Digital Democracy

Taiwan’s Experiments with E-democracy: Can AI be good for democracy? Taiwan has been experimenting with digital democracy for a decade. In this week’s Prosthetic Gods Nir and J review the advantages and disadvantages of using electronic tools for citizen participation in politics. And we also talk about the Harris Zoom rallies and the Google anti-trust case. Tools for Citizen Participation: Taiwan has experimented with two platforms for engaging citizens in collaborative policymaking, vTaiwan and Join. vTaiwan uses the online deliberation system Pol.is to map opinions and promote consensus views, and it has been used on issues such as drafting Uber regulations. https://info.vtaiwan.tw/ https://pol.is/home https://congress.crowd.law/case-vtaiwan.html On join.gov.tw, Taiwan’s citizens can file petitions, and when they gather 5,000 signatures, ministries hold face-to-face discussions about them. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9530852 Former digital minister, Audrey Tang https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2024/05/22/audrey-tang-learning-from-taiwans-digital-civic-experimentation/ Citizen Tech NGOs: g0v (gov-zero): The civic tech community in Taiwan that collaborates with the government to create open-source tools for transparency and citizen participation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G0v