vTaiwan

Democracy of Proposition
‍vTaiwan aims to go beyond political polarization, break out of echo chambers generated by social media, and reach a rough consensus among stakeholders. In contrast to “democracy of rejection” in which social movements are shaped by “negative coalitions or reactive majorities who can tolerate their own contradictions more easily, vTaiwan participates in the construction of a “democracy of proposition” where the social majority“ cannot be based on equivocation or ambiguity but presuppose a positive and deliberate agreement.The vTaiwan process was developed by drawing on world partners’ efforts in experimenting with new technology and the internet to facilitate public participation

Recursive Public and Coherent Blended Volition (CBV)
Participation in rulemaking has been a vibrant research topic for the past decades. Participatory rulemaking aims to facilitate the inclusion of individuals or groups in the design of policies. Riding on the advancement of technology, digital transformation in governments has not only digitized documents and papers but also opened up the government, achieved new levels of transparency, and allowed people inside and outside government to innovate on a shared platform. The vTaiwan process was developed by drawing on world partners’ efforts in experimenting with new technology and the internet to facilitate public participation. One of these projects is the Regulation Room (RegR), operated by the Cornell E-Rulemaking Initiative. RegR provides an online environment to facilitate public discussion and feedback on proposed federal rules. vTaiwan drew from the RegR’s goal to broaden participation and improve quality in rulemaking using technology. vTaiwan built on the valuable work of RegR and further designed itself as a recursive public that is open to transformation and reformulation. vTaiwan therefore empowers the public to define the topic of discussion, the agenda of how a topic is being discussed, and the tools used to facilitate the conversation. vTaiwan is run by the Coherent Blended Volition (CBV) of participants and contributors; this approach emphasizes a “conceptual blend” of diverse views by incorporating the most essential elements of the different perspectives into a coherent whole.
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The vTaiwan process consists of four successive stages: proposal, opinion, reflection, and legislation. There is no strict policy in the vTaiwan process to move from one stage to the next. The transitions between stages are decided by consensus from the vTaiwan community. This open format principle enables meaningful deliberation when all stakeholders are ready and willing to collaborate and iterate on solutions. The methodology of the participant-oriented agenda and rolling correction substantially engages citizens and public servants.
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Stage 1: Proposal Stage
‍vTaiwan hosts weekly mini hackathons, an online-offline open community taking shape as a hackathon, to welcome all opinions from all walks of life, including programmers, designers, public servants, journalists, scholars, legal specialists, students and so on. At the mini hackathon, contributors submit an issue to a competent government authority who has the choice to accept (be accountable for the issue) or refuse to open the proposal topic. An issue will not move into the vTaiwan process without a government authority being accountable for the issue and a facilitator taking charge of the issue. In this stage, open-source collaborative real-time text editors, such as Hackpad[6], serve the purpose of sharing notes taken at mini hackathons, meanwhile, tools for shared documents and media storage, such as SlideShare, are used by all stakeholders to inform themselves about the issue under discussion.
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Stage 2: Opinion Stage
‍After ensuring accountability, vTaiwan initiates the opinion stage to launch an online opinion collection. vTaiwan first conducts an online survey with stakeholders within the community’s network, who could potentially recommend other stakeholders in their network. Then, online opinion is collected using Discourse, Pol.is, Typeform, and Sli.do. Discourse, an open source discussion platform, enhances accountability by requiring competent authorities to reply to stakeholders’ comments within seven days. Pol.is facilitates open-ended engagement from large groups of people and clusters participants into opinion groups to illuminate the critical aspects of the topic in real time, using Principal Components.
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Stage 3: Reflection Stage
‍In this stage, the facilitator hosts an online-offline in-person consultation with stakeholders, including scholars, public servants, private sector representatives, and community participants. The layout of the physical meeting space is designed to promote participation and deliberation. The consultation is live-streamed and the facilitator simultaneously prompts the in-person discussion and relays the online discussion to the physical space. LIVEhouse.in and YouTube are the main platforms used to broadcast the live-streamed consultation. LIVEhouse.in also has a chat room for remote participants. The meeting starts with the facilitator giving a summary of the process so far. Presentations from the stakeholder groups follow. The facilitator uses digital note-taking to summarize information in real-time and document it. All information is displayed on the projector screen. The online discussion administrators actively monitor the feed for questions and comments on LIVEhouse.in. Videos are released on the vTaiwan Facebook page where more citizens continue to engage throughout the following weeks. The digital tools provide all citizens with channels to have a voice and participate online, overcoming the obstacles of time and space, enabling civic engagement, and allowing divergence and convergence of idea flow until consensus is reached.
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Stage 4: Legislation Stage
‍vTaiwan then moves to the legislation stage and presents the consensus on the policy or legislative solutions. In some cases, the issue is resolved with a guideline, a policy, or a statement by the competent authority. In other cases, it could be formulated into a draft bill sent to the Legislative Yuan.