Was vTaiwan such a big flop, after all?
reposted from Reboot Democracy
A recent issue of the Daily Beast featured an article about vTaiwan, Taiwan’s flagship crowdlaw project to engage the public in the legislative process, reporting what I long suspected and feared: early success has not translated into lasting impact or institutionalization of public participation in policymaking.
“The platform hasn’t been used for any major decisions since 2018” said vTaiwan co-creator and former Taiwanese legislator Jason Hsu. He went on to add that: “since the government is not mandated to adopt recommendations coming from vTaiwan, ‘legislators don’t take it seriously.’”
After vTaiwan enabled over two hundred thousand people to participate in crafting 26 pieces of national legislation, advocates for tech and democracy hailed this four-stage online and offline deliberative process as the poster child of tech-enabled public engagement. We celebrated vTaiwan as evidence of the powerful potential for meaningful public participation in governance.
vTaiwan began with a proposal stage, with offline and online discussion of problems using a series of different tools for deliberation and frequent polling.This collaborative problem-definition process, which lasted from a few weeks to a year, helped a large number of people to agree on and define which problems should be tackled.
While disappointing, vTaiwan is not unique in failing to deliver on the promise of tech-enabled participation. As my GovLab colleagues and I reported last year, Madrid’s online engagement platform Decide Madrid attracted almost half a million sign-ups. But of the 28,000 legislative proposals submitted by residents since 2015, only one became policy. Sign-ups have declined dramatically.
Online public engagements fizzle for a variety of reasons. First, they can be hard for the public to use. With four different platforms cobbled together, Hsu reports that vTaiwan was seen as difficult to use and people lost interest in navigating the complex process. Indeed, the project relied on a number of different tools, none of which had a particularly intuitive user interface.
However, even when the public participation platforms are easy for the public to use, more often than not they are poorly designed for the sponsoring institutions, reducing participation to simplistic contributions that only serve to drown institutions in voluminous, mostly unusable feedback. That’s what happened in Madrid where short comments without supporting evidence or blue prints for implementation lacked the necessary complexity to translate an idea into action. It’s not clear how well vTaiwan meshed with the way lawmaking worked.
Poor design, however, might only be partly to blame. The success of the project might also have threatened the political status quo and presented a challenge to traditional forms of decision making and political power. We wrote this report focusing on how to instutitionalize public engagement in decision making, attempting to draw lessons across a wide range of contexts and geographies. vTaiwan, more than many online engagement projects, was designed to fit with the legislative process.
One of the critical factors we identified was political support. While Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister, was co-creator and driver behind the project, it’s not clear from afar how much support the project enjoyed outside or inside of government.
As we explore new uses of artificial intelligence to make resident engagement better suited to complex policy making processes, we will need to look more deeply at what went wrong in Taiwan and whether it might have been vTaiwan’s success, rather than (or in addition to) any failures of design that killed the project.
