vTaiwan: An Empirical Study of Open Consultation Process in Taiwan

Summary

Launched in 2014, vTaiwan is an open consultation process that brings Taiwan citizens and government together in online and offline spaces, to deliberate and reach rough consensus on national issues, and to craft national digital legislation. This paper documents vTaiwan’s background, open consultation process framework, and the collaborative open source engagement tools used in vTaiwan. The UberX case study highlights vTaiwan’s open format and crowdsourcing characteristics as well as vTaiwan’s culture-a recursive public that shapes an interactive environment that is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through an evolving rough consensus. Aiming to go beyond its limitations and challenges, vTaiwan iterates on creating a feasible model of decentralized consultation for society.

Tags: Civic Participation Deliberative Democracy Human-centered Computing Participatory Design Policy-making Procedure