A Genealogy of Korean Digital Democracy: From the Efficacy of the Square to Everyday Democracy

Ohyeon Kweon (Parti Social Cooperative)

May 2026

📖 Part 2 of this series: [The Next Chapter of the Square: The Democracy Korea Is Building in the Age of AI]

This article was originally published in Korean in Trends and Prospects (동향과 전망), №127 (Summer 2026), a peer-reviewed journal of the Korean Social Science Research Council, and republished at peacecode.net with minor factual updates and sourced endnotes. Part 2, “The Next Chapter of the Square,” continues this essay by asking where we should go from here.

1. Introduction: A Digital Democracy That Grew by Co-evolution

South Korea occupies an unusual position: a highly advanced information and communications infrastructure combined with a civil society that participates in politics with rare intensity. On this foundation, Korean democracy has developed a distinctive model in which the physical solidarity of offline squares and the technological connectivity of online spaces interact and co-evolve. Just as distinctively, the voluntary initiative of civil society and the institutional responsiveness of public bodies have influenced each other in both directions — not one-way — layering and upgrading the democratic system over time. Whenever a crisis or a major social issue arose, citizens gathered their energy across online and offline spaces, and used it to defend the constitutional order peacefully and to drive institutional innovation.

Yet Korean digital democracy now faces a new set of challenges brought by a changing technological environment. Social media and algorithmic feeds connect citizens quickly, but they also spread biased information, feed confirmation bias, and deepen post-truth dynamics. Algorithms optimized for platform revenue sort citizens into like-minded clusters — the echo chamber effect — fostering distrust of others and social isolation. With social media already driving extreme political polarization, the arrival of AI makes it even harder to be optimistic about democracy’s future.

Against this backdrop, this essay traces the evolution of Korean digital democracy through the lens of co-evolution, and seeks practical alternatives for overcoming the crisis of democracy in the age of AI. At a moment when advanced technology is reshaping the public sphere and policymaking, the question is how to redesign our institutions so that technology serves the public interest rather than being captured by commercial logic.

2. A Genealogy of Participation: Accumulated Efficacy and Evolving Symbols

At the base of Korean democracy lies a powerful sense of civic efficacy — the conviction, backed by historical pride, that collective solidarity can confront injustice and change the world. This efficacy was not formed overnight. At each turning point in the struggle for democratization, it found expression through different symbolic tools, and evolved with them. The forty-year arc can be summarized as a chronicle of civic maturation: from a struggle for survival against violent state repression, toward a solidarity that embraces diversity and acts peacefully.

The first evolution to note is the dramatic visual contrast in modes of participation. In the harsh era of resistance against the authoritarian military regime of the 1980s, the Molotov cocktail was both symbol and last resort — a desperate, violent language of resistance against the physical violence of state power. After democratization in 1987, and especially through the street cheering of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, Korean civil society redefined the meaning of the square. The millions who gathered voluntarily in 2002 experienced the release of enormous collective energy without violent confrontation, and internalized a new collective pride.

This accumulated, positive efficacy resurfaced at each subsequent moment of national crisis in the peaceful form of the candle. The candlelight vigils of the 2008 protests over U.S. beef imports, and the massive candlelight revolution of 2016 that led to a president’s impeachment, proved that the era of violent struggle symbolized by the Molotov cocktail had ended: nonviolent solidarity and peaceful expression had become Korean democracy’s settled method. Citizens in the square shared their flames with one another, and that light proved more powerful than any physical force.

Most recently, the symbol of participation has evolved once more — into the light stick. The appearance of colorful light sticks, borrowed from K-pop fandom culture, at political and social rallies is deeply telling. Unlike the collective actions of the past, armed with uniform slogans and a single ideology, the light stick represents a contemporary mode of participation: individuals who keep their diverse cultural tastes and personalities intact while forming a loose but powerful solidarity around a shared purpose. From the singular resistance of the Molotov cocktail, through the solemn solidarity of the candle, to the multicolored inclusiveness of the light stick — this visual evolution shows how far Korean democracy has matured into an ecosystem that respects heterogeneity and includes without excluding.

At every moment of crisis, Korean citizens have refused to remain passive objects, exercising instead a sovereign capacity to defend the democratic system itself. Whenever illegitimate power threatened the constitutional order, citizens built voluntary networks of cooperation and protected democracy. This persistent chronicle of pride and efficacy became the psychological and cultural foundation for the digital-democratic innovations that followed.

3. From PC Networks to Civic Tech and the Digital Civic Square: The Expanding Public Sphere and Online–Offline Co-evolution

The history of Korean digital democracy is a process of co-evolution in which the agenda-setting power of virtual space pulled the physical square forward, and citizens grew from consumers of information into active producers. The digital public sphere played the decisive role of explosively amplifying the dynamism of the offline square.

• Emergence (1990s) — PC-communication networks (Hitel, Chollian). Breaking the information monopoly of legacy media; anonymous individuals form a culture of horizontal online debate on public issues.
• Expansion (2000s) — Daum Agora and independent online media. Rise of citizen journalism. Online opinion feeds offline rallies, which in turn reinforce online discourse — the full-fledged online–offline co-evolution.
• Experimentation (2010s) — civic tech (Parti, Code for Korea, and others). Civic Tech takes hold. Citizens move beyond discussion to set agendas, organize dialogue, and solve everyday social problems with technology — a practical experiment in platform democracy.
• Inflection (present) — global social media and video platforms. Enormous reach, but algorithm-driven consumption deepens confirmation bias and polarizes the public sphere.

In the early-to-mid 1990s, the arrival of PC-communication networks — the text-based online services Hitel and Chollian, Korea’s equivalents of the BBS era — gave Korean society an unprecedented experience of horizontal debate. Offline society still carried the residue of military rule and Confucian hierarchy, but inside the blue terminal screen, anonymous individuals shed the hierarchies of age, occupation, and gender and spoke freely. It was the beginning of a migration of media power: the agenda-setting function monopolized by newspapers and broadcasters began to move into citizens’ hands.

In the 2000s, the explosive spread of broadband and the arrival of Web 2.0 gave birth to a vast digital square: Daum Agora. Agora was more than a channel for collecting opinion; it served as a staging ground where citizens organized petitions and consolidated political will. Voluntary political fandoms such as Nosamo (the grassroots supporters’ community of the politician Roh Moo-hyun) demonstrated how online debate could shake the dynamics of real-world politics. During the 2008 candlelight protests, discussions that began on Agora flowed into crowds of hundreds of thousands in Seoul Plaza — a landmark demonstration that the digital public sphere and the physical square could synchronize to set the national agenda. Alongside this, OhmyNews pioneered citizen journalism under the banner “Every citizen is a reporter,” and Daum Blogger News (later Daum View), which championed “media democracy,” brought blog journalism into bloom, distributing the agenda-discovery function of legacy media to ordinary citizens.

Daum Agora in the late 2000s — an impeachment petition signed by nearly 1.5 million citizens, and the 2008 candlelight marches under the flag ‘Agora, the sacred ground of debate.

The Daum View sign-up page — “I am the media”; “Become the protagonist who changes the world” (2000s).

Entering the 2010s, the public sphere leapt toward becoming an infrastructure of everyday democracy. Joining a global wave of democratic innovation around 2015, the social cooperative Parti began building a “digital civic square” where citizens converse and act on a daily basis as protagonists in solving social problems. Starting from a practical ecosystem in which citizens opened their own campaigns — from animal rights to political reform — Parti poses social issues as questions, draws out citizens’ collective answers through online voting and debate and through offline citizen dialogues of many formats, and provides an arena where citizens solve problems directly with public-interest data and civic technology. Through education and gatherings both online and offline, it also sustains a community in which citizens connect their experiences and grow together. The aim is an enduring, influential ecosystem of everyday democracy, in which citizens tend and build the digital civic square themselves as citizen-owned public infrastructure.[1]

The public sphere also took a practical leap with the rise of Civic Tech — technological approaches that help citizens and government communicate and solve public problems. In Korea, civic tech began in the early 2010s alongside the open-government movement, and it evolved to a new level during the national crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As a nationwide mask shortage pushed public confusion to its peak, activists from Parti proposed on February 24, 2020 that the civic hackers then building COVID-19 services jointly demand standardized public data released through open APIs. On March 4, seventeen civic hackers, including Parti’s chair Ohyeon Kweon, formed the “COVID-19 Public Data Response Team” and submitted a formal proposal to the government’s Gwanghwamun 1st Street platform. The government chose to open its data rather than build apps itself, releasing public mask inventory data on March 10. Within about five days, roughly a hundred mask-inventory apps and web services were voluntarily launched by the private sector.[2] This collaboration soon consolidated into Code for Korea, and became a historic proof that citizens gathered in the public sphere had evolved beyond shaping opinion into practical agents who solve social problems directly with technology. The same phenomenon repeated itself after the December 3, 2024 declaration of martial law, when citizens in and around the squares voluntarily built a wave of digital services for their fellow citizens.

This current has a fairly distinct starting point. In July 2012, Codenamu — an open community formed by activists from Creative Commons Korea and the Web Science Workgroup — held an open data camp. Reporting at the time recorded it as the first open data gathering Korean citizens had organized for themselves: some fifty developers and designers, one overnight, eight public-interest services. One of them was Ansim Hospital, which put antibiotic and injection prescription rates on a map so that citizens would have a basis for choosing a neighborhood clinic. What the camp exposed was not only the promise of the technology but the barrier of the data. Because public institutions did not release their information in a form outsiders could use, participants spent more time reshaping data into something usable than building the services themselves. That December they made four asks in public: open it so it can be used from outside; standardize formats, units, and terms; build an ecosystem for the people who make things with it; and prime the pump. The following year the Act on the Promotion of the Provision and Use of Public Data was enacted, taking effect in October 2013, and open public data went on to become the ground of Korea’s open government movement. The order is worth recording: institutions did not open first with citizens following behind — citizens asked first, and the institutions followed.

A second institution settled into place in the same period. The Framework Act on Cooperatives, enacted in January 2012 and in force that December, broadly opened a legal form through which citizens could own an organization together. It is the reason Parti, launched three years later, could take the cooperative form at all. If the public data act opened the information, the cooperatives act supplied the vessel of ownership — the two conditions for a digital civic square to grow were laid side by side in 2012–2013.

Today, however, Korea’s digital public sphere is passing through a serious inflection point. The square-like functions once anchored by domestic portals have fragmented, and global mega-platforms such as YouTube and Facebook have taken over the public sphere. These platforms offer planetary connectivity and formidable mobilizing power, but beneath them lies the blind spot of commercial algorithms: provoking anger and hatred lengthens time-on-platform and increases ad revenue. The structure inevitably produces confirmation bias — feeding people more of what they already believe — corroding healthy deliberation and splitting society into extremes. This paradox of the digital public sphere is a loud warning: when technology fails to recover its public character, it can turn into a threat to democracy itself.

4. Institutionalizing Citizen Participation and Collaboration: The Co-evolution of Citizen Initiative and Institutional Response

The democratic aspirations that erupted in the squares and online communities did not dissipate as one-off rallies or passing waves of opinion. The real strength of Korean democracy lies in having absorbed this fragmented participatory energy into the formal systems of state administration and politics. The institutional evolution runs along a continuous line — e-People → the National Petition → Democracy Seoul → Gwanghwamun 1st Street → Everyone’s Square — a process of public–civic co-evolution in which the quality of participation deepened from simple complaints, to setting major agendas, to direct policy design and deliberation.

• e-People (2005–). Consolidated scattered complaint channels into a single system and made handling procedures transparent, raising administrative accountability.
• Blue House National Petition (2017–2022). Required senior officials to answer petitions that gathered a threshold of public support, institutionalizing citizens’ agenda-setting power.
• Gwanghwamun 1st Street & Democracy Seoul (2017–). Linked online proposals to offline forums, introducing a multi-layered deliberation model where citizens, experts, and civil servants discuss policy together.
• Public mask apps (2020). A public–civic collaboration model: government open data combined with private development capacity to solve a national crisis rapidly.
• Everyone’s Square (2026–). A pan-government citizen participation platform, applying different deliberation formats depending on the issue — a multi-layered civic collaboration platform.

The institutional starting point was e-People (2005), Korea’s integrated online petition and complaints system. Complaints and grievances once scattered across ministries, or lost behind bureaucratic walls, began to be received within a single administrative system. Most importantly, the system imposed a duty of accountability: agencies had to respond transparently and within deadlines. It marked a decisive shift from supplier-centered administration to citizen-centered administration.

The second stage was the Blue House National Petition (2017), which expanded the political public sphere by carrying citizens’ direct democratic aspirations straight to the highest office. Under its rule — any petition gathering 200,000 signatures within 30 days receives an official answer from the presidential office — citizens could set the national agenda without passing through the press or the National Assembly. Over nearly five years, about 1.11 million petitions were posted, 285 crossed the response threshold, and cumulative visitors reached roughly 515 million — raising issues from the protection of vulnerable groups to gender and the reform of powerful state agencies.[3]

The third stage moved beyond raising issues to citizens participating directly in the design and execution of policy — the stage of deliberation and governance. The representative cases are Seoul’s Democracy Seoul (now “Sangsang Seoul”) and the central government’s Gwanghwamun 1st Street. The first Gwanghwamun 1st Street, run for 87 days from May to July 2017, received 180,705 policy proposals, of which 167 were adopted as national policy tasks; it was made permanent as the Open Communication Forum in May 2018 and integrated into an online platform in January 2019.[4] Democracy Seoul, opened in October 2017, goes beyond answering proposals: once a proposal gains sufficient support, experts, civil servants, and citizens deliberate together (50 endorsements trigger a department answer; 500 open a public forum; 5,000 forum participants trigger a direct answer from the mayor). By early 2020 it had received about 5,963 citizen proposals, 59 of which became city policy.[5] This propose–deliberate–implement process elevated citizens into active policy designers, generating deliberation close to daily life — signage for assistance-dog access, debates on flexible school start times, fertility-treatment subsidies, protections for stray cats in redevelopment zones, and more.

Image: The three-stage model of Democracy Seoul — from citizen proposals and Seoul city proposals, through deliberation and decision, to implementation

As a technical proof of sovereignty, the public mask apps of 2020 remain the high-water mark of public–civic collaboration. As described above: Parti activists proposed open-API standardization to civic hackers on February 24; the seventeen-member response team submitted a formal proposal via Gwanghwamun 1st Street on March 4; about two days later, on March 5, the government decided to open the data and began building the API, releasing sales data for some 23,000 pharmacies at 7 p.m. on March 10. From March 5, the day the decision was made, more than 200 developers gathered in a Telegram channel and, working alongside the government’s API development process, poured out roughly a hundred mask-inventory apps and web services within about five days — contributing decisively to calming a national panic.[6] The episode proved that in contemporary digital democracy, citizens are not passive beneficiaries of public services but agents of innovation who plan and build public digital infrastructure themselves. The collaboration then settled into a lasting civic-hacker community, Code for Korea, which continues today.

Image: Timeline of the 2020 public mask data release — from the infectious disease alert of Feb 23 to API service improvements on Mar 14.

As one waypoint in this stream: over the past decade, Parti has run more than 1,200 citizen campaigns with a cumulative 1.8 million participants, held more than 1,000 offline citizen forums, and collaborated with more than 1,500 partner institutions and organizations in operating the digital civic square.[7] In particular, Parti DemosX, the open-source civic collaboration platform developed from the operating experience of Democracy Seoul, has been adopted by Busan’s “I’m in Busan,” the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education’s “Seoul Education Communication Square,” and other governments and institutions — becoming a de facto standard for Korean civic collaboration platforms. This illustrates a defining feature of Korean democracy: civil society has not remained a mere user of government platforms, but has designed and operated the infrastructure itself, building citizen-owned public infrastructure.

The most recent development, Square of All — a pan-government platform being launched in 2026 — extends this line into an integrated, government-wide attempt. It goes beyond a bulletin-board suggestion box: depending on the nature and weight of an issue, it flexibly deploys town halls, citizen dialogues, large-scale debates, deliberative polling, and citizens’ assemblies — a multi-layered civic collaboration platform. It is the process by which citizen demand for participation and governmental innovation breathe together, settling participatory and deliberative democracy into everyday governance.

Figure: The operating structure of the multi-layered civic collaboration platform.

5. The Threats of the AI Era and the Tasks of Digital Democracy

Despite this positive interaction and institutional progress, the early internet’s promise of “openness and connection” has been distorted inside the monopolistic profit structures of mega-platforms — and the rapid spread of AI now raises challenges of a new order. With echo chambers produced by the revenue-driven algorithms of a few dominant platforms already reproducing conflict and hatred and badly eroding social trust, the new AI technologies portend post-truth, homogenization, and black-box dynamics.

First, finely crafted synthetic media and algorithmic targeting obstruct voters’ rational judgment and entrench post-truth politics through the spread of disinformation. Second, as AI-generated synthetic data is recursively fed back into training the next generation of models, diverse and exceptional opinions are lost and outputs converge toward the average — the phenomenon of model collapse — which can shrink social diversity and homogenize public opinion. Third, as AI spreads into public decision-making, the black-box problem — the difficulty of tracing an algorithm’s reasoning — threatens the transparency of administration and risks distorting democratic procedure. And with a handful of giant technology firms monopolizing data and AI models, both citizens and governments that have lost control are losing the capacity to fix any of it.

For Korean digital democracy to keep co-evolving across online and offline, civic and institutional spheres — and to keep turning new technologies into possibilities, as it has before — a paradigm shift is required, centered on digital sovereignty, democratic AI, and digital commons.

First, to escape dependence on particular platforms and capital, digital sovereignty must be established. This means more than storing data on domestic soil: it is the normative authority of civil society and communities to exercise real control over how data is collected, processed, and used.

Second, to check technological bias, the concept of democratic AI must be introduced: participatory governance structures in which citizens take part directly in the planning and operation of AI models, audit their ethical standards, and ensure social values are reflected in technical design.

Ultimately, the data accumulated through citizens’ everyday activity, and the AI infrastructure trained on it, must be treated not as the private property of particular firms but as digital commons. Only when the gains of technology are fairly shared across society, and an open environment gives everyone access to innovation, can democracy respond effectively to the concentration of technological power.

6. Conclusion: Three Tasks for Defending Democracy in the Age of AI

This essay has traced the trajectory of Korean digital democracy from the PC networks of the 1990s to the multi-layered civic collaboration platforms of 2026, through the lens of co-evolution between online and offline, citizens and institutions. Civil society entrenched a culture of peaceful solidarity running from the Molotov cocktail through the candle to the light stick, and built real governance — from demanding open public data to deliberating policy — that goes far beyond the expression of opinion.

But at a moment when AI and algorithms reach deep into opinion formation and policymaking, overcoming information bias and technological monopoly — and securing the quality of democracy — requires three core tasks.

First: build citizen-led public digital infrastructure, accumulating civic space and social capital. We must escape total dependence on commercial platforms and create an independent, safe digital ecosystem where citizens use public data and discuss and solve social problems directly. This must be built not as yet another government system but as citizen-owned public infrastructure — a structure that does not shake when governments change, that resists capture by the logic of capital, and in which civil society is the designer and operator. Through it we can reconnect fragmented individuals and thicken the social capital — trust and solidarity — on which democracy stands.

Second: institutionalize multi-layered, online–offline civic collaboration platforms that produce real change. Beyond one-off opinion gathering, we need standing structures of public–civic governance in which proposals pass through deep deliberation — deliberative polling, town halls — and flow back into actual policy. Co-evolution must be guaranteed in law, institutions, and technology so that participation is not merely procedural but changes citizens’ daily lives; civic collaboration systems must be anchored as basic social infrastructure that cannot be shaken by the arbitrary judgment of whichever government is in power.

Third: strengthen transnational civic networks against technological monopoly. Solidarity efforts such as Facing the Ocean (FtO), where civic hackers from Korea, Taiwan, and Japan meet, should be expanded — sharing each country’s innovations in digital democracy and building a common line of defense against the influence of global platforms.[8]

Technology must ultimately be designed and used to advance the public good and human autonomy. Drawing on the accumulated experience of healthy interaction between online and offline, citizens and institutions, Korean digital democracy can overcome this new crisis and offer a signpost for sustainable community — if we reconstruct the digital environment as a field of solidarity under citizens’ control.

All of this now stands before a new crisis. Consensus itself is shaking; algorithms are splitting the square; AI offers to deliberate in our place. Where do we go from here? Part 2 takes up that question.

→ [The Next Chapter of the Square: The Democracy Korea Is Building in the Age of AI]

Notes

1. Founded in 2015 as a small experiment in democracy platforms, the social cooperative Parti has grown into a social platform cooperative operating a digital civic square where citizens converse and act daily — led by its crew members and supported by citizens. parti.coop.
2. Korean Wikipedia, “Public mask apps”; Korea Policy Briefing, “How citizen developers’ ideas became the public mask apps” (Aug 14, 2020). The key dates — Parti activists’ proposal to civic hackers (Feb 24), formation of the COVID-19 Public Data Response Team and submission to Gwanghwamun 1st Street (Mar 4), the government’s decision to open data and begin building the API (Mar 5), the data release (Mar 10, 7 p.m.), and the launch of ~100 mask services by mid-March — are cross-confirmed in government and press records of the time.
3. Blue House announcement (Apr 2022) and Kyunghyang Shinmun, “The Blue House National Petition closes its doors” (May 9, 2022). The platform ran from Aug 19, 2017 to May 9, 2022: about 1.11 million petitions, 285–286 passing the answer threshold (200,000 signatures in 30 days), roughly 515 million cumulative visitors.
4. Korean Wikipedia, “Gwanghwamun 1st Street,” and Korea Policy Briefing records. The first run (May 25–Jul 14, 2017; 87 days) drew 180,705 proposals, about 1 million visitors, and 167 adoptions as national policy tasks; the Open Communication Forum opened May 4, 2018, and the integrated online platform launched Jan 31, 2019.
5. Seoul Metropolitan Government press release, “Democracy Seoul reorganized — the mayor answers when 1,000 gather” (Feb 2020). From its opening in Oct 2017 to Feb 2020: 5,963 citizen proposals, 59 adopted as policy. The staged structure — 50 endorsements for a department answer, 500 for a public forum, 5,000 forum participants for a mayoral answer — was revised in Mar 2020 (e.g., participatory-budget linkage at 1,000+).
6. Korea Policy Briefing, “How citizen developers’ ideas became the public mask apps” (Aug 14, 2020); Code for Korea (ed.), The Public Mask White Paper (mask.codefor.kr; beta, 2021) — the civic-hacker community’s first-hand record of the week-long collaboration, in which some 300 civil servants, citizen developers, and companies took part. The collaboration begun by civic hackers later developed into the standing community Code for Korea. Ohyeon Kweon, chair of Parti, received a Presidential Commendation in 2021 for his work on the COVID-19 response, under the Government Performance Evaluation citation.
7. Parti internal tally (as of June 2026): 1,200+ cumulative campaigns; 1.8 million cumulative campaign participants; ~100,000 average monthly users; 1,500+ partner organizations; 1,000+ offline citizen forums over ten years, at times more than 20 per month. Parti received a Presidential Commendation in 2026, under the ICT Service Merit citation, for building a citizen-led digital civic square and for supporting citizens’ self-organized digital activity during and after the 12·3 martial law crisis — the Revolution of Light (빛의 혁명). parti.coop.
8. Facing the Ocean (FtO) is an East Asian civic-tech exchange network begun in 2018 by civic hackers from Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Parti and Code for Korea are core participating organizations.

Originally published in Korean at peacecode.net.