rethinking democracy
vTaiwan is an experiment that prototypes an open consultation process for the entire society to engage in rational discussion on national issues.
Let's think and work together.
vTaiwan is an online-offline consultation process which brings together government ministries, elected representatives, scholars, experts, business leaders, civil society organizations and citizens. The process helps lawmakers implement decisions with a greater degree of legitimacy. It has various touch points such as a website (vtaiwan.tw), a combination of meetings and hackathons along with the consultation process. vTaiwan is also an open space, it is a combination of time and space run by participants to work on cases brought in.
As an open project, vTaiwan attracts people from multiple disciplines including law makers, public servants, developers, designers, writers, researchers, journalists, film makers and much more. Therefore, we contribute our skills in different ways. Here is a list of things vTaiwan contributors have been doing, go ahead and have look and see how you would like to contribute:
By the end of Feb, 2018, 26 cases have been discussed through the vTaiwan process, and 80% of them have led to some decisive government action.
vTaiwan hosted UberX case to discuss about Uber problem in Taiwan. More than 4000 participants crowd-sourced our meeting agenda for an open consultation meeting via 4 weeks of public survey on Pol.is. Uber agreed to vTaiwan’s coherent blended volition, and the administration pledged to ratify all the Pol.is consensus items into a new regulation
vTaiwan helped pass the FinTech sandbox act, the regulation that empowers financial technology field to conduct transparent, accountable small scale experiments that are currently unregulated by the law.
The devastating consequence of non-consensual intimate images (NCII) has recently been on the table around the globe, the community members and volunteers of vTaiwan all agreed this is a burning issue that we ought to examine. A Pol.is survey was launched during June 7th, 2017 to July 21st, 2017. Online discussion helped shelters the victims from exposure to include more stakeholders to preserve the diversity of viewpoints and experiences.
The vTaiwan process consists of four successive stages - proposal, opinion, reflection and legislation - supported by a selection of colloborative open source engagement tools.
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.
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.
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.
Join vTaiwan by join.g0v.today at channel #vtaiwan