A decade ago, I started @g0vtw, a civic tech community now with over 11k members on slack. but before that, I was an open source software developer, yet had no interests in how the government works and broader social issues in general.

Here's how I started the journey

Near-death experience and the stupid TV propaganda

At the end of my 2021 sabbatical, I got into paragliding. With a failed landing at 130th flight and falling from 30ft, I broke my back and wasn't sure if I'd walk again.

During recovery for 3 weeks, I had nothing to do and noticed a 40-second government TV commercial about "economy power-up plans". It literally said "This is very complicated topic, you, the citizens, don't need to know the details". You can see how this goes viral.

Hackathons and Data

Equipped with anger from the general public including tech community, I was thinking how we can channel that energy towards something practical, showing everyone and the government, that with sufficient access to the data, we can understand and deliberate these "complicated issues". We worked for 2 days on the budget data and created some catchy visualization and it was a blast.

More and more people wanted to work on all sorts of projects, primarily data-driven or crowd-sourced approaches to tackle issues like campaign financing, legislation, procurement, money in politics, disaster responses, among others. We needed a name. It is g0v with a zero, meaning we fork the government, and build services as it should, from digital-native perspective.

So it ended up as bi-monthly hackathons, and bi-annual summits, for nearly 10 years, producing hundreds of open source projects.

For the next decade

The community at large becomes not only producing impactful projects, but also the social capital of the resilience for democracy. g0v projects were able to help with issues like disinformation, digital rights during covid, to name a few.

I hope this becomes an effective mechanism to brew and iteration solutions towards surveillance capitalism. because the threats enabled by technologies can't simply be tamed by regulations, they need fundamentally technical solutions or alternatives, designed and built by the people.

To learn more, hop on this podcast episode to hear what community members say about @g0vtw