Digital Tools Open Up Taiwan’s Democratic Imaginations
Starting in 2015, an assortment of tools have reduced the costs of policy communication and made the process of negotiation more open and transparent in Taiwan.
Although there remain quite a few rooms for improvement, those endlessly creative digital tools have provided governments and communities with open spaces for policy discussion unconstrained by time or geographical limits.
Elements
Below we categorize these tools into four elements: Discussion, Survey, Transcript and Telepresence.
Discussion
Anyone can post a topic on the top section, and everyone else can post a reply in the bottom section, thereby forming a discussion thread. Forums such as Discourse are the most elementary tool.
Survey
This comprises online voting and visualization systems. It integrates everyone’s views, sort people with identical views into a group, while retaining non-mainstream opinions. The most prominent feature of Pol.is is its visual and structural expression of the trend in user-generated opinions.
Transcript
This offers multi-user online transcript editing while retaining a complete record of every edit. Participants can quickly go online to collect and organize data and coordinate affairs. After the Sunflower Student Movement, many government ministries in Taiwan have started to use Hackpad to communicate with the community.
Telepresence
LIVEhouse.in, YouTube, Rhinobird
Telepresence refers to the process of extracting on-site signal to online space and translating them back into on-site display. The process involves many technologies, e.g. video cameras, live-streaming platform, online chat rooms, digital whiteboards, and projection technology. The emergence of telepresence solutions such as LIVEhouse.in has enabled many people to take part in policy communication remotely and participate in discussions in the virtual space.
Systems
When the elements come together, they form stand-alone systems that enables government and communities to stimulate mutual ideas and generate spirited exchanges.
vTaiwan.tw
vTaiwan is an experiment in public participatory policy formation and making the legislating process transparent. The platform brings together discussion, survey, transcript, and telepresence tools together.
The operational method involves dividing the topics into five stages: namely, opinion, collection, discussion, proposal, draft, and finalized act.
During the 2015 Cyberspace Regulation process of the administration, vTaiwan played an important role as an exchange platform. For example, during discussions about the legalization of Uber and Airbnb in Taiwan, the vTaiwan platform generated a tremendous wave of civic participation.
join.gov.tw
The Join system is a public policy participation Internet platform launched by the National Development Council. Its aim is to make executive policy planning more open and transparent, to promote citizen participation and to strengthen communications. It hopes to catalyze a “partnership” between government and community.
The system has four areas: e-petition, public consultation, supervision, and contact a senior official. It incorporates the elements of discussion, survey, and transcript tools.
Members of the community not only can use the platform to put forward their own opinions about existing policy direction for the government to consider, but they can also propose their own policy from scratch. As long as a minimum number of users have seconded the proposal, the relevant ministry must issue a response.
As of this writing, the e-petition area has two community-raised cases. Both the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Health and Welfare have been required to respond officially.
(The latter case — an exemplar story of how Peggy Lo, a g០v hacker who became a fellow of the Ministry and turned its culture around — is told in the video below. [Mandarin only; not yet captioned])
