Ohyeon KWEON

For two decades, I’ve been building digital public squares in Korea—platforms, tools, and communities where citizens dialogue, deliberate, and act together.

I chair Parti Cooperative, Korea’s digital agora for civic dialogue and action. A social cooperative owned by its citizen members, Parti operates an integrated platform ecosystem across two missions.

The first is sustaining the digital citizens’ commons where civic life happens. Campaigns.do is Korea’s leading platform for citizen campaigning, fact-checking, and collective action. Mixon is an appropriate-technology platform that lets nonprofits and cooperatives build their own participatory spaces. Galaxy Vote, Star Talk, and Korea Talks are dialogue tools that visualize opinion landscapes and match citizens across differences for one-to-one dialogue.

The second is building governance solutions that connect citizens to decision-making. DemosX is a citizen-government collaboration platform enabling the full pipeline from citizen proposal to policy. It powers Democracy Seoul, Gwanghwamun 1st Avenue, and the Presidential Committee for National Cohesion’s public engagement platform.

These platforms are grounded in practice. For over a decade, we’ve convened up to twenty offline deliberations, living labs, and workshops every month. More than 215 public forums have reached 56,620 direct participants, alongside 5.4 million citizens across our digital platforms. Every tool we built was shaped by what we first learned in real rooms with real citizens.

I’m also an Organizer at Code for Korea. In 2020, I proposed and led the Mask App and Personal Safety Number projects—Korea’s most internationally recognized civic tech responses to COVID-19—for which we received the Minister’s Award from the Ministry of Science and ICT. In 2019, I co-organized Facing the Ocean, a civic tech network across Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.

Long before Parti, I helped build Agora at Daum—the online public square of Korea’s 2008 candlelight protests—and founded UFOfactory, a social enterprise serving 1,200+ nonprofits.

Today, I serve on Korea’s Presidential Council on National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (AI Democracy Division) and as an advisor to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety. Both Parti and I have received Presidential Commendations from the Government of Korea, with Parti recognized across government, civil society, labor, media, and academia.

One conviction has guided every chapter: the digital public square should belong to citizens. That’s what I’ve built, and what I continue to build.