Disfactory: mapping and reporting illegal factories in Taiwan

May 25, 2021 from 3:40 pm to 3:50 pm

Speaker: Yun Chen (g0v.tw community, Taiwan)

Part of the Empowering communities using geospatial technology session of TICTeC Show and Tells 2021
Tuesday 25th May, 15:00 – 16:00 BST
Zoom

Disfactory is a crowdsourcing platform that enables citizens to report illegal factories on farmland in Taiwan, aiming to decrease pollution and accidents.

Within 10 months, Disfactory has received more than 1,500 reports and filed over 200 official documents to local governments, resulting in the demolition of seven illegal factories and around 150 more being placed under examination. This is out of an estimated 55,000 illegal factories across Taiwan.

In response, government agencies have allocated more resources to inspections, along with a clearer policy implementation agenda and open data in machine readable formats; and land brokers and factory builders are using Disfactory to convince stakeholders to comply with regulations.

Disfactory was initiated in a g0v.tw hackathon by Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan (CET), a small crowdfunded environmental advocacy CSO without any prior web development knowledge. Over time the project has attracted a core developer team of around 12 volunteers and more than 40 community contributors to weekly meetups across four countries.

The current product is an integration of an anonymous and convenient reporting interface, data visualisation and a CRM system that automates filing and tracking official documents to the governments to scale up crowdsourced reporting.

Yun discusses the key factors, UX methods and product development strategies used in iteration, including both the positive outcomes and the less successful aspects of the project.

Links: Yun-Chen’s presentation slides

https://disfactory.tw https://about.disfactory.tw