Louise Pomeroy

On March 18, 2014, a large crowd seethed around Taiwan’s parliament. Protestors fought off guards and kicked the doors of the building open, streaming onto the parliamentary floor. Thousands more surrounded the building as an occupation began – one that stretched from hours into days, then weeks.

That moment, when the power of the parliament was pitted against mobilised crowds willing to risk arrest or violence, would later be known as the Sunflower Student Movement. Yet for the citizens not only of Taiwan, but of polarised and weakened democracies everywhere, what happened next might be more important. In the wake of the movement, an experiment began. It was an attempt to better unite parliament and crowd, changing how government listens to its citizens, and makes decisions. An attempt to reinvent democracy itself.


One of the people in the crowd that evening was Audrey Tang. She had begun coding at the age of eight by typing on a keyboard drawn on a piece of paper. At 14, she had dropped out of school to learn about technology, and then spent time in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur before returning to her native Taiwan in her thirties. Joining a collective called G0v – “gov zero” – she’d become an activist whose worldview was interwoven with technology. For most of her life, Tang had been active in a global community of engineers, tech workers, officials and NGOs that had formed to work out rules to govern the internet. Owned both by everyone and no one at the same time, the internet needed a new politics, and this community called it “multistakeholderism”. The idea was that anyone could have a seat at the table as long as they were animated by transparency, willingness to listen and consensus-finding, in order to bring together the different tribes of the internet.

These people called themselves “civic hackers” and, from 2012 onwards, they’d moved from the politics of the internet itself to using the internet to open up mainstream politics. Yet as G0v started grappling with Taiwan’s politics, they found that it was opaque, fractious and deaf to civic society – the opposite of multistakeholderism.

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The spark for the Sunflower Student Movement was a trade bill that was seen by protestors as a step towards uniting Taiwan with China. The movement eventually derailed the bill but, to the civic hackers, it was only the symptom of a deeper malaise: there had been no consensus, no listening. The ruling party had tried forcing the bill into law simply because it had the votes to do so. That opened up questions that had nothing to do with trade. Why hadn’t the government listened? Was there a better way of doing things?

After the Sunflower Student Movement, something astounding happened. A government representative asked G0v for help. The government wanted to listen, and stop anything like the Sunflower Revolution from happening again. Civic hackers were asked to step into power. Members of G0v joined the government to form a new team, called the Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS). Tang went from civic hacker to Digital Minister of Taiwan.


Civic hackers thought that elections were simply not enough. Two-way votes held years apart didn’t allow information to flow easily from citizens to government. Likewise, not enough information flowed out of government about what they actually were doing and why. Direct democracy didn’t work either: referendums often split society, and simply showed a government that the country was divided. Something different was needed.

Civic hackers thought the internet could be part of the solution, but in Taiwan – like everywhere else – it seemed to be part of the problem. Online politics was polarised. It made people angry and bombarded political leaders with lobbying and abuse. The internet created only heat and noise, and gave citizens no way to express preferences the government could act on.

Their answer to the government’s request was to create a new kind of political process. They wanted to allow citizens to not only vote on questions posed by the government, but also control what questions were asked in the first place. And they wanted these questions to be based on attitudes held in common across Taiwanese society rather than on its divisions. They called the process vTaiwan.

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It came out of the G0v hackathons, developed by volunteers, but attended and listened to by government officials. Through constant tweaking, they worked out a set process, partly technological, partly face-to-face, that could be started by government on a specific question. It had to be open for anyone to join, and could only work if people were involved with skin in the game from all sides of any particular question. But it also had to create concrete outputs that the government could turn into new laws.


They knew that online discussions would most likely attract the younger, digitally savvy crowds first, so vTaiwan was at first mostly used to debate questions of technology regulation: “should Uber be allowed?”, or “should alcohol be available to buy online?” Whatever the question, vTaiwan sought to design away the incentives for trolling and abuse and move political debate closer to internet-powered governance: transparent, inclusive and, above all, consensus-seeking.

One evening in mid-July 2019, I saw vTaiwan in action. Citizens gathered around tables in a softly lit room, together with officials from the Ministry of Transport. The issue was electric vehicle regulation. Many had arrived on Segways and e-scooters – vehicles that the government deems illegal – but there wasn’t any shouting. Everyone – government, riders, e-vehicle sellers, pedestrians – had come to talk about what they had in common with each other. This debate was face-to-face, but the people in it had already been drawn closer to each other: vTaiwan had already used an online debate to identify what G0v call “consensus items” – statements many people across most groups broadly agreed with.

Votes on vTaiwan are aggregated to show clusters of consensus

On any usual social media platform, the opposite would more likely be true. Those platforms are engineered to keep you on the site, and this usually means serving up content that provokes the strongest emotions – either zealous agreement or spluttering outrage. People would focus on the most polarising statements. Using the Internet to pull people together rather than split them apart requires designing an environment very different from the usual online forums for political debate, such as Twitter or Facebook.

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To do that, vTaiwan used a platform called Polis, the creation of a team of technologists and former activists based in Seattle who aim at turning online debating on its head. “We wanted a comment system to be able to handle large populations and stay coherent,” says Polis co-founder Colin Megill, “to make it easier to successfully decentralise power in organisations of all kinds.” Like any social media, it allows participants to share their feelings and to agree or disagree with others. But as they do so, the platform draws a map of the debate, and shows everyone where they are in it. In the case of the debate on electric vehicles, for instance, two knots of people with similar views had emerged: one that wanted e-vehicles legalised today, another worried about safety.

“When people started using Polis, we found that it became a consensus-generating mechanism,” Megill says. To bring the groups closer together, Polis has reengineered many of the features we take for granted on social media. No reply button – hence no trolling. No echo-chambers, replaced by an attitudes map showing you where you are in relation to everyone else. The platform does not highlight the most divisive statements, but gives more visibility to the most consensual ones. The ones that get attention are those that find support not only in one cluster, but across other groups, too.

“People compete to bring up the most nuanced statements that can win most people across. Invariably, within three weeks or four, we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements,” Tang says. “People spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue.”

This technological change exposes a deeper human truth: on most issues, there might be half a dozen points of bitter division, but 20 or 30 of broad unity. The trick is to make these more visible.

“[Social media] mostly divides people. But the same technology can also be designed in a way that allows people to converge and form a polity,” Tang says. vTaiwan has allowed citizens to sidestep the gruelling divisions that define online politics. vTaiwan didn’t necessarily try to resolve the areas of bitter disagreement, but instead to forge a way forward based on the numerous areas most people agreed on.

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Since 2014, the government has repeatedly asked for vTaiwan to be used to find consensus where none seemed to exist. Groups both supported and rejected caning for drunk drivers, but – rejecting the government’s phrasing of the question – eventually united around how to prevent drunk driving in the first place. In another instance, vTaiwan found that both groups in favour of and against changing Taiwan’s timezone were keen for Taiwan to be seen as more unique – the disagreement was about whether changing time zone would be an effective way of doing this. In its most famous case, the regulation of cab-hailing app Uber, vTaiwan initially found hardened factions set around either its convenience or illegality. Yet the debate ended with a series of practical points of agreement: Uber could operate, but only with licenced drivers.

One precious thing about consensus is that it can actually be acted upon. By clearing away the noise and division, the government was able to connect debates with decisions. The outcomes of the vTaiwan have been put in front of Parliament, by government, to form the core of 11 pieces of laws and regulation, with eight more waiting to go on everything from revenge porn to fintech regulation.

This was only the beginning. The vTaiwan process itself has remained outside of government, run by G0v volunteers – even though the government uses the results. For Tang and PDIS, the next step was to move the same principles and thinking into government itself. Later that week in July, I see the same process playing out in the chilled, echoing marble corridors of a government building. A civil servant with rolled-up sleeves leans on a table looking down at a giant sheet of paper, next to a young man wearing a backpack. Both are part of a vTaiwan-inspired process called “co-gov”, that brings citizens into government ministries. The issue at hand is that there are too many empty houses in Taipei at the same time as skyrocketing rent.

The most agreed-upon statements are highlighted, encouraging consensus over polarisation

Co-gov is designed to map out the issue, understand the stakeholders involved, and then find the areas of consensus. Tang and PDIS train civil servants to run “vTaiwan-inspired” processes of their own, using Polis whenever they need to listen to large groups of people. All government drafts of law are now subject to 60 days of public commentary which – although the details are still being worked out – is set to be similar to vTaiwan. The next step is to use this kind of deliberation to shape what people are asked in referendums. “We’re making hacker culture part of public service culture. We’re not bringing the hackers in, we’re turning government into hackers,” Tang says.

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This experiment has as many challenges in front of it as achievements behind. So far, it has only focused on emerging digital issues, unlikely to affect people who don’t use technology. Some in G0v feel that it has still to face its acid test: a national issue riven with entrenched polarisation. On the streets of Taipei, few people have heard of it: only 200,000 people have so far been through the process.

If you’re cynical about politics, you’re just likely to be cynical about digital democracy too – just another way for politicians to get what they want. Cynicism aside, deliberation of any kind is always time-consuming and tiring, and a struggle for people to fit into their busy lives. It has also been slotted into a system of representative democracy which, in a sense, it both challenges and relies upon. “Citizens can really make some change through this digital platform. But those digital democracy platforms don’t have any kind of real authority,” says Taiwanese parliamentarian Karen Yu. “Legislators still have more power for legislative change.”

It is ironic that a project aimed at spreading power outwards is so dependent on a small number of individuals, including Tang. If the ruling Democratic Progressive Party loses power in 2020, the experiment might vanish overnight. It remains to be seen whether the Sunflower legacy will be enduring.

But Taiwan has lessons for democracies all over the world, proving that the character of political debate is partly down to platform engineering. Polarised and angry content keeps us engaged, and that is exactly what platforms have been designed to show us. Design a platform to find consensus, and you see it arise in the debate.

Tang thinks that vTaiwan might become a power that could exist quite apart from representatives or ministers. “Once people get the idea that you don’t need a government to do governance, then people get into the true spirit of collaborative governance,” she says. “It may take a generation or more for people to see the state as a useful illusion and only use that illusion whenever convenient.”

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In countries such as the UK, democracy has fossilised in a particular form. In Taiwan, a young democracy that doesn’t carry the same weighty legacy, it is being upgraded. It might stand a better chance of adapting.

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