Tech conferences serve many different purposes.  You could be interested in certain topics and attend a conference to learn more about it.  Or you may know some people will be there and it’s a good place to exchange thoughts and ideas.  Or you may be there just to get some general feelings about the field: is it growing, are things actually changing, what’s the vision, things like that.

Then COVID-19 happens and countries begin restricting public gatherings and international travels.  While a lot of conferences adapted and moved online, it could be much harder for an online event to serve the same social functions as an on-site gathering.

Here in Taiwan, however, thanks to the so far successful handling of the pandemic, many conferences went on regardless.  Despite the many difficulties, COSCUP, one of the biggest open source conferences in Asia, was held in Taipei in August this year and attracted more than 2800 people in two days.

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With its last three editions since 2014, g0v Summit has grown into one of the biggest civic hacking and civic tech conferences in Asia-Pacific, with 109 speakers from 23 countries in 2018.  The latest incarnation, g0v Summit 2020, will take place in Tainan during December 3-6 this year, and is expecting a +300 crowd at the venue.  Despite the uncertainties brought by the pandemic, g0v Summit is ever evolving and we are trying quite a few new things this year, if not only moving the event out of Taipei.

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There is clearly a gap in terms of resources and size of audience between events held in Taipei and in other cities of Taiwan, but we are not the only tech conference taking place in Southern Taiwan this year.  MOPCON has been doing that in Kaohsiung for almost a decade.  PyCon Taiwan also chose to take place in Tainan earlier this year.  As for g0v Summit 2020, we actually decided to move to Tainan last December, following a hackathon with +100 people in central Tainan City.

Perhaps it is good to stop here and briefly explain who “we” are.  g0v (pronounced “gov-zero”) is a loosely connected community founded in 2012 consists of people who care about open source and civil participation.  We value actions, so our community events usually consist of hackathons big or small, where social problems are discussed and solutions are proposed and prototyped in a few hours of work.  These projects and teams mostly work on their own, but are open for people to join and use the community as a platform to exchange information and expertise.  

There are bi-monthly hackathons hold by ”jothon” task force where usually +120 people show up each time, half of them newcomers.  These are open to everyone.  Some projects last for months or even years, and have their own smaller hackathons.  If you are into civic hacking and are in Taipei, you are guaranteed to find some gatherings to go to every week by asking around on the g0v Slack online chat room.

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All of these happen mostly in Taipei, though.  Last year, with great lengths of preparation, jothon held one of the bi-monthly hackathons in Tainan.  This was the first attempt after many years to try to bootstrap that civic hacking “vibe” outside of Taipei.

The result is promising.  Good-Ideas Studio, a hub for tech innovation based in Tainan, and Tainan Sprout, a non-government organisation and watchdog of city council, already have many overlaps with g0v and offered tremendous help in terms of resources and local networks.  Facing the Ocean, a regional network of civic hackers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea, joined forces and invited +20 people from abroad.  Not only did the event attract +150 attendees, a monthly Tainan meetup was started as a result and is continually hosted at Good-Ideas Studio.

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So the first and foremost reason we moved g0v Summit 2020 to Tainan is to build further on this foundation.

And indeed there is much to do here.  Although g0v is a community of people making and embracing online collaboration tools, face-to-face communications are still the backbone of the civic hacking scene in Taiwan, and a lot of progress were driven by gatherings like hackathons and g0v Summits.  But it was until we began to think about moving to Tainan and started talking to a wider range of people here, when we realized that we haven’t reached out far enough.  Almost all of them have heard of g0v and are interested, but very few of them have personally been to a g0v hackathon.

Being open does not make you inclusive.  It’s like saying “if you build it, they will come.”  Sometimes this is enough, but when it comes to communities, extending an invitation and actively seeking connections between you and potential participants is part of the “building” process.

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That’s why we didn’t put together a preparation team for g0v Summit only from the familiar faces in the open source community.  More than half of the staff are locals who are based in Tainan for years.  Jothon, Tainan Sprout, Good-Ideas Studio, and Fablab Tainan along with Fablab STMC are all co-hosting the event and have their own curated tracks.  Build a team from such diverse backgrounds and have them work together intensely for a few months, you guarantee they will learn a lot from each other.

g0v Summit in the past drew a lot from experienced staff and organisers of open source conferences like COSCUP or SITCON.  The mindset, habits, and ways of communication of volunteers in open source movements could be very different from that of activists, NGO workers, and business owners.  By holding a g0v Summit in Tainan, we hope to make event preparation a “training ground” for organisers to learn to work together with a diverse workforce.  This is the second reason we want to move to Tainan this year, to connect by working together.

That is not to say that the staff is inexperienced.  On the contrary, it is precisely because they have much experience in diverse backgrounds that putting them together drives innovation.  Nothing connects people better than working on the same project.

The third reason that we’re here is that there is obviously a large reservoir of civic-minded engineers in Southern Taiwan that remains untapped.

Open source user groups have existed in Tainan and Kaohsiung for almost as long as those based in Taipei, since the early 2000s.  A lot of these developers flock together to events like MOPCON, and can easily identify with the motto of g0v to "code to refactor the society".  There are also more and more engineers of the younger generation that choose to live in Southern Taiwan and work remotely.  

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If g0v events so far could not convince them to take a trip to Taipei, explore the possibilities of civic hacking, and tackle social issues during off-hours, we move the g0v Summit to their proximity.

With session exchange and joint promotion with MOPCON, we hope to connect these developer workforce to the civic hacking scene, to local organisers and organisations, and more importantly to the global civic hacking network.

All in all, the reason that the g0v Summit is taking place in Tainan this year is because of the people, and that is the essence of a community.

(Participate in the Dec. 3-6 summit in person or remotely.) 

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License: CC BY 4.0 International by Pomin Wu, a g0v.tw contributor
Uploaded by Penny Chiang