(highlight:: That may sound much like any other online forum, but two things make Pol.is unusual. The first is that you cannot reply to comments. “If people can propose their ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll,” Tang says.

“The opposing sides had never had a chance to actually interact with each other’s ideas.”
The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to generate a kind of map of all the participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps.
“The visualization is very, very helpful,” Tang says. “If you show people the face of the crowd, and if you take away the reply button, then people stop wasting time on the divisive statements.”)
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(highlight:: > If vTaiwan’s recommendations are ignored, the process runs the risk of being viewed as “openwashing.”
That the government isn’t required to heed discussions on vTaiwan is the system’s biggest shortcoming. Jason Hsu, a former activist and now opposition legislator who helped bring vTaiwan into being during the Ma administration, calls it “a tiger without teeth.”)
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vTaiwan is one of dozens of participatory governance projects around the world listed on CrowdLaw, a site run by the Governance Lab at New York University. Most of them, says Beth Noveck, the lab’s director, suffer from the same problem: they’re not binding on governments, which means it’s also hard for them to gain credibility with citizens. Still, she says, Taiwan’s experiment is “a step in the right direction.” It’s “far more institutionalized” than what’s been seen elsewhere, she adds
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Taiwan does have a newer participatory governance system that is getting more traction. Join, also overseen by Audrey Tang, is a platform for hosting and debating online petitions, again using Pol.is to create consensus. She describes it as a vTaiwan within the government—“basically the same … process, but with senior career public servants instead of g0v volunteers” at the heart of the platform.
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(highlight:: Although petitions on Join still aren’t legally binding, any government agency that agrees to participate in a deliberation must, if the petition gets more than 5,000 signatures, give a point-by-point response explaining why it agreed to or rejected the proposal. Five of Taiwan’s cities or counties are testing Join; the aim is ultimately to roll it out nationwide, Tang says.
Join tends to attract a broader, older, and less tech-savvy range of users than vTaiwan. The advantage of this, says Tang, is that it doesn’t tackle only digital-economy issues, as vTaiwan does, but a wide variety of questions, “like whether we should build a hospital in the southmost part of Taiwan, in Hengchun, or whether the first publicly open marine national park should ban fishing.” The downside is that there’s more resistance from the government bureaucracy. Senior public servants “need some hand-holding,” she says, to be able to see people who comment online as “not protesters or mobs, but actually people with distinct expertise.”)
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(highlight:: Here too, the consensus-building tendencies of Pol.is can lead the discussion in unexpected directions. Initially, opinion on the caning issue was divided into three camps: besides the people who were for and against caning, a third group argued that it was too light a punishment for such offenses.
Eventually, however, the consensus opinions that emerged had nothing to do with caning at all, but were more focused on methods of preventing those crimes. At the time of this writing, proposals being considered for legislation included alcohol locks and confiscating drunk drivers’ cars.
This suggests people had concluded that, in fact, “To cane or not to cane?” was the wrong question to ask. That kind of realization, and solution, wouldn’t have emerged from a traditional online petition that only gives people the option of voting yes or no.)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: That may sound much like any other online forum, but two things make Pol.is unusual. The first is that you cannot reply to comments. “If people can propose their ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll,” Tang says.

“The opposing sides had never had a chance to actually interact with each other’s ideas.”
The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to generate a kind of map of all the participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps.
“The visualization is very, very helpful,” Tang says. “If you show people the face of the crowd, and if you take away the reply button, then people stop wasting time on the divisive statements.”)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: > If vTaiwan’s recommendations are ignored, the process runs the risk of being viewed as “openwashing.”
That the government isn’t required to heed discussions on vTaiwan is the system’s biggest shortcoming. Jason Hsu, a former activist and now opposition legislator who helped bring vTaiwan into being during the Ma administration, calls it “a tiger without teeth.”)
- View Highlight
-

vTaiwan is one of dozens of participatory governance projects around the world listed on CrowdLaw, a site run by the Governance Lab at New York University. Most of them, says Beth Noveck, the lab’s director, suffer from the same problem: they’re not binding on governments, which means it’s also hard for them to gain credibility with citizens. Still, she says, Taiwan’s experiment is “a step in the right direction.” It’s “far more institutionalized” than what’s been seen elsewhere, she adds
- View Highlight
-

Taiwan does have a newer participatory governance system that is getting more traction. Join, also overseen by Audrey Tang, is a platform for hosting and debating online petitions, again using Pol.is to create consensus. She describes it as a vTaiwan within the government—“basically the same … process, but with senior career public servants instead of g0v volunteers” at the heart of the platform.
- View Highlight
-

- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Although petitions on Join still aren’t legally binding, any government agency that agrees to participate in a deliberation must, if the petition gets more than 5,000 signatures, give a point-by-point response explaining why it agreed to or rejected the proposal. Five of Taiwan’s cities or counties are testing Join; the aim is ultimately to roll it out nationwide, Tang says.
Join tends to attract a broader, older, and less tech-savvy range of users than vTaiwan. The advantage of this, says Tang, is that it doesn’t tackle only digital-economy issues, as vTaiwan does, but a wide variety of questions, “like whether we should build a hospital in the southmost part of Taiwan, in Hengchun, or whether the first publicly open marine national park should ban fishing.” The downside is that there’s more resistance from the government bureaucracy. Senior public servants “need some hand-holding,” she says, to be able to see people who comment online as “not protesters or mobs, but actually people with distinct expertise.”)
- View Highlight
-

(highlight:: Here too, the consensus-building tendencies of Pol.is can lead the discussion in unexpected directions. Initially, opinion on the caning issue was divided into three camps: besides the people who were for and against caning, a third group argued that it was too light a punishment for such offenses.
Eventually, however, the consensus opinions that emerged had nothing to do with caning at all, but were more focused on methods of preventing those crimes. At the time of this writing, proposals being considered for legislation included alcohol locks and confiscating drunk drivers’ cars.
This suggests people had concluded that, in fact, “To cane or not to cane?” was the wrong question to ask. That kind of realization, and solution, wouldn’t have emerged from a traditional online petition that only gives people the option of voting yes or no.)
- View Highlight
-