Article in the [[MIT Tech Review]] that explores a few of the platforms [[Taiwan]] has used to experiment with [[internet]] [[democracy]].

In summary: New tech platforms [[pol.is]], [[vTaiwan]] and Join show promise, but lack the political back-up power required to have real influence. (Offers a counter to the optimism of [[From Globalization to a Planetary Mindset]].)

Further research: [[Palladium]] is a new magazine based on "[[governance]] [[futurism]]" and may hold more insights. [[Audrey Tang]], [[Taiwan]]‘s Minister of Technology(?), keeps coming up in these discussions and seems like someone worth investigating.

“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.”

Quotes§

It was late in 2015, and things were at an impasse. Some four years earlier, Taiwan’s finance ministry had decided to legalize online sales of alcohol. To help it shape the new rules, the ministry had kicked off talks with alcohol merchants, e-commerce platforms, and social groups worried that online sales would make it easy for children to buy liquor. But since then they had all been talking past each other. The regulation had gotten nowhere.

That was when a group of government officials and activists decided to take the question to a new online discussion platform called vTaiwan. Starting in early March 2016, about 450 citizens went to vtaiwan.tw, proposed solutions, and voted on them.

vTaiwan relies on a hodgepodge of open-source tools for soliciting proposals, sharing information, and holding polls, but one of the key parts is Pol.is, created by Megill and a couple of friends in Seattle after the events of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011. On Pol.is, a topic is put up for debate. Anyone who creates an account can post comments on the topic, and can also upvote or downvote other people’s comments.

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 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.

Within a few days, the voting had coalesced to define two groups, one pro-Uber and one, about twice as large, anti-Uber. But then the magic happened: as the groups sought to attract more supporters, their members started posting comments on matters that everyone could agree were important, such as rider safety and liability insurance. Gradually, they refined them to garner more votes. The end result was a set of seven comments that enjoyed almost universal approval, containing such recommendations as “The government should set up a fair regulatory regime,” “Private passenger vehicles should be registered,” and “It should be permissible for a for-hire driver to join multiple fleets and platforms.” The divide between pro- and anti-Uber camps had been replaced by consensus on how to create a level playing field for Uber and the taxi firms, protect consumers, and create more competition. Tang herself took those suggestions into face-to-face talks with Uber, the taxi drivers, and experts, which led the government to adopt new regulations along the lines vTaiwan had produced.

Filed in: [[Literature Notes]]