A former student passed along this story about Taiwan’s approach to building more trust between citizens and the government. It just so happens that I’m part of a panel proposal for the Association of Internet Researchers conference that includes a researcher, Misti Yang, who is researching Taiwan’s approach. I would imagine I’ll learn much more about this situation from Misti, but for now I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts about this particular writeup.
When Taiwan’s government experienced a breakdown in trust with citizens (a situation that came to a head during the Sunflower Revolution), it turned to “civic hackers.”
Taiwan’s civic hackers were organized around a leaderless collective called g0v (pronounced “gov zero.”) Many believed in radical transparency, in throwing opaque processes open to the light, and in multi-stakeholderism, the idea that everyone who is affected by a decision should have a say in it. They preferred establishing consensus to running lots of majority-rule votes. These were all principles, incidentally, that parallel thinking about how software should be designed — a philosophy that g0v had begun to apply to the arena of domestic politics.
g0v thought the problem in Taiwan was linked to a disconnect between politicians and the public – there was no clear way of gauging public sentiment and no good way of crafting some kind of consensus. Social media spaces, unsurprisingly, were of little use, since their algorithms (built on “engagement”) amplify more extreme content that increases division. So, they built a new digital space:
The hackers’ answer was called vTaiwan. (The “v” stands for virtual.) A mixed-reality, scaled listening exercise, it was an entirely new way to make decisions. The platform invites citizens into an online space for debate that politicians listen to and take into account when casting their votes. Government would start a new vTaiwan process on a political question it was deliberating, and Taiwanese people from across the full spectrum of opinion would join one another to discuss it online.
But vTawain wasn’t just a replication of corporate social media platforms. Instead, it used Pol.is, a platform that essentially amplifies consensus building statements and hides trolling and flaming. The focus is on finding points of agreement.
My initial response, before knowing too much about the intricacies of Pol.is, is that this searching for consensus might come at the expense of important counter arguments. Consensus can often mean just this: the silencing of opinions that are important but have perhaps not gained enough traction or political momentum to get a foothold. I’ll be interested to learn more about how Pol.is navigates this problem.
