vTaiwan

In the evening hours of March 18, 2014, a group of students occupied Taiwan’s parliament. Earlier that evening, behind closed doors, the Taiwanese government passed a controversial trade deal with China. A media watchdog group covering the news from the session shared the information, and it quickly spread online; soon the parliament was barricaded and surrounded by peaceful protesters. A local group of civic hackers called g0v (pronounced “gov-zero”) set up digital infrastructure to broadcast the proceedings from the occupied parliament to the nation. This was the beginning of the Sunflower Movement.

For 22 days, hundreds of thousands of people worked together to envision and demonstrate how an open, transparent decision-making process could function. They organized small group discussions and held public teachins in the streets, passing microphones to hear all voices and clustering sticky notes on poster boards to record divergent and convergent points. After half a million people on the street, plus many more online, had settled on a set of demands, students presented these to the government to illustrate a democratically derived decision.

The government took note. A few months later, government minister Jaclyn Tsai came to a g0v hackathon, and asked the civil society group to create “a process to allow the entire society to engage in rational discussion.” In two weeks, the vTaiwan platform launched. While not every radical’s perfect solution, it was an important step for the government to begin collaborating with civic hackers, and civil society at large, to run a digital rule-making process that involves diverse voices. A g0v participant, Audrey Tang, was appointed minister without portfolio by the Taiwanese government in 2016, taking on the unofficial English-language title of “Digital Minister.”

Democracy continues to be an active struggle in Taiwan, not just a legacy to be defended.

Rather than demonstrating for or against an issue, the critical intervention of those participating in the Sunflower Movement was to demonstrate how to facilitate collective sense-making—how to help large groups make sense of complex challenges democratically.

A generation of Taiwanese came of age in a democracy that was only as old as the internet. The island of 23 million people has been fighting for decades to protect its self-governance against incursions from mainland China. Taiwanese youth have also learned facilitation techniques from members of their parents’ generation who were veterans of the Chinese democracy movement. Internet connectivity is even more widely accessible than in the United States. But today, amid the rising global wave of autocracy and the consolidation of power by mainland China, Taiwan faces threats to its autonomy, just like many other Asian democracies. Pro-democracy protests were widespread before the pandemic, and democracy continues to be an active struggle in Taiwan, not just a legacy to be defended.

vTaiwan is not a singular application, and the platform does not only operate online. As an open community, vTaiwan runs a consultation process that brings together the relevant stakeholders around an issue. This process begins when an issue gets a certain threshold of votes on Join, a platform that lets anyone propose topics for deliberation. Issues can also be raised in person at weekly open sessions. Once an issue is identified, a facilitator agrees to steward the issue through the multi-step process.

Facilitators are trained volunteers. They gather facts from stakeholders, workshop the description of an issue, and share an initial set of varied position statements online. Tens of thousands of people can engage through a cardstyle interface that presents statements and offers the opportunity to respond with “agree,” “disagree,” “pass,” or “write my own.” vTaiwan uses a tool called Polis to generate visualizations that preserve minority and majority positions.

After this initial stage, a volunteer facilitator leads the stakeholder group through a series of open conversations to draft a proposition to legislators. Picture it like this: The facilitator stands in the center of a U-shaped seating arrangement. She wears a 360-degree live-streaming camera on her shoulder and holds a tablet that displays digital post-it notes from people across the country. Using dynamic facilitation, she organizes points by type and synthesizes points with high levels of consensus. This “facilitation as civic infrastructure” results in an effective deliberation that can swiftly settle deadlocked issues, such as how to sell alcohol online or regulate Uber. Since 2015, more than two dozen cases have been discussed through the vTaiwan process, and 80 percent of them have led to some decisive government action. This is a model that presents a direct alternative to partisan deadlock through a process of problem solving and listening.

By combining accessible technology with facilitation, vTaiwan lays out a blueprint for governance and democracy in the networked age. vTaiwan demonstrates a new means by which the public and government can work together openly to find solutions that satisfy the majority. It makes the dream of a responsive government and collective sense-making a reality, and it doesn’t require complex or expensive tools. Effective facilitation, transparency, and inclusive processes can synthesize thousands of diverse voices and take them from a sphere of heated debate to produce collective outcomes. The goal, according to Tang, is a society capable of “listening at scale.”