g0v Summit 2024, Taipei (4-5 May 2024)

From Saturday 4 to Sunday 5 May 2024, g0v — the decentralised Taiwanese civic-tech community — convened its fifth biennial Summit at Academia Sinica in Taipei, the first edition of the biennial series since December 2020 and the return of the community's signature international convening after a four-year hiatus induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Organised entirely by volunteers, the two-day summit brought together software developers, designers, activists, educators, writers, and citizens for cross-sector exchanges across five working areas: the relationship between "nerd politics" and digital governance; data, AI, and community collaboration; grassroots responses to authoritarianism; digital infrastructure emphasising empathy, inclusiveness, and plurality; and the convergence of technology with social issues. The 2024 edition was held two weeks before Taiwan's May 20 presidential inauguration and in the same calendar year as Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs launched its Alignment Assemblies of AI, positioning the summit at the intersection of the g0v community's long civic-tech arc and Taiwan's emergent national-scale AI-governance practice.

Context

The g0v Summit is the biennial convening artefact of the g0v community — the decentralised volunteer network founded in Taiwan in 2012 that describes itself as committed to information transparency, open results, and open cooperation as its core values. The summit series began in 2014, one year after the community's catalytic involvement in Taiwan's Sunflower Movement, and has run through editions in 2016, 2018, and 2020 in Tainan — with the 2022 edition skipped. The Open Culture Foundation records that in recent summit editions speakers came from 19 countries with more than 2,000 local and international participants attending, making the series one of the largest annual international civic-tech convenings in the Asia-Pacific. The Open Knowledge Foundation Germany's post-summit blog framed the 2024 edition as "mending connections and motivating participants" after the four-year sedative on crowd events, and the summit's position in the civic-tech calendar gave it additional geopolitical charge: Taiwan's January 2024 general election had returned the ruling Democratic Progressive Party to power, and the May 20 presidential inauguration of Lai Ching-te followed the summit by a fortnight.

The summit's conceptual framing in 2024 continued from the community's most visible recent project arc — the vTaiwan national-scale deliberation platform and, more recently, the March 2024 Alignment Assemblies of AI under Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs, which had invited hundreds of thousands of randomly-selected Taiwanese citizens by SMS to deliberate on AI-evaluation guidelines. Both processes are widely cited in the international participatory-AI-governance field as the leading public demonstrations that national-scale citizen deliberation on AI can be carried at the scale of a full national citizen sample, and the 2024 summit's "Data, AI, and community collaboration" theme made those developments a centrepiece of the convening's working agenda.

What happened across the two days

The summit ran as a two-day programme at Academia Sinica's International Conference Hall, structured around plenary keynotes and parallel-track featured sessions.

Day 1 opened with two keynotes. Liu Chih-hsin's "No One at the Front Line" named the g0v community's founding posture — "Don't ask why no one is doing a particular thing; you are the no one" — against the current landscape of civic-tech organising in Taiwan. A second Day 1 keynote on "Global democratic decline in East Asian civic tech", delivered by Hal Seki alongside Ohyeon Kweon and Liu Chih-hsin, placed the g0v project inside a regional frame of democratic backsliding and positioned the summit explicitly in conversation with civic-tech communities across East Asia.

The summit's most internationally attended session was Access Now's highlight panel, "Defending digital rights in the age of digital authoritarianism", which examined three converging threats to digital rights in the Asia-Pacific region: the weaponisation of internet shutdowns, the abuse of spyware and surveillance technologies, and the erosion of data rights. The panel was moderated by Chihhao Yu of IORG — the Taiwan-based information-operations research organisation — and featured Access Now senior staff Raman Jit Singh Chima, Michael De Dora, and Namrata Maheshwari alongside Golda Benjamin. A follow-on community track, "Digital resilience: What to do if the internet is out?", drew on resilience lessons from Myanmar and Taiwan delivered by Wen Lii, Fu Shiang Ching, and Golda Benjamin, anchoring the shutdown-response thread in two geographically close but politically contrasting operating environments.

Other Day 1 sessions spanned the summit's full thematic range: a session on open source in accessibility; participatory data governance; and a "Digital youth citizenship" panel on youth-focused civic tech programmes and government collaboration approaches that brought together g0v Taiwan, Code for Japan, and Sonja Fischbauer of Open Knowledge Foundation Germany to compare school-embedded civic-tech models (g0v's Sch001 curriculum) with extracurricular youth-hacking programmes (OKF Germany's Jugend hackt). A session on countering disinformation — led by Khairil Zhafri — sat alongside the digital rights protection track.

Day 2 opened with John Postill's keynote "Geek Politics and Global Culture Wars", framing the civic-tech movement inside the broader landscape of techno-political polarisation. Further Day 2 sessions addressed sovereign technology funding — Powen Shiah and Paul Sharratt on how civic-tech infrastructure gets resourced without capture by either state or commercial interests — and student civic-tech participation, with Wu Chen-wei, Zhuo Yun-yi, and Da Yu-ting on the front of bringing the next generation of practitioners into the community.

Significance

The 2024 Summit is the corpus's first Event located in Taiwan, the first Event anchored in East Asia at the civic-tech movement's own biennial summit format, and the first Event in the corpus whose organising community operates as a decentralised volunteer network without a formal legal entity — distinct from the NGO-organised and coalition-organised event types already in the corpus. It closes the Taiwan event anchor (previously zero), the East Asia civic-tech summit sub-type (previously zero), and the participatory-governance / civic-tech-community-organised annual convening gap in the corpus's event register.

Inside the corpus's regional shape, the 2024 Summit pairs with the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly 2023 (the regional annual civil-society digital-rights assembly anchored by EngageMedia in Southeast Asia) as a second East Asian anchor in the corpus's events layer — one rooted in the NGO-organised digital-rights convening tradition (DRAPAC), the other in the polycentric civic-tech volunteer community (g0v). Where DRAPAC23 mapped the AI-and-human-rights agenda as a regional civil-society concern, the g0v 2024 Summit brought together practitioners inside the movement who build the civic infrastructure through which AI-governance deliberation is operationalised — the vTaiwan process, the Alignment Assemblies, the school-embedded civic-tech curricula — in the same room as the Access Now-led digital-rights practitioners who anchor the corpus's internet-shutdowns and surveillance lines.

The 2024 edition is also the corpus's first Event whose lead organiser (g0v) entered the corpus as the East Asian anchor of the deliberative-democracy and participatory-AI-governance movement area, giving the summit an unusual double function: it is both an event the corpus tracks as primary work-product data, and an occasion that materially advances the AI-governance-at-national-scale work the corpus describes as the corpus's leading demonstration of citizen-led AI deliberation. The summit's AI-governance session and Taiwan's Alignment Assemblies of AI, running in the same calendar year, are the two moments at which the g0v community's fourteen-year civic-tech arc reached the explicitly AI-governance layer of the make-AI-good movement's agenda.