackathon of Martial Mobilization, invoking a rebellious image from the 1949-era civil war.
Enthusiastic registrants soon exceeded the initial venue’s capacity. Fortunately, a lab director at Academia Sinica offered to host the event at the Institute of Information Science. On December 1, civic hackers filled the institute’s 80-person auditorium and presented their projects, covering a wide range of government functions, including Congress, Tenders, Geography, Weather, Electricity, Healthcare and many other areas. Lively discussion continued online at Hackpad and IRC well after the daylong event.
In support of the coding efforts, writers and bloggers formed a Facebook group “copywriting on demand”, contributing their skills to any project that asked for assistance. Designer Even Wu also initiated a “design on demand” group, providing hackers with various visual assets.
Dissatisfied with the makeshift logo banner, Wu would continue to work on several iterations of the logotypes, eventually completing a set of Visual Identity guidelines, which elevated g0v into an easily recognizable brand.
(Illus. 2: Evolution of logotype designs.)
Hacking Infrastructure [§1.1]
As the new projects continue online, writers and designers participating in g0v found that Facebook groups lacked essential features such as shared bookmarks and task tracking. On the other hand, popular tools for open-source software development such as Git, IRC and Wikis posed a high entry barrier for non-coder participants.
To address this issue, in January 2013, we launched hack.g0v.tw as the common entry point for online projects as well as face-to-face events. It combines several tools that form a cohesive space for coordination:
Owing to the diverse nature of the projects and participants, there’s a strong preference for lightweight, descriptive structures (“tags”) over rigid, prescriptive structures (“taxonomies”).
Because much of our activities are face-to-face, we also favor real-time shared documents (e.g., Hackpad and EtherCalc) over revision-controlled, long distance collaboration tools (e.g., Wikis and mailing lists).
Reclaiming Our Language [§1.2]
The resounding success of the December 2012 gathering prompted a successive event. The 1st Hackathon of Homesteading Commons was held on January 27 at three cities across Taiwan, attracting one hundred on-site hackers and even more online participants.
One of the online participants was Ping Yeh, a long-time open source advocate who immigrated to the US in 2011. In a blog article posted the night before the Hackathon, he called upon g0v hackers to liberate the Revised Ministry of Education Dictionary from the Ministry’s archaic website into “an open API, with full index and search capabilities, free for all individuals and companies to use.”
With over 160 thousand entries, rich etymologies, and full references to classical texts, the MoE Dictionary has been the authoritative definition of the Traditional Chinese language since it was first published in 1945. The digital-only Revised edition launched in 1996 as a website and attracted nearly 200 million visits—even with almost no upgrades—over the next seventeen years.
What would it take to bring the Revised MoE into the modern web of permanent URLs, Unicode text, and mobile devices? Yeh argued that the Ministry of Education ought to provide structured dictionary data and let citizens take care of the presentation. Since the Ministry took the opposite stance by explicitly disallowing redistribution, Yeh pledged to personally design the required data structure so civic hackers could scrape the dictionary data to “reclaim our language.”
More than 30 participants on the MoeDict team—formed during the Hackathon—worked overnight. The next day, the team published not only complete data in JSON and SQL formats, but also prototyped websites and apps for all major platforms. With the recent memory of Real Price Map’s closure, we forestalled copyright issues with two legal devices:
After months of deliberation, the Ministry eventually agreed to our fair use claim and collaborated with us to convert their CC-licensed Taiwanese Holo & Hakka dictionaries into a cross-referenced, multilingual platform at moedict.tw. The website would go on to serve millions of visits per month, with over 100 thousand regular mobile app users by the end of 2013.
Job Helper [§1.3]
It is important to job seekers to know whether an employer has followed employment laws and regulations while hiring employees. This is why Job Helper was launched.
Since June 2011, when the Labor Standards Law amendments were passed, any violations of the Law by an employer would be made public through the Labor Affairs Bureau of each county and city. However, before job applicants can get the information, they need to find in which county or city the company is registered, and then dive in a long search for related documents in various file formats stored somewhere on the official website of the Bureau. Adding to this daunting task is that many people are not aware that this kind of information is regularly published by the Labor Affairs Bureaus despite its importance to job seekers.
In January 2013, when HTC cancelled overtime wages for its employees, Ronny Wang, motivated by how poorly the employees were treated by corporates, initiated the project Job Helper. “If we could identify whether or not an employer has violated the Labor Standards Act as we seek for jobs,” said Wang, “we would be more alert to the risks of the job and would have a better sense about the reasonable wages.”
During development, the first problem encountered was the absence of information about violations on all popular job search websites. The solution was to create and utilize an extension program to the browsers. Now users can install Job Helper, a browser extension, from the Chrome Web Store. This extension can check employers listed on the job search websites and identify employers with a history of violations. The information on these violations will then pop out when you browse the job opportunities posted by the employer.
How are these violation data accessed and collected? This work can only rely on data crawling. Ronny Wang and Guo-Wei Su analyzed various electronic documents of lists of employers violating the Labor Standards Law provided by Labor Affairs Bureaus of all the counties and cities in Taiwan, and wrote a program which automatically imports the information in the documents into database records with a uniform format.
Enormous efforts have been devoted to the project so far, and the result has turned out to be a huge success. To date, Job Helper has 34k users, and supports several popular job search websites in Taiwan, including 104, 1111, yes123, 518, and ejob. It is rated 4.88 stars out of 5 at Chrome Web Store.
Listening to Welfare [§2.1]
Suffering from multiple barriers at each level of government and having to deal with numerous welfare statutes, hearing-impaired developer Blue Chen decided to develop a convenient, understandable Deaf Welfare Portal, enabling people to quickly find appropriate welfare channels, relevant laws, and aid packages by simply selecting their hearing condition.
Chen recorded the idea on hack.g0v.tw, where it caught the attention of Peggy Lo, webmaster of the healthcare portal After That Day. Lo realized that her vision of “one-stop information services for medical care, welfare, and funerals” fit well with Chen’s, so she volunteered to join the development team.
During the 2nd Hackathon of Nine Major Constructions on March 23, the six team members decided to expand the scope to cover other groups, such as the elderly, children, low-income households, the disabled, and military veterans; they also added aid packages provided by local NGOs, in addition to government sources.
After four months of development, the project went online in July with the new name “Listening to Welfare”, as well as a new motto: “The sign of a successful society is not measured by the privileges of its wealthy, but whether its most vulnerable people can enjoy a comfortable life.”
Follow-up reports by public service media, such as NPOst, have expanded the reach of our projects, encouraging new social welfare projects in subsequent Hackathons.
Open Source Developers’ Conference [§2.2]
Since the first cross-community “Perl/PHP/Python Party” event in 2003, OSDC.tw has been the largest annual meeting for the open source developer community in Taiwan. On this occasion, g0v.tw presented two keynote speeches outlining systematic approaches for both technical and operational directions.
In the “PgREST — Node.js in the Database” presentation, Audrey Tang used the MoeDict’s development process to illustrate a “full-stack, no-middleware” paradigm that unifies “distributed databases, spreadsheets, collaborative documents, front-end, back-end, and mobile app development” using the same set of tools, significantly reducing the entry barrier for non-specialist web developers.
Kirby Wu’s “g0v Hackathons – Coding a better society” proposed three operational concepts:
In the conclusions to their speeches, both speakers affirmed the “standby government” approach: Instead of criticizing the government’s offerings, we can share our visions by creating “patches” to demonstrate better alternatives, thus effecting changes in the public sector. This ethos has since become the standard basis of cooperation between g0v.tw and government agencies.
From Anger to Fact [§2.3]
Say you discover a fine website that provides a detailed history of certain events, but later find that its resourcefulness is merely a façade, the purpose of which is to justify the wrongness of the activities of wealthy corporations. Such stories told may be beautiful, but they are only single-sided, muting voices from other sources. The façade hides the harmful actions done to the lands we live on that care little about our traditional cultures. If you are a web programmer, what would you do besides despising the corporations and mourning for our society?
Such was the circumstances that prompted Jimmy Huang to create fact.g0v.tw, a website for presenting complicated information as simple timelines with highlighted events. It is to be compared with the “consortium’s version”, offering the public more chances to discover the truth.
Fact (政誌) had previously been codenamed Angry Politics (怒政), named after our anger aimed at today’s political affairs. We soon found that the Angry image was less appealing to the public in the long term, so the members came up with a better name, Fact (政誌, “Political diary”), which is a homophone of “politics” (政治) in Mandarin.
With this “diary”, we hope that people will remember their shared history wherein our efforts and passion are devoted to fighting for the right. No matter the results, a lot of things are still in progress and deserve continuous attention.
The data on Fact are collected from Wikipedia and rearranged. In addition to keeping historical data, the site reflects the editable data on Wikipedia and, in this sense, allows the public to take part in Fact in recording history.
To date, there are 21 members involved in software development and homepage editing for Fact, and the contents are contributed by numerous Wikipedia writers. Hot topics on Fact include several important events in Taiwan, such as same-sex marriage, the September political conflicts, Da-Tung oil, the White Shirt Army social movement, the Da-Pu event, the referendum on Taiwan’s Fourth Nuclear Plant, the Sun-Moon-Light wastewater, toxic starch, etc.
While most events are still taking place, they seem winding down due to the short memories of the media and the public. Fact needs the general public as well as the engineers to run properly, because it requires both hard facts and reliable narrations stored in the people’s minds to be pulled out, published, and recorded in Wikipedia, so that we shall never lose track of everything that has happened in Taiwan.
Dynamic Democracy [§3.1]
In addition to our interest in Taiwan’s current affairs, we have also been inspired by the massive upsurge of democratic activities in Europe, including, for example, Iceland’s constitutional referendum, Finland’s crowd-sourced legislation, Italy’s Five Star Movement, Germany’s Pirate Party, and other similar precedents. As g0v.tw continues to work with the government for greater information transparency, these activities have presented clear evidence for the accumulated wisdom of online communities and their potential to shape public policy.
Accordingly, the members of g0v.tw have localized the online policy-formation system Liquid Feedback and have named it 動民主 (Dynamic Democracy). The first trial took place on June 8 at our 3rd Hackathon of Living-Room Factories. We implemented a preferential voting mechanism to determine the best project in the Hackathon; four tickets to the highly sought-after COSCUP event were awarded as the winning prize.
At the end of June, Dynamic Democracy team members held an online meeting with representatives from the German and Italian Pirate Parties. We decided to expand the existing voting platform and incorporate pre-proposal discussions and post-performance tracking into the system, turning it into a “Foundation for Decision-making" (Basisentscheid) for online collaboration among policy groups.
Once we agreed on the system blueprint, coming up with a compelling interface became the next priority. The designer ET Blue began by remaking the voting system and gradually outlined the architecture of a three-tier platform for citizens’ right of initiative:
After extensive requirement-gathering talks with civic groups, political parties, candidates for public office, and independent media, development of the new Dynamic Democracy system began in earnest at the end of 2013.
COSCUP × 1985 [§3.2]
COSCUP is the most popular annual conference for Taiwan’s open source users, promoters, and developers. The event took place in August 2013 at the International Conference Center with “Open x [Web, Mobile, Data]” as the main theme, attracting a total of 1,800 registrants. Among its eight concurrent tracks, the Community Track featured seven presentations by g0v.tw on our infrastructure, MoeDict, Job Helper, Listening to Welfare, and Budget Maps.
The conference opened on August 3 with a panel discussion, the Open Data Roundtable, moderated by Ping Yeh and informally dubbed Four Reps from Industry, Government, Academy, and Community: Ben Jai, founder of Hope Bay Technology; Simon Chang, Minister without portfolio; Tyng-Ruey Chuang, host of Creative Commons Taiwan; and CL Kao from g0v.tw. The quartet exchanged ideas about how government and community should interact, agreeing that “requests from the community is the only way for the government to determine which piece of data has meaningful value.”
Traditionally, various major communities hold Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetups nearby on the evening of the opening day of COSCUP. The g0v.tw BoF adopted the slogan “Dismantle our Government and Build It Anew” and was held on the Ketagalan Boulevard. Participants dressed in white and joined 250,000 other demonstrators in the peaceful protest organized by the group Citizen 1985 over Corporal Hung Chung-chiu’s death.
Citizen 1985 and g0v.tw both emerged from grassroots movements that combine online collaboration with face-to-face meetings. Following the protest, we took the initiative to offer software support to Citizen 1985, providing anti-eavesdropping and distributed network encryption technologies. The two groups would eventually enter formal collaboration in October with the launch of the Big Citizen Is Watching alliance, working together on a series of congressional oversight projects.
The five-minute Lightning Talks before the conference closing on August 4 have always been a highlight of COSCUP. When introducing the long-term Kuansim project launched by Hsin-Yi Chen, speaker Zhe-Wei Lin stated that “out-of-control government comes from the failure of citizens to exercise oversight,” calling on people in the open source community to become involved in g0v.tw.
When the passage appeared on the PTT BBS, it won enthusiastic support from netizens and was praised as the “next weapon for civil society movements” and “+9 Eye of Big Citizen”; traffic in the g0v.tw IRC chat room quickly tripled, with the cumulative number of users surpassing 500. Our Facebook page Likes exceeded 10,000 within the month.
News Helper [§3.3]
Due to overwhelming response, 30 additional spaces were made available for the 4th Hackathon of National Assembly on August 10, for a total of 111 participants. The assembly not only included a large number of first-time participants but also covered a much wider range of topics, including more than 10 novel projects such as Petneed.me Online Adoption, Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement Disaster Map, Cost of Generating Electricity Calculator, and Real-Time Rainfall Visualization.
Among the new projects, Ronny Wang’s News Helper had the highest velocity. Led by a team of 10 hackers spread across back-end services, front-end websites, browser extensions, user experience design, data collection, and feedback mechanisms, the project went online on August 19, with the number of users quickly surpassing 10,000.
The idea for this project came from the prevalence of online rumors in Taiwan: The mainstream media often posts erroneous news without first checking its validity, including stories such as “Ancient Civilization Discovered on the Moon”, “North Korea Announces that It Has Landed on the Sun”, and “Beijing Watches Fake Sunrise on Video Screen amid Smog”. Due to the short attention span of social media stories, even if the news source later corrected or deleted the story, few people would notice.
To address this problem, the News Helper browser extension is designed to display an automatic warning whenever the user runs into a false news report—“Attention! You may be a victim of counterfeit news”—with a link to the real story with evidence. In addition, in the event that errors are found in news stories previously posted, a reminder will pop up stating that “the news story you read 10 minutes ago contains errors.”
To encourage users to report errors, the browser extension adds a “Report to News Helper” link next to the Facebook “Share” link. This one-click reporting system has effectively reversed the tendency of social media to fuel Internet rumors, providing a convenient tool for verification of online news stories as well as promoting a participatory, collaborative culture based on the principle that contributing a little time goes a long way toward better media quality.
Congress Matters [§4.1]
The g0v.tw congressional project (ly.g0v.tw) was established in November 2012, making it our longest-standing project. At present, 40 people have been involved in its development.
Taiwan’s Congress produces a variety of documents on a daily basis—official gazettes, minutes of hearings, scheduled hearings, summaries of hearings, legislators’ schedules, agendas, agenda related documents, bills, interpellations, and legislative proposals—released in Word, PDF, or HTML through four online systems. However, there are no structured data that can be processed by programs.
Beginning in January 2013 with the “official gazette reader”, the project team progressively created proof-of-concept applications, such as “voting results at a glance”, “comparison of legislative drafts”, and “scheduled hearings”. In mid-August, Johnny Luo, creator of Legislator Voting Guide, joined the development team and donated the website source code to the public domain with the CCO declaration.
With the process of sorting out text data and building a open interface in JSON format largely complete, the team moved on to audio and video data. Congress’ IVOD system supported only Internet Explorer, and its records can be removed after three years. Beginning in August 2013, we collaborated with the Citizen Congress Watch initiative to automatically upload congressional videos to a YouTube channel, ensuring that proceedings are easier to share and retain, even allowing users to link to a specific time point in the proceedings.
Following the above achievements, the idea of Congress Cinema was first proposed on October 20 at the 5th Hackathon of Ilha Formosa. By including elements of community participation—such as enabling users to select any part of the proceedings for viewing and engage in real-time discussion—we made the task of monitoring Congress both convenient and fun. The implementation was completed during the Yahoo Hack Taiwan event on November 3, with the addition of interactive gestures such as throwing shoes in protest or sending virtual flowers to legislators. The project not only won the Best Popularity Award but also attracted widespread attention from Chinese-language media, both in Taiwan and abroad.
Less than a week after its launch, Congress Cinema already attracted tens of thousands in views. The team moved swiftly to bring together legislative proposals, legislative schedules, interpellations, public hearings, and Speaker profiles into Congress Matters, a visually pleasing website suitable for mobile use. When the marriage equality amendment sparked public debate in December, the site’s side-by-side presentation of legislative drafts became a widely cited reference.
Media Relations [§4.2]
Due to our decentralized nature, there is no single spokesperson for g0v.tw; this has been a difficult adjustment for traditional media. Although we always keep complete audio and video recordings, as well as transcripts, for each event, journalists still felt the need to contact the project initiator to obtain first-hand information.
With Congress Cinema gaining mainstream media attention at the end of 2013, it was increasingly the case that reporters could not find anyone to interview before their deadlines. Therefore, we developed two strategies:
In addition to the text and pictures, the publicity team is actively producing a series of short videos to promote the open-source culture and its spirit of collaboration, enabling people to gain a better understanding of our cultural background.
Art and Culture [§4.3]
Starting from the 0th Hackathon’s “design on demand” group, many designers and artists have joined g0v.tw, producing illustrations, inscriptions, project avatars, and visual identities.
With the increasing output, in early August the group transitioned to a long-term project “g0v.tw Ministry of Culture”, and established a licensing center on December 21 during the “6th Hackathon of Labor Standards”, releasing works through CC licenses. The MoC project is currently divided into several initiatives:
Another long-term project, the “g0v.tw Ministry of Education” has been involved in projects such as collaborative teaching tools, a collection of “g0v Onboarding” articles, and the “g0village” interactive game. At the end of 2013, the team introduced the “Leve1up” project as a step-by-step guide for newcomers to become active participants, using methods such as skill trees and an achievements system.
OpenData.TW
Founded in September 2010, this project was initiated by Youth Synergy Taiwan’s chief information officer, Whisky Chang. OpenData.TW is one of Taiwan’s first online forums dedicated to the discussion and promotion of open data.
With a series of lectures and awareness enhancement programs, the project has inspired the public’s expectations and imaginations surrounding open data.
The project aspires to “go beyond transparency in the public sector and beyond information-sharing in the community; the ultimate goal is to achieve an open government, by forming a policy group to lobby for necessary legislative amendments.”
Code for Tomorrow
Founded by TH Schee, CK Liu, and Ying-Chu Chen in mid-2012, the mission of this preparatory office encompasses “the encouragement of stakeholder communications, the nurturing of emerging talents, and the promotion of international development.”
In 2013, the office worked in collaboration with SYSTEX to create a Data Science training program for civic-minded individuals as well as teams.
The preparatory office hopes to establish a formal “Code for Tomorrow Foundation” in the future to connect with international open knowledge foundations and create a robust ecosystem.
In his CfA Summit opening keynote, writer Clay Shirky remarked that “the product of a Hackathon isn’t running code. It’s the social capital developed among the people.”
In contrast, Taiwan’s BBS-and-Facebook generation of digital natives are often portrayed as “small circles keeping one another warm”, a view shared even by veteran social activists.
Over the past year, we at g0v.tw have demonstrated a way to combine online and offline collaboration. Following the model established by the Free Software community over the past two decades, we transformed social media into a platform for social production. The key is a fully open and decentralized framework, cultivating a culture where “when any person is away, someone else can always take on the role.”
Looking toward 2014, we hope that our collaborative process will inspire more people to identify the issues they care about, and use this cooperative space to develop the strength to overcome feelings of powerlessness. In conjunction with fellow movements committed to information transparency, we strive to create a better, more enlightened future.