VTaiwan

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vTaiwan is a Taiwanese online platform run between the Taiwanese government and citizens of Taiwan for the creation of consensus and the discussion of recommendations in enacting legislation.

Citizens of Taiwan can use the vTaiwan platform to crowdsource debates and recommendations over important issues and to draft proposed legislation for the country's government. The platform was created in 2015 by the g0v community as part of the Sunflower Student Movement, and is currently run as a collaboration between the government and the public.

Origin

Citizen participation in Taiwan has developed significantly since democratic reforms were enacted after the end of martial law in 1987; however, the government lacked an open consultation platform to incorporate the opinions and discussions of both the public and the private sectors in national legislation. The first direct presidential election was held in 1996, around the same time the Internet started to take off within the country. Until the Sunflower Movement in 2014, activists could only participate in public deliberations and consultative processes; mass citizen participation in decision-making processes was uncommon. vTaiwan was one of the projects developed following the Sunflower Movement in 2014 in response to the need of an open consultation platform for the public deliberation of nation-wide legislation.

vTaiwan was originally developed by the g0v (a civic hacking community) initiative. In December 2014, the Minister without Portfolio of the Executive Yuan, Jaclyn Tsai, requested g0v to create a platform for open consultation processes that would allow all levels of society to participate in the law-making process. According to Tsai, the idea behind the initiative was that in today's pluralistic society, Taiwan needed a mechanism to incorporate many different voices into rational discussion of national legislation efficiently. This challenge was then accepted by the g0v hackathon; vTaiwan was then created by g0v volunteers, and it is now run by citizens and maintained by g0v.

The core tool adopted by vTaiwan's website is pol.is, which provides a platform for anyone interested in any given public issue to draft statements on solutions and recommendations for them. The platform is designed such that people can also reply to other participants' proposals by showing that they agree or disagree. When there is no consensus on a certain issue, consultation meetings are held via livestream, inviting related ministries, academics, private sectors, all stakeholders, and online community participants, during which participants can voice their opinions. All livestreams are recorded according to the principles of openness and transparency. g0v volunteers have also built up a transcription infrastructure which creates transcripts online, leaving them open to everyone to review after the meetings.

The vTaiwan approach is claimed to create an environment that allows citizens to participate in the deliberation process; it aims at avoiding polarising disputes while allowing for citizens to speak up in the communication process. With digital technology, vTaiwan is shown to serve as a collaborative platform for government and civil society to reach a rough consensus among participating stakeholders. A study by Hsiao et al. in 2018 shows that the culture of vTaiwan adheres to the implementation of collaboration, open-source and transparency, which creates an environment of mutual trust, understanding, self-organisation, and distributed responsibility.

Process

The four stages in the vTaiwan process are proposal, opinion, reflection, and legislation. Transitions between these stages are based on consensus of the vTaiwan community, as there is no strict policy on when each stage should proceed. There is at least one facilitator to guide each vTaiwan case through the entire process.

Stage 1: Proposal Stage

Mini hackathons, which are held weekly by the vTaiwan community, are online-offline meetings that are open to all where contributors can submit an issue or concern to a competent government authority. The authority can choose to accept, thus being accountable for the issue, or reject opening the proposed topic. An issue will be entered into the vTaiwan process only if a government authority is willing to be accountable for that issue, with a facilitator taking charge of it. Digital tools used in this stage are Hackpad and SlideShare for note-taking, document-sharing and media storage.

Stage 2: Opinion Stage

The opinion stage will be initiated by vTaiwan after ensuring accountability. Opinions are collected by conducting online surveys with stakeholders within the community’s network, who can potentially recommend other stakeholders. There may be one or several rounds of online surveys, each round lasting for at least one month, and there are no limits to the number of rounds. Discourse, Pol.is, Typeform and Sli.do are the main digital tools associated with this stage. The responsible competent authority is required to reply within seven days when cued by moderators on Discourse. Ministries can cue other ministries to enable cross-ministry conversation. Pol.is, meanwhile, is used to illuminate critical aspects of the issue by analysing opinions from large groups of stakeholders into opinion groups in real-time, using Principal Components Analysis and K-means clustering.

Stage 3: Reflection Stage

Online-offline in-person consultation, with the participation of stakeholders including scholars, public servants, private sector representatives and community participants, are hosted by the facilitator and are live-streamed to allow remote participation. In-person discussions are prompted and online discussions are conveyed to the physical meeting by the facilitator simultaneously. Information in both real-time and documents are summarised digitally and displayed on the projector screen while online questions and comments are monitored by online discussion administrators. YouTube and LIVEhouse.in are the main broadcast platforms for the live-streamed consultations; the vTaiwan Facebook page will also release the archived videos to allow continuous online engagement to take place.

Stage 4: Legislation Stage

A consensus on policies or legislature solutions will be presented by vTaiwan. The issue can end in two ways; they may be either resolved with a guideline, a policy, or a statement by the competent authority, or formulated into a draft bill that will be sent to the Legislative Yuan. The government may agree to bind its action to the reached consensus or provide a point-by-point explanation of the infeasibility of those consensus points.

Previous cases

Since vTaiwan first launched in 2015, 28 cases have been introduced onto the platform (as of May 2022). Below are several hallmark cases discussed on the vTaiwan platform.

Uber (2015-2016)

Uber’s arrival in Taiwan brought along controversies and challenges to the current legal regulations, as well as revolts from the existing carpooling market. An “Uber case” proposal was thus introduced onto the vTaiwan platform in July 2015. From July 15 to August 15 2015, around 4500 stakeholders and the general public voiced their opinion on the regulation of Uber through Pol.is. Two weeks later, on August 27, a public meeting with academic, industry experts, online users, and representatives from four main stakeholders (namely, The Association of Taxi Drivers in Taipei, the Taiwan Taxi taxi fleet, Uber Inc, and government agencies such as the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and the Ministry of Finance) was held to discuss the recommendations generated from the Pol.is system. The proposals that emerged from the process were then developed into a draft bill. The proposal was later adopted in the form of amendments to the Regulations for Automobile Transportation Operators in October 2016.

Airbnb (2015-2017)

Often considered a model of sharing economy, Airbnb is an online marketplace that connects people who want to rent out their homes with people who want short-term accommodations in specific locations. The legality of a part of the short-term rental services offered on Airbnb was under debate in Taiwan, with stakeholders and the public voicing their concerns over the licensing, safety, and taxation of the listed rental properties. After being introduced to the vTaiwan platform, the case of Airbnb was discussed through Pol.is from September 1 to 27 2015, with online users voting on whether Airbnb should comply with the same regulations the Taiwanese hotel and homestay industry does, and the mechanisms through which they would comply with said regulations if so. On October 1 2015, a public meeting with experts and stakeholders including representatives from Airbnb Inc. and the Tourism Bureau of Taiwan (under the Ministry of Transportation and Communications) was convened. In the meeting, participants reached the consensus that relevant regulations should be more comprehensive. A year later, on November 14 2017, amendments to the Regulations for the Management of Home Stay Facilities were made.

Open Parliament (2020-2021)

As part of the effort to participate in the global Open Government Partnership (OGP) movement, which aims to promote a transparent government, anti-corruption, civil engagement, and digital governance, the Legislative Yuan worked to draft an Open Parliament Action Plan. To understand Taiwanese citizens’ expectations of the Action Plan, the Executive Yuan Open Government National Action Plan Taskforce crowdsourced public opinion on this issue through vTaiwan. The proposal of this case was brought onto the vTaiwan platform on August 3 2020, with the period of the “Opinion Stage” being set from August 5 to 31. Throughout this process, three focus groups around Taiwan and four livestream panel discussions were held. After August 31, the collected public opinions were reported back to the Taskforce to inform the drafting of the Action Plan. Two open reviews for the initial drafts subsequently took place on September 30 and October 30 of 2020. In January 2021, the Legislative Yuan officially debuted the Taiwan Open Parliament Action Plan, scheduled to run from January 2021 to May 2024.

Relationship with the government

The Taiwanese government requires each responsible ministry to hold an account on vTaiwan, and must respond to citizens' comments within seven days. The usage is promoted by the National Development Council, the Digital Minister and one of the core contributors of vTaiwan, Audrey Tang. It uses a “top-down” model for officials to post the draft of a policy onto the platform, and it serves as a means to collect opinions from the public. The citizens remain rather passive throughout the process as the proposals are mainly raised by the government officials on the platform. The platform is managed by civil groups without funding or guidelines from the government, and is mostly limited to issues about the digital economy by the Tsai Administration, which may be due to the main audience of the platform being more comfortable with the digital platform.

Criticisms

Procedural problems

One criticism of vTaiwan is that as authorities are not committed to legitimise any decisions made by vTaiwan, it has not been granted sufficient economic and political support and legitimacy, both of which are essential for a digital platform for political participation in a participatory democracy. The degree of political decision-making power granted to a platform’s participants depends on whether they can make meaningful input to the policy-making process. The lack of a “propose” button on the platform is also said to considerably constrain citizen empowerment. Another related criticism is that the consensus-analysing method of Pol.is, which allows voters choosing among “agree”, “disagree” and “pass” in response to the statements that other participants have contributed, is based on majoritarian logic, which may be construed as being anti-democratic.

Binding power of vTaiwan

Up until 2018, vTaiwan has been used in the decision making of more than 26 legislation drafts, 80% of which are decisive governmental acts. Despite its influence, however, conclusions made on vTaiwan are not mandatory for officials, and thus it has been described as a “toothless tiger”, as the government would not be censured for not accepting suggestions produced from vTaiwan.

Political influences

Some also criticise that the Taiwanese government has been less interested in discussing issues on vTaiwan since 2018. vTaiwan is considered “not [to be] a huge priority” by the governing Democratic Progressive Party, according to Karen Yu, a former legislator from the DPP under President Tsai Ing-wen. As the Taiwanese government launched a new platform called Join in 2018, which in contrast to vTaiwan bears the legitimacy of being managed by the government, the platform is relatively lacking in authorization in this public-private partnership.

See also

• Open government
• g0v
• Open Government Partnership
• e-participation

References

This article "VTaiwan" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:VTaiwan. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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