Department of Information Technology

　　On April 21, the Taipei City Department of Civil Servant Development (DCSD) held the Taipei Spring Season Codefest Workshop. Commissioner of Information Technology Chao Shih-lung joined DCSD Commissioner Ho Ya-jiuan to greet the members of all participating teams. The spring season competition emphasizes the theme of ‘design based on the perspective of public users.’ The reason for choosing this theme is to make government data (which oftentimes require users to have a basic understanding of specialized knowledge) more accessible to the regular Joe in a direct and simple-to-understand manner. By presenting the information through a visualized format, this approach will stimulate people’s interest in related topics. The organizers also hope that the competition will help to promote the open-source “Taipei City Dashboard” and to encourage more people to adopt the app, making adding it to the day-to-day living experience of the public and using it as a new standard for public-private-partnership. The event is slated for May 11 and 12. 

　　Leading in the call to open-source city service systems, the Taipei City Department of Information Technology (DOIT) hopes to push forth its agenda of strengthening the utilization of city administration data in support the decision-making process of city officials. At the same time, through the holding of Taipei Codefest, the agency also encourages programming talents from the private sector to take part in the process of creating a better platform for digital public services and realizing its vision of “Co-creation, Co-benefits”. The current contest adopts the perspective of citizens and integrates important topics such as disaster response, traffic safety, climate change, services for borough residents, and household registration services, which ensures that the City Dashboard can be more easily introduced into the daily life of citizens. To provide the teams with an overview of trending topics and development highlights, DOIT joined hands with DCSD to co-organize the contest workshop and invited agencies – the Department of Civil Affairs, the Department of Transportation, the Taipei City Fire Department, the Department of Social Welfare, and the Department of Urban Development – to support the event. The workshop offers in-depth analysis and explanation on the following topics: the need of local residents and young workers from other municipalities for information and social services; the ‘pedestrians’ hell’ phenomenon and plans for dealing with the problem; Taipei’s disaster response measures and how the resilience-oriented mechanism helps to reduce the loss of life and property, as well as comprehensive overviews on global issues spanning climate change to net zero. The organizers hope that the programming teams will be able to convert elements from the topics covered into new dashboard components,making the data readily available with the help of visualization tools.  

　　As a pioneer of open-source policy in Taiwan’s public sector, DOIT open-sourced the Taipei City Dashboard last year. As a continuation of the endeavor, the city government further released the back end and data end codes of the city dashboard as open source this year. With the kicking-off of the 2024 Spring Season Taipei Codefest, a total of 209 individuals hailing from schools, private companies, and community groups have signed up to compete in the hackathon. The competition will pit top coding teams against each other, and we look forward to witnessing the exciting clashes co-create promising public services platforms, carrying forth the spirit of ‘Co-creation, Co-benefits’.