More About vTaiwan
Makers, bloggers, thinkers and other contributors have helped us tell the story of vTaiwan in their eyes. See how people in touch with us help us describe what vTaiwan is.
Tom Atlee featured vTaiwan in his blog
The face-to-face stakeholder conversations are intentionally diverse, professionally facilitated and, when preceded by a pol.is process, grounded in the differences and consensus statements that arose from that process, usually requiring point-by-point responses. And an interesting leading edge of vTaiwan development is the use of 3D cameras in live-streamed stakeholder dialogues to allow observers with appropriate apps to immerse themselves in virtual reality representations of those conversations.
Also, two interesting points raise the quality of personal pol.is engagements into the realm of conversation. First, pol.is was designed to eliminate the tendency of online comment forums to degrade into mutual trolling, while allowing full expression of creative ideas and rational discussion. Second, research shows that in many cases when a participant registers a “disagreement” with someone’s statement, they shortly thereafter submit a statement of their own that provides a solution to their underlying concern. Thus, even without the direct interactivity of conversations and comment forums, pol.is nevertheless evokes dialogic and deliberative “communication acts” among its participants in which they are influenced by each other’s perspectives.
More about vTaiwan, read the blog posts Tom published.
Christian Svanes Kolding directed a video for vTaiwan
In a tumultuous time where the utopian visions once offered by social media seem to have been subverted into systems of oligarchic power, while trust in institutions and government is at a historical tipping point, how does one build a platform for millions of users to create new avenues for meaningful dialogue? In short, how does one design for trust? These are the challenges that g0v (gov zero), a collective of activists, coders, designers, scholars and ordinary citizens, took on four years ago in taiwan and in response, they created vTaiwan. Conceived in collaboration with the government, vTaiwan is a digital platform and a civic deliberation process for shaping legislation. By in essence creating a virtual public commons, it revitalizes the way citizens engage with their government, and how governments engage with their citizens. Through its transparency, which results in a greater degree of public trust and legitimacy, it offers a template for online discourse that is still in use to this day and applicable across the world.
More about vTaiwan, watch the video Christian directed.