We dream of a consensus-based politics - but vTaiwan is using digital tech, as well as comfy meals, to make it happen
From Technology Review article, “The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws”
We have covered the amazing e-democracy developments in Taiwan, called vTaiwan, directed by the digital minister Audrey Tang (once a protester), over many months on this platform.
But we are delighted to find this very clear write-through (the BBC Click show from which it’s adapted is embedded at the end) from Demos’s digital guru Carl Miller (also author of The Death of the Gods: the new Global Power Grab.)
What’s useful here is that Miller has done some detailed reporting on two instances of its process - which aims to find consensus - in some detail: on regulating Uber, and on e-vehicle regulation.
Miller sets it up here:
[The Taiwanese] designed a new process that people from across political divides could join and express their views. But crucially, the process had to produce a consensus that the government could turn into new laws and regulations.
Their creation was called vTaiwan - with the "v" standing for virtual - a platform where experts and other interested parties can deliberate contentious issues.
It works by first seeking to crowdsource objective facts from those involved.
Then users communicate with each other via a dedicated social media network called Pol.is, which lets them draft statements about how a matter should be solved, and respond to others' suggestions by either agreeing or disagreeing with them.
Once a "rough consensus" has been reached, livestreamed or face-to-face meetings are organised so that participants can write out specific recommendations.
The platform's first test was to regulate Uber.
The ride-hailing service was expanding quickly in Taiwan, angering the traditional taxi industry as the US firm did not require its drivers to have a professional licence or the same type of insurance, and was not paying the same taxes as local firms. Customers, however, enjoyed cheaper fares and added convenience.
To break the deadlock, vTaiwan invited groups from across the debate to join its online space.
Pol.is lifted everyone out of their echo chambers. It churned through the many axes of agreements and disagreements and drew a map to show everyone exactly where they were in the debate.
Image copyrightVTAIWANImage captionThis screenshot shows the Uber dispute's deliberation process under way on Pol.is
A number of different groups, with different attitudes, emerged. Taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers, and other passengers formed four poles in the corners of the map.
There was no reply button, so people couldn't troll each other's posts. And rather than showing the messages that divided each of the four groups, Pol.is simply made them invisible.
It gave oxygen instead to statements that found support across different groups as well as within them.
"Change the information structure," Colin Megill, one of its founders, told me, "and you can tweak power".
Technically, the tweak was small, but politically its effect was enormous.
Rather than encourage grandstanding or the trading of insults, it gamified finding consensus.
Image captionThe vTaiwan process is designed to help participants identify common ground and use it as a basis to resolve disagreements
"People compete to bring up the most nuanced statements that can win most people across," Tang told me.
"They spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue."
This screenshot shows the Uber dispute's deliberation process under way on Pol.is
The debate continued and as people drafted more nuanced statements Pol.is showed that the four groups had became two.
"Invariably, within three weeks or four," Tang told me, "we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements, most of the time."
After a month, "consensus items" emerged, that enjoyed near-unanimous support.
One, with 95% support across all groups, read: "The government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to improve their management and quality control systems so that drivers and riders would enjoy the same quality service as Uber."
In July this year, I saw vTaiwan in action on another disruptive technology - e-vehicle regulation.
The process had reached the final meeting stage and organisers had made efforts to put attendees in a co-operative mood.
The room was softly lit, everyone ate food together and the only issues on the table were those Pol.is had already identified as those that most people agreed with.
This was completely different from simply asking them to vote via an app. vTaiwan gave participants the agenda-setting power not just to determine the answer, but also define the question. And it didn't aim to find a majority of one side over another, but achieve consensus across them.
As divisions were turned into consensuses, the government could act. New regulation was passed allowing Uber to operate with licensed drivers, and regular taxis to use apps.
And after Uber, it has been used to set the agenda for 11 pieces of law and regulation, with eight more waiting to be voted on, on everything from the regulation of online alcohol sales, fin-tech regulation to new laws on revenge pornography.
Miller makes the point at the end that vTaiwan hasn’t really taken on “an issue of real, national division, much less one that is already entrenched. And there are still fears that an online process could exclude less digitally savvy groups.”
From one of our previous articles on vTaiwan, we recovered these thoughts from one e-activists about how they might even begin to phrase a discussion on Taiwan’s death penalty laws:
It was decided that to facilitate a productive conversation on the death penalty issue, the topic would be structured as: “imagine alternatives to the death penalty”—not “discuss the pros and cons of the death penalty”—which would hopefully open the floor to discussion, not fights.
And we’d draw your attention to our posts showing a range of digital and social initiatives aimed at reducing polarisation in public discussions.
To end, here’s the BBC Click report from Carl Miller: