# Civic Tech Meets DAO: Lessons from Japan's Largest Digital Public Goods Community | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 24:13
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-KbMl1CGelHw
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbMl1CGelHw

## Description

Code for Japan, Japan's largest civic tech community, is implementing DAO concepts and Ethereum coordination mechanisms to enhance its decentralized structure and sustain open-source projects. This talk explores our journey in applying on-chain governance to an established volunteer-based community, highlighting our approaches to contribution visualization and project support using NFTs and QF. We'll share key challenges, solutions, and learnings from bridging web2 and web3 in civic tech.

Speaker(s): Hal Seki
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Coordination
Keywords: DAO, Quadratic Voting, Public good, plurality

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

thank you for coming to my session uh I'm very honored to be here for sharing our story about Civic Tech by the way so before starting the uh please raise your hand how many of the people know the term Civic tech oh very few good uh so uh I'm founder of cod for Japan and running Civic Tech Community in Japan and Civic Tech is a global movement transform government transforming government citizen relationships through technology and Community the we have both uh two phases the one phas is for the collaborate with the government uh to Foster open government initiatives like promoting open data or open source software or or or doing hackathon with them and to to know that to understand what kind of Civic innovation is enabl and also we have we facilitate citizen Le projects like uh citizen participation for uh change for improving the society or cities uh often uh organize the uh the kind of the the participatory uh experimental project with the citizens it called living loves and also uh provide some participatory policymaking platform or something and also uh encourage we encourage students to start new projects for solving local issues uh organizing haathon or or we have specific projects for solving social issues like uh gender equality or anti- disinformation and so on so the key point is that we use the digital public goods for or infrastructure for uh for enabling this PO side Communications and uh so so digital public goods is created by the communities and also created by the government we utilize th those of the ideas to facilitate Civic Innovation and in Japan there are four types of stakeholders like a central government or private sectors or local government and Academia so uh for the central government uh we work with them uh through the Outsource uh sometimes we do outsourced work from the government or we send some uh Tech developers or technologist to the become Our member of the government committees and also there are private sector it is important uh and there are big tech companies or social startups or G Tech startups or non nonprofit organizations so we ask funding simply for to this big tech companies and also we work with the social startups or nonprofit organizations and and also also we promote open source software or open data to these private sectors and the local government is really important for us uh because Civic Tech literally the citizens can do something with the local govern government so we facilitate to build the local communities or uh become uh some sometimes the the the uh uh technologist become fellows to the Civic uh local government and as Academia uh we uh we provide kind opportunities for of the students in intercept or use Civic engagement processes and and so on so we have those kind of stakeholders and uh code for Japan's role is uh uh facilitate Civic Tech in Japan and my our vision is Sy together create together and we have three pillars of activities mainly one uh we Foster uh digital democracy and we build uh digital public goods and also we facilitate Cien n projects and those three uh under those P we have many projects uh and right now we have more than 8,000 members on our SL workspace and also we have uh more than 20 core members uh paid staff and also we have n 19 plus brigades brigades mean the local code for Community like a code for saporo or code for Osaka and we have Grassroots communities and connect those uh for uh facilitate the uh to start new things uh I started Cod for Japan uh 11 years ago and we or we have been organizing the uh more than 65 times monthly hackathons and we have multiple government Partnerships let me show some examples from the uh digital public goods part and this is a DDM the soft Ware uh open source software for the citizen participation processes the uh this is created by the originally created built by the uh Barcelona city government but this is open source so that we translated this software into Japanese and also provide the uh those instances to the local government uh like City kakogawa cities or k is City and the the in Japan citizen engagement tools are beginning to be used in a wide range of fields both of the public and private sectors so right now Cod of Japan is providing such uh uh for providing those software for cities to encourage uh citizens to participate the policymaking processes and also we have as I said uh uh we have 19 plus Regional Civic Tech communities uh each communities have the different uh format of activities they organize hackathon with the local government or local just local communities or have some experimental project with them so we connect those those communities and and and try to uh create create the digital INF digital public goods infrastructure and one of Key activities of us is the social HCK day this is the monthly hakon just one day hakon and and we everyone can join not including non- tech people uh the in in the beginning of the event the the uh project owners uh will pitch their ideas or existing project and ask help uh for the to by the participants so each participant can choose which project they you want to join and and after joining uh forming the teams that team will work together and and at the end of the event uh they will uh share what uh what what Improvement has done on the event and this is the legary uh regular hakon so that people don't need to build the new new new projects every time they just they can bring their existing project and people join and help to improve this is uh this hackathon is not a competitive hackathon that collaborative hackathon and from that activities there we have so many projects uh this is part of the project list our project list and I at on this stage I I don't have time to explain details but uh uh uh some of the projects are very active but some of the projects are already quiet and some of the some of the projects have been released uh publicly so uh so this uh from this uh so from the hackathon event we uh some citizens create the projects and uh some projects uh uh actively developed and but still we have uh many challenges as a uh Civic Tech Community uh sustainability is issue or and also impact and adapt adaption is also issues and and also technical social issues like uh uh yeah we have uh funding model is very difficult uh currently the in Japan uh there is not much uh uh Foundation helping the this kind of the uh new uh form of activities so that so we earn revenue from the government and spend those revenues to the community side and so creating sustainable Civic Tech EOS system is very important challenge to solve and also growth management is difficult uh maintaining quality with scale uh it's very uh difficult for to manage by the voluntary just voluntary groups so we need some kind of solution for gloss managing managing growth and also impact side the the government integration we is still uh still difficult uh bureaucratic resistance to open source is strong in Japan and and the procurement system is not does not fit with this uh kind of open- source software and Civic engagement and we there are digital literacy gaps between Generations or sectors and Technical problem is uh technical challenges also we have uh yeah recently technology evolution is quite rapid so we have to catch up to uh to understand the new uh new uh challenges like AI governances or privacy protection so and also social Innovation side we have to uh we need to uh have a way to measure real social impact this is very important to uh to expand uh our community to the other stakeholders but and also we have uh we we can see the future Trend and opportunities uh for example AI can be used for uh making better policy discussions and the right side images uh from the uh recent election in Japan uh the some uh researchers uh Illustrated visualized and clustered opinions from the uh citizens and all so that this kind of soft Ware is widely used in Japan uh not widely used started by started you uh yeah this uh for example talk to the city or police is the software uh that we used and also we maybe we can enhance a policy participatory platform like this and so second one is a perfect perfectly match with this conference so we want we have been building the uh digital public goods so maybe uh connecting to web3 ecosystem we can build some some of sustainable funding models or com how we can enhance communities work by uh creating incentive mechanisms and also we can uh find we want to expand the Civic Tech uh close border collaboration so maybe from this uh conference maybe we can uh have new uh projects together let me show some examples of our project and we uh organized a matching donation Sy project using simple Grant this is the open source software uh for uh doing the uh qu quadratic funding uh donation so uh we we selected the 18 Civic Tech project projects from community and listed uh this those projects and asked funding from the to to uh the publicly and the result uh we uh we prepared uh $615 us as a matching pool and and we collected uh ,200 us do from uh around a 100 unique donors this is not uh this is still small amount of the donation but we uh we understand how the CTIC funding Works uh and and Next Step would be uh we can we will run more rounds and we want to expand stakeholders uh like uh government people and and also uh we uh we accept we want to merge the the this mechanism with the token donation the simple grants is uh using the credit credit card donation so uh we want to expand this more and last uh project I want to share is toang uh this is uh the kind of the Dow tool simplest way for contribution recording and RSE distribution and key challenges from our activities from da Dow daish Civic Tech communities uh we have three main programs like uh track tracking our works it's annoying actually uh track so Civic Tech Community is a Civic Tech project is U mostly the uh open open source uh Community like uh work so uh contribution measurement is bit difficult uh if it is only the development side uh maybe the we can track record by the uh GitHub commit report commit record but the uh Civic Tech Community Civic Tech project requires many tasks other than the development so uh and also we often forget to report completed work and also uh reward for long-term contribution uh is uh important for making sustainable Community uh which makes people to motivate uh to be motivated and but uh it's hard to secure funding if the project is on the early stage uh and also chores go unnoticed there are so much unvisible work and how can we reward those efforts it is is uh that is one one point I want to we want to solve and also on boing rather is uh also ke key and so many people can join easily because it's it's open but actually it's difficult to join without help understanding the community uh understanding the community is uh takes time so uh we need to uh create uh we need to have a better uh onboarding processes and yeah so uh that why we started toban toban is a role based reward system so uh the those features we toan has this kind of features uh it offer offers effective Ro management this is not a task based system Ro based uh project owners can assign and manage responsib the effect efficiently and also track contributions from the uh contributors use P2P token transfers to record even small contributions and and we said uh toban can uh be uh used by to set fair re uh determine RS based on role and time engaged and also quick distribution toan can distribute rers swiftly uh to large groups we use the we are using the hats protocol uh like this and so uh the roles can be distributed to some people uh and also that people can that assigned uh that people can assign their role to the this to subgroups so that uh the role will be distributed to the contributors and after getting some rewards uh like a treasury or or revenues from the uh project uh the project owners can distribute that the uh rewards to the uh contributors so uh this this can be used not only for the cic communities we we for example the uh so maybe toan can be used for The Residency program housekeeping or essential workers additional bonuses so uh yeah uh but this is just beginning uh if you are interested in please join us uh there we have the GitHub report and and we started TG group and there is a lead developer so please talk to us and yeah that's all mainly but we have many use cases let's solve real world problems with us thank you very much all right uh do we have any questions for hell uh in the audience we do have some time to take a few questions you have any question you can use Mic you guys okay we do have one how you tackle the crossborder payment oh it's good question so uh I think this is for the uh simple grants program uh we accept right now current currently we just accept credit credit card uh donation so but uh maybe we we can expand our program to the Token donation so so that to crossb uh donation uh to to enable crossborder donation and also uh we uh want to uh yeah uh we actually we uh participated uh to the G Bitcoin around and maybe we can mix that kind of the solutions all right uh we do have one question here hi um this is matali I actually wanted to ask you how one of the challenges you mentioned was bureaucratic resistance to open source MH and say especially in countries that have authoritarian governments how how do you propose um one can like navigate through these challenges good question thank you very much so we have yeah we have been uh convincing them the government people to use open- Source software uh but the we need to explain the the value uh about uh using open source software not only the technical side but also the uh why uh they have to care about this so and one of the reason they uh accepted is the the efficiency cost cost efficiency because in Japan there are uh 1,741 local government cities and if each city is built the uh their Solution by scratch it takes so much cost but it's happening in Japan so I explained uh and demonstrated to build the software as a uh some uh to we we actually we built the covid-19 dashboard for Tokyo Metropolitan government and we published that source code on the on GitHub and accept the uh issues and pro requests after that many people contributed to uh the improving the soft to improve software uh and and also other prefectures uh used the software and same software and using their data uh to visualize the covid-19 situation so so such kind of demonstration was really uh useful to explain why government have to uh choose open source license all right I think we can take these two questions are there any advices or hard-learned lessons you want to share to people who want to establish this kind of initiative oh so hard Lear lessons could be people uh it's very very difficult to keep uh long contributions from everyone uh people have no time to uh keep contributing to the uh Civic Tech Community actually I'm a founder of cod for Japan but no one still working with me uh as the initial uh members