Digital Democracy. A Taiwanese Experiment in Policymaking

DEMOCRACY IS FACING CONSIDERABLE CHALLENGES, BUT WHAT IS BEING DONE TO SECURE ITS FUTURE? IN TAIWAN WE ARE WITNESSING A DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT IN CYBERSPACE. THE TAIWANESE GOVERNMENT HAS OPTED TO ENGAGE WITH THEIR CITIZENS DIRECTLY THROUGH DIGITAL FORUMS. THE PERSPECTIVE MET WITH COLIN MEGILL, THE CO-FOUNDER OF POL.IS, A PLATFORM OF VOLUNTARY POLL-ANSWERING AND SUBMITTING, POWERED BY MACHINE-LEARNING, REAL-TIME AI, TO SPEAK ABOUT DIGITAL DEMOCRACY.

Have you ever had a misunderstanding where you heavily argued with someone, just to realize that you are both on the same page? Now, size that up to political parties. We are seeing heavy polarization in the majority of democratic states today. Brexit, the US elections and the EU policies are political processes that face not only disagreements but increasingly irreconcilable positions every step of the way. With social media echo-chambers and assumptions of the opposing party’s dishonest intent, democracy needs to develop to face and overcome these challenges. But what if there was a way of uniting these infamously divided electorates, and perhaps, reach a consensus?

vTaiwan

In Taiwan, a creative and innovative democratic experiment is unraveling: vTaiwan. Through several digital platforms and forums, government officials, market representatives, civil society organizations and civilians are interconnected in a non-hierarchical multi-step process of digital policy making. In a sense, it is a crowdsourced deliberative process that encourages new solutions to controversial national issues. By February 2018, out of 26 cases discussed some 80% led to some decisive government action. Two prominent examples of vTaiwan’s success are the regulation of Uber in Taiwan—a controversial issue for years solved in only a few months—and the FinTech Sandbox Act that allows the financial technology field to conduct transparent and accountable small-scale experiments, unregulated by law. These democratic and transparent efforts do not come out of nowhere. They are happening in the aftermath of the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement—a protest in Taiwan that reached its pinnacle when the students, academics, civic organizations occupied the legislative chamber for nearly a month and demanded that the government drop the proposed trade agreement with China. The ruling party had attempted to pass the treaty without offering any real opportunity to oppose it, and after the occupation, the government agreed to greater supervision and a clause-by-clause review. Ultimately, the Sunflower Student Movement provoked a change of government in the Taiwanese elections 2016. The new government chose to go down a path opposing one undertaken by China— that is, towards an open-source government. Opensource means that all the information and data is easily accessible to the everyday citizen who seeks insight into government business or to find flaws. Facing the uncertainty of statehood and Chinese political pressure, the move towards radical transparency is not surprising.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister Without Portfolio (no department or ministry to manage) initiated these efforts in 2015 by formally integrating vTaiwan into practice. As a transgender, anarchist, radical transparency-advocate and software programmer, Audrey Tang moves Taiwanese democracy one step further towards country-wide consultation and insight into policymaking and reviewing.

Pol.is—Surveys Created by People Taking Them

One of vTaiwan’s most intriguing tools is a software called Pol.is—an open-source online platform for voluntary poll-answering and submitting. This software uses real-time machine-learning Artificial Intelligence to visualize the different opinion-groups—and on which sub-issues they differ. Any participant, government official or civilian, submits statements which leave participants with three options: agree, disagree or uncertain. Crucially, Pol. is does not have a comment feature, and thus eliminates the risk of potential trolls or “cancel culture.”The algorithm can thereafter show on what points the opposing groups agree. Case studies performed by the Pol.is team show that the participants use that information to try and improve their own group’s position by bridging the divide through bi-partisan statements. Eventually, certain statements can reach genuine consensus. An example of this is Taiwan’s controversial UberX case where 95% of the participants eventually agreed that “the government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to improve their management & quality control system, so that drivers & riders would enjoy the same quality service as UberX’s.” These consensus items then led to concrete bill drafts and implemented policy.

THE PERSPECTIVE met virtually with the Co-Founder of the software Pol.is, Colin Megill, an expert and successful speaker on Artificial Intelligence with a background in International Relations. For nearly ten years he has worked to create systems that enable the complex citizen voice to participate in decision-making. While talking about Pol.is and how it might help democracy evolve digitally, he stressed the issues of polarization and transparency.

Megill points to democratic votes today, where “binary votes like pro- or anti-Brexit, or having universal basic income or not, instead are highly multidimensional conversations about the way that the government interacts with society.” This binary system of voting yes or no, democrats or republican, creates the polarization.

“Polarization is not present in society,” he says. “Polarization is a function of a lens that we view society with. When we view society by Brexit or not, then we have created a one-bit view-finder in this society that isn’t society—it’s the lens.” Instead, Pol.is allows for the participant to contribute with their own statements that can break the dichotomy, break the lens. “Eliminating biases [of a survey-maker] is not possible. If we want to do that, we can open up the dimensions of the survey that are not in the frame of reference of the survey designer, or the frame of reference for the relevant power.”

From my view it’s about disaggregating. If you aggregate and delay, you get Brexit. If you disaggregate and speed up, then you’re dealing with it.

Colin Megill to THE PERSPECTIVE

Polarized democratic systems can’t make space for this complexity and the multidimensional will of the people ends up expressing itself through large protests and non-constructive acts of defiance. Megill linked this to the Seattle Fault Line—an area at risk for earthquakes of magnitude 7 on the Richter scale. “When it releases, it’s going to be a huge earthquake,” he explains. “It can’t release pressure gradually, so it’s going to do it all at once. That’s how I understand Brexit. There were no pressure valves, just the blow-out.”

Despite Pol.is attempting to facilitate consensus, Megill is well-aware that political conflict will not simply disappear. Pol.is is not a magic harmony-tool, but rather a system trying to sustainably relieve political pressure build-up. “From my view it’s about disaggregating. If you aggregate and delay, you get Brexit. If you disaggregate and speed up, then you’re dealing with it.”

Data security is a crucial component of digital democracy. Megill highlights the significant risk of affecting the individual’s independent vote, but asks any concerned citizen to look at the digital banking system for comfort. He claims the bigger risk lies with social exploits, where people don’t use available security tools—such as two-factor authentication—designed to guard their passwords and sensitive data.

This, however, is not to say that digital policymaking is easy. On this point Megill stresses the danger of machine learning managing citizens’ voices. “Let’s say that a government contractor applies machine learning just to stop bots, but ends up suppressing some portion of the public. [...]If you have a closed-source system for digital political debate, there is going to be a capturable area between citizens’ voices and the government itself.” To counter this scenario, Pol.is is an open-source software which means that anyone can check the code for errors, copy and modify it to fit their own needs. In this sense, open-source is a security aspect in and of itself.

Pol.is holds great potential for contributing to the digitalization of democracy—and there are several other trials and experiments happening simultaneously. Taiwan has modified the open-source code to a greater extent with another platform called Join—with over ten million unique visitors. The city of Amsterdam is also currently in the process of adopting its own version of the tool into their municipality-level decision making. Colin Megill invites any interested city or citizen to learn about Pol.is and experiment with it themselves. Cyberspace is expanding at an exponential rate and democracy needs to catch up. “Have at it!” Megill concludes.

EJE BRUNDIN

March 30, 2014, Taipei, Taiwan. Students wearing black boxes depicting their demands for an oversight law to be established by the Legislature before allowing the trade agreement to be reviewed.

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