News of the protests broke on a spring day in the middle of March 2014, when transgender civic hacker Audrey Tang was working at Socialtext in Silicon Valley. Finally, the revolution in her home country was gaining pace and she yearned to be part of it.

There was a knot in Tang’s stomach as she hurriedly opened the staff internal chat tool, writing: “I have to leave immediately because democracy needs me.”

As she ran to the parliament building, the streets of Taipei were bursting with protesters. Mostly college students, they waved placards reading “Taiwan is not for sale” – a reference to the government’s trade deal with China, which they feared would irreparably damage the economy, democratic system and national security. Many wore yellow headbands and clutched sunflowers, a symbol of hope.


Taiwan had already seen uprisings against government decisions, but this one was different. During the days that followed, unrest built, provoking violent clashes between protesters and police, who fired water cannons in an attempt to disperse the crowds. Police, journalists and protesters were injured. Students emerged from the crowd with bloodied faces and broken bones.

Then, on March 18 at around 9:00 pm 300 protesters climbed over the fence at the legislature and entered the building. Once inside, the students took over the congress chamber, hanging banners over the rostrum and declaring their occupation a success.

Read next Could Mastodon be the social network to replace Twitter? Could Mastodon be the social network to replace Twitter?

They occupied the legislative floor overnight, resisting multiple attempts to expel them. Over the next few days, they continued to camp both outside and in the legislature. But the government refused to concede to their demands, so on March 23 2014 at 7:30 pm, several hundred stormed the nearby Executive Yuan.

Dodging police shields and truncheons, they forced their way through security barricades and razor wire and vaulted the barriers at the three main entrances of the government building. During the chaos, some students fainted and others were injured by glass from the windows. But they were determined – and it worked. After about half an hour, the police were outnumbered and the complex was almost entirely occupied.


The Sunflower Movement had begun.

Taiwan minister without portfolio Audrey Tang Audrey Tang

By the time Tang arrived at the protests, it was dark. She rushed to help protesters and the civic media set up broadband connections to broadcast their message. “We had to improvise practically everything. There was no internet connection, so to begin with, we had to bootstrap ourselves. I remember getting 350 metres of Ethernet cable to connect through the parliament building to the street outside.”

Read next Canonical hack exposes private data of 2 million forum members Canonical hack exposes private data of 2 million forum members

During the carnage that followed, Tang recalls a young person lending her his laptop. “We needed a stable connection between my Wi-Fi and through an Ethernet bridge to the camera person who was taking footage of the protests outside the parliament. He was like, ‘this is my administrator password’, saying, ‘you can have the laptop all night if you want’. How is a 20-something ok with leaving this expensive-looking laptop with a complete stranger for the entire night?”


Little did she know, he belonged to the Black Island Youth, the group that was to later break into parliament. He had no desire to carry heavy equipment, he was just grateful for someone to look after it. “The laptop was going to be a burden,” she says, laughing.

During three weeks of sometimes violent and frightening clashes, police made several attempts to forcefully evict students from the government building. But finally, the occupation came to an end after Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng visited the parliament chamber and agreed to oversight of trade deals with China – including the one that had sparked the protest.

Incredibly, the students had won their first battle: Taiwan’s central government had lost all legitimacy. But this was not the end of the Sunflower Movement: Once they left the occupied buildings, the protesters vowed to continue to spread their message across Taiwan. The government was defeated in the next election in 2016 with the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen becoming the first female president in the nation’s history, taking 56 per cent of the vote.

Soon after, the Sunflower Movement’s young revolutionaries were to become part of a digital project aiming to crowdsource opinion to inform government policy. The protests marked the first time they had been given a say in decision-making. They had won the campaign; now they needed to learn how to govern.

Read next These £20k modular houses can be built in five days and 'grow' with your family These £20k modular houses can be built in five days and 'grow' with your family

Activist Chia-Liang “CL” Kao in 2012 after a paragliding accident Chia-Liang Kao

To understand how Taiwan got to this point, we have to go back to 2012. Chia-Liang “CL” Kao was recovering at home after a paragliding accident when he saw the Taiwanese government’s TV advert aiming to inspire confidence in the struggling economy.

Its unsettling message, “trust in us”, angered Kao. He was not alone: the commercial caused fury among Taiwan’s growing community of young, politically-aware citizens. From his bed, Kao watched online as others reported the government’s official YouTube channel in protest. At one point, YouTube even took the video offline. Kao didn’t agree with that. “Reporting it as abuse was a kind of censorship,” he concedes.

It was then, two years before the Sunflower Movement, that Kao started to create tools along with other programmers, forming the hacker group that was later to be called g0v (pronounced gov dot zero). Its aim: to “fork the government.”

“Fork” is used in open source communities to describe the process of creating another version of the working software. And that’s exactly what Kao wanted to do: An early tool to show how, exactly, the government spends public money was a logical first step towards achieving that.

Read next Toonz software used by Studio Ghibli is now free and open source Toonz software used by Studio Ghibli is now free and open source

At this time, the group had no name. “It was just a bunch of people thinking about what they can do,” says Kao. “Open data was just taking off. We thought, how about using open data to improve the quality of policy making in general?”

It was the largest social movement the country had ever seen, and when the Sunflower Movement started, it highlighted a growing public appetite for transparency in government policy making. Even before the revolution, this was the foundation for g0v tools, aiming to help citizens get a clear idea of how policies would impact them. Kao describes an online calculator to help users understand how labour reforms would affect them. “This makes a policy personal.”

Kao and Tang know each other well. Both now 36 years old, the pair met in 1999 when they co-founded a startup and worked together on an open source advocacy community.

Tang says Kao’s 2012 paragliding accident – after which he was online even from his hospital bed, laptop suspended above so he could code – was the foundation of the g0v movement. “He was paralysed in bed and couldn't do anything other than try to organise people.”

At the inception of g0v, and during the two years leading up to the Sunflower Movement, Tang worked on the infrastructure the community uses to communicate. Kao says Tang spent a lot of the time “just patching things on people’s projects”. It was not uncommon for g0v members to go to bed knowing there were issues in a programme, only to log in the following morning and find Tang had fixed them overnight.

Read next The Chinese startup trying to democratise manufacturing The Chinese startup trying to democratise manufacturing

When they both took part in the Sunflower Movement, g0v had already started to host hackathons – group get-togethers guided by an open source mentality. It was in late 2014, after the protests had come to an end that the country’s digital minister at the time, Jaclyn Tsai, attended a g0v hackathon.

Impressed by the group’s work, she asked contributors to build a platform to discuss public matters rationally, employing Tang as her main assistant. The result: what is known today as virtual Taiwan (vTaiwan) – a vehicle, working independently of g0v but utilising Kao’s team of talented programmers to inform its tools. Their collective aim: to ‘fork’ the government and push for the citizen participation and collective decision-making that had begun with the Sunflower Movement.

China’s children are its secret weapon in the global AI arms race Long Reads China’s children are its secret weapon in the global AI arms race

By the time Tsai left with the outgoing government following the 2016 elections, Taiwanese officials were looking for someone with a background in the digital and start up world, to help boost the country’s economy through an ‘Asia Silicon Valley’ project. Tang’s name had come up during the hand-over from the old to new government, so she was invited to a meeting to help position the plan.

They were so impressed by the results, Tang was then tasked with finding a minister without portfolio to discuss policy issues with citizens. After asking around, she eventually decided to do it herself, but crowdsourcing opinion so all decisions could be made collectively.

Read next Gallery: The Chinese startup trying to democratise manufacturing Gallery Gallery: The Chinese startup trying to democratise manufacturing

That was how in late 2016, Tang became the country’s youngest minister without portfolio and the first transgender official in the top executive cabinet. The revolution had begun with the Sunflower protests, and it was now Tang’s job to lead the hackers who were helping to decide government policies within vTaiwan through the crowd-sourced and transparent agenda she had helped create.

So, how does this work in reality? I ask Tang. “As a ministry without portfolio and therefore not partial to any ministry, the idea is that I lead this peer network in a service-based leadership, in the sense that I don't command it do anything. If they need a facilitator, we provide the facilitator. If they need us to handhold them through talks with angry stakeholders, we do that, too. The idea is that we lower their fear, uncertainty and doubt.”

Tang describes herself somewhat paradoxically as a conservative anarchist. “An anarchist is, to me someone who does not give or take commands, who doesn't coerce other people into doing things. Conservative means I respect the traditions, the way people's lives are.”

Today, Kao’s g0v continues to work alongside, but is not directly inside, the wider vTaiwan project. The vTaiwan process starts online to set the agenda and Tang also meets citizens face-to-face, touring the country and hosting workshops, including town hall meetings and broadcasting conversations in real-time. Every vTaiwan process is structured around the “focused conversation method” developed by Canadian academics to guide large groups through high-quality deliberation.

It is enabled by a platform called Pol.is, run by a Seattle-based programmer with an international relations background, Colin Megill, alongside co-founders Michael Bjorkegren and Christopher Small. Megill was inspired to start the business because, he says, collective decision-making is “really hard for humans”.

Read next Gallery: Why hardware needs to go open source Gallery Gallery: Why hardware needs to go open source

VTaiwan is going some way towards achieving this, but it’s currently restricted to the digital policies that affect younger generations more likely to participate in online debates. So far, successes include a crowd sourced bill that passed through parliament on Closely Held Company Law after going through the vTaiwan process. The community has also used this crowd-sourced deliberation method to resolve a disagreement on internet alcohol sales; and ratified several items on ridesharing (Uber) regulations.

VTaiwan has also garnered interest around the world, including in the UK. Theo Bass has researched the project through his work on the government innovation team at charity organisation Nesta. He sees vTaiwan as “very process oriented”.

That’s not to say the community aren’t technically accomplished: ‘Genius’ is a word Tang is uncomfortable with, but one of vTaiwan’s contributors, Shuyang Lin, says Tang can skim read and correct documents in seconds. Programmers come to her with technical issues.

Tang recruited Lin, who had just returned from Amsterdam where she worked as a designer, on Facebook. “Audrey said she wanted a Jony Ive for her team,” she says. Lin decided her own job title: ‘re-architect’, “because we are re-architecting the government”.


A self-critical group, the revolutionaries re-architecting Taiwan’s democratic system accept that it isn’t perfect. And despite detailed processes, there is also concern that vTaiwan is open to tampering. Daniel Faraci, a director at Grassroots Political Consulting, points out the threat from hackers and bots. “My fear is that these tools can be easily manipulated.”

But the young hackers who want to fork their government think the revolution is at least starting to fulfil its promise. “The government isn't even at arm's length,” says Tang. “We've now totally given up control on vTaiwan, just as Minister Jaclyn Tsai gave up control when she turned up at a g0v hackathon and said: ‘The government doesn't know how to do this. You guys figure it out’.”

CORRECTION (9 May 18): This piece has been corrected to reflect the fact that Audrey Tang was telecommunicating to Socialtext, not working there as the original piece suggested.