Gov Taiwan

= "g0v.tw is an online community that pushes information transparency, focusing on developing information platform and tools for the citizens to participate in society".

URL = http://g0v.tw/

Description

"g0v.tw is an online community that pushes information transparency, focusing on developing information platform and tools for the citizens to participate in society. Substituting the “o” with “0″ in gov, the new “g0v” not only stands for rethinking the role that the government plays from the bottom up, but also represents the world view of 0 and 1 in the digital natives generation. Based on the spirit of open source, g0v cares about freedom of speech and open data, writing code to provide citizens the easy-to-use information service. The transparency of information can help citizens to have a better understanding on how the government works, to understand the issues faster and to avoid media monopoly, so they can monitor the government more efficiently, and become involved in actions and finally deepen the quality of democracy."

(http://g0v.tw/en-US/about.html)

Discussion

Martin Rausch on Taiwan's digital democracy experiences:

"From Taiwan to the world

This lineage runs directly into the story of Taiwan. The civic tech community g0v took up the IETF’s “rough consensus and running code” almost word for word. Out of that community, and out of the Sunflower Movement of 2014, came a way of governing that Audrey Tang later brought into Taiwan’s cabinet, first as a minister without portfolio, later as the country’s first Minister of Digital Affairs. What makes Taiwan remarkable is not the ethos itself, but that it was translated into principles, roles, and structures that ordinary civil servants could work with.

It got there not by protest, but by demonstration. At the heart of the civic hackers’ approach lies a play on words: demonstrate, don’t just protest. A protest says what is wrong. A demonstration shows what could be right. The g0v community built alternative versions of government websites: replace the “o” in gov.tw with a zero, and you reached a clearer, more open version of the same service. Once it had been shown that the people affected could be brought into the room, and that a government could listen to thousands of voices rather than a few loud ones, it became hard to justify not doing so. Step by step, the exception became the default. Participation had become something the government could not not do.

The results are tangible. When Uber arrived and taxi drivers protested, Taiwan faced the same deadlock as cities around the world. Instead of letting the ministries argue, the vTaiwan process invited Uber drivers, taxi drivers, and passengers into an open online deliberation. The fierce initial conflict gave way to shared concerns: passenger safety, which 95 percent of participants agreed on, and a level playing field for drivers in both systems. These became the basis for a new rule, in place within months. In the United States and Switzerland, the same question was still being fought out in courts, legislatures, and cantons nearly a decade after Uber arrived.

During the pandemic, Taiwan kept its society open without ever imposing a full lockdown, relying instead on transparency, rapid feedback, and public trust. And when a petition on JOIN, the government’s participation platform, called the tax filing system “massively user-hostile,” the government did not defend it. It invited the complainers to help redesign it, and by the next tax season, a filing that had taken hours could be done “within a cup of bubble tea’s time.”

Behind these results stand a few principles. The most famous is Audrey Tang’s formula that participation in democracy should be fast, fair, and fun. Fast, because people need to see that their contribution matters. Fair, because every voice is heard and genuinely considered, not just the loudest or best connected. Fun, because people come with different amounts of time and energy, so participation needs many on- and off-ramps. Alongside these sits iteration: release a policy or service early, listen, improve, the way open source software evolves.

The principles are carried by structures. Every ministry appoints participation officers, civil servants trained to work with the public, who meet across ministry boundaries and connect the silos that normally keep government from seeing a problem whole. Supporting them is PDIS, the Public Digital Innovation Space: a small office of digital natives, many from the civic tech community, who are there to serve the participation officers.

And underneath both lie two commitments that any administration can learn from:

• Commitment without bullshitting the public. Taiwan’s practice was to share what is known, admit what is not, and correct itself publicly when wrong. This is running code applied to communication: the public can tell whether something works, and pretending otherwise destroys trust. It is also the answer to the defensiveness described earlier: an administration that admits mistakes openly and early leaves its critics little to attack.

• Involving the ecosystem. Government does not build alone. It builds relationships with civic hackers, NGOs, businesses, and citizens, treating them as contributors rather than as customers or subjects. This is where Audrey Tang’s formula of uniqueness times relationship becomes policy.

The result is what might be called agile and open government: an administration able to keep pace with a reality that moves faster than any procurement procedure.

These ideas are now traveling worldwide. In Finland, the innovation fund Sitra has hosted many assembly-like dialogues combined with online participation, as have PolisNL in the Netherlands and Agora in France. In Germany, SPRIND, the federal agency for breakthrough innovation, has launched a nationwide process to help cut bureaucracy in government. In California, the Engaged California platform has applied broad listening with people affected by the Los Angeles wildfires. Scotland is building its own digital democracy infrastructure. What these adaptations share is not a technology stack. It is a posture: administration as a participant in a living system rather than its commander."

(https://tomatlee493488.substack.com/p/no-kings-no-presidents-no-voting)

More information

• Finding Light Through the Cracks: Reinventing Democracy with Audrey Tang

by Martin Rausch, with Tom Atlee and Jenna Büchy

• Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy

by E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and ⿻ Community