Democracy “with the people”: Lessons from Taiwan on crowdsourced public policy and radical transparency
By: Prashant Chamarty
Tags: Public Policy, Covid 19, Democracy, Pandemic, Coronavirus

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

If all this makes you nervous as it made me as to how much there is to catch-up we need to remember the immortal words of Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

After invoking Leonard Cohen, we can envision the digital transformation of governance by understanding how Taiwan enabled Digital Democracy :

Listen at Scale (Collective information system): Listening at scale can be facilitated using online spaces. These online spaces didn’t have reply buttons so that people focus on the message and not unnecessary and irrelevant banter. The people could upvote and downvote ideas, and the platform did clustering real-time to determine and highlight the options gathering the most consensus. This was used Taiwanese government to gauge and implement the preferred choice in terms of response to COVID border controls, fair distribution of masks etc. On these forums due to the lack of reply button and the upvote and downvote buttons, citizens were forced to post more nuanced and well-formed ideas to make sure their approach gets the most consensus. These platforms also demonstrate that people agree more than they disagree and served as positive reinforcement for the platform. Distributed Ledger: Distributed Ledgers help improve trust and accountability. E.g. every time Taiwanese citizens bought masks from the pharmacy they could in real-time see the levels of the masks in that pharmacy go down in real-time. Humour over Rumour: This entails using humour to counter disinformation and replace annoying government messages with humorous messages which tend to go viral and thus reach a wider audience. Taiwan hired actual comedians to respond to rumours with humour within 2 hours. 2 hours because it was determined as the appropriate time to respond to prevent the spread of rumours and counter it effectively. Another strategy used was “Cocreation” where the biggest detractors will be brought into the process of designing the experience/systems they have criticized. Co-learning and Humility: Another key tenant to digital democracy is humility and openness to learning together with citizens, i.e. co-learning. This enabled the Taiwanese government to work with citizens to roll out COVID response strategy without seeming alarmist early on but at the same time being humble enough to make it clear that the approach might evolve as better scientific research comes to the fore.

The most significant enabler for all this was the declaration of the Broadband as a Human Right which has resulted in every single point in having at least 10Mbps connectivity and this making the digital democracy inclusive. Another approach was providing Open APIs for all the systems developed by the government so that the government tools could be built into various other systems by civic hackers, thus amplifying the reach of digital democracy. The statement that can summarize the whole philosophy is:

Making the state transparent to citizens and not citizens transparent to government.

The best approach to the digital transformation of the government and a digital democracy is summarised by Audrey Tang 唐鳳 , Tiwans’s full-time conservative anarchist and part-time Digital Minister’s job description which goes something like this :