Chinese Democracy

Good Enough Ancestor - "This is the story of Taiwan's democratic transformation as seen through Audrey Tang's eyes, amid a global crisis for democracy." (Taiwan, Sunflower Movement, Audrey Tang previously)

Plurality (pdf) - "Digital technology has catalyzed polarization, inequality, loneliness and fear. Plurality details how Digital Minister Audrey Tang and her collaborators – architects of Taiwan's internationally acclaimed digital democracy – achieved inclusive, technology-fueled growth that harnesses digital tools to strengthen both social unity and diversity."[1]

• vTaiwan: rethinking democracy - "vTaiwan is an experiment that prototypes an open consultation process for the entire society to engage in rational discussion on national issues."

Where do we go as a society?

Thinking and working together.

Launched in 2014, vTaiwan is a decentralized open consultation process that combines online and offline interactions, bringing together Taiwan's citizens and government to deliberate on national issues. It serves as a model for People-Public-Private Partnerships (PPPP), involving government ministries, elected representatives, scholars, experts, business leaders, civil society organizations, and citizens in crafting digital legislation.

One of the many tools vTaiwan utilizes is Pol.is, a digital platform for opinion collection, to facilitate large-scale conversations and consensus building. This tool has been pivotal in achieving "rough consensus" on various policy issues at the national level, addressing scalability challenges in deliberative democracy.

vTaiwan - "vTaiwan is an open consultation process, consisting of online and in-person discussions, which brings together experts, government officials, stakeholders, and citizens to create consensus and recommendations for national legislation." The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws - "vTaiwan is a promising experiment in participatory governance. But politics is blocking it from getting greater traction."

Taiwan might not seem like the most obvious place for a pioneering exercise in digital democracy. The island held its first direct presidential election only in 1996, after a century marked first by Japanese colonial rule and then by Chinese nationalist martial law. But that oppressive past has also meant that Taiwanese have a history of taking to the streets to push back against heavy-handed government. In Taiwan's democratic era, it was a protest four years ago that planted the seed for this innovative political experiment.

The 2014 Sunflower Movement, led by students and activists, derailed an attempt by President Ma Ying-jeou's government to ram through a trade agreement between Taiwan, which has been locally ruled since 1949, and China, which claims Taiwan as its territory. For more than three weeks the protesters occupied government buildings over the deal, which they felt would give China too much leverage over the Taiwanese economy.

In the aftermath, the Ma government invited Sunflower activists to create a platform through which it might better communicate with Taiwan's youth. A Taiwanese civic tech community known as g0v (pronounced "Gov Zero"), which had played a leading role in the Sunflower protests, built vTaiwan in 2015 and still runs it. The platform enables citizens, civil-society organizations, experts, and elected representatives to discuss proposed laws via its website as well as in face-to-face meetings and hackathons. Its goal is to help policymakers make decisions that gain legitimacy through consultation.

[...]

vTaiwan relies on a hodgepodge of open-source tools for soliciting proposals, sharing information, and holding polls, but one of the key parts is Pol.is, created by Megill and a couple of friends in Seattle after the events of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring in 2011. On Pol.is, a topic is put up for debate. Anyone who creates an account can post comments on the topic, and can also upvote or downvote other people's comments.

That may sound much like any other online forum, but two things make Pol.is unusual. The first is that you cannot reply to comments. "If people can propose their ideas and comments but they cannot reply to each other, then it drastically reduces the motivation for trolls to troll," Tang says.

The second is that it uses the upvotes and downvotes to generate a kind of map of all the participants in the debate, clustering together people who have voted similarly. Although there may be hundreds or thousands of separate comments, like-minded groups rapidly emerge in this voting map, showing where there are divides and where there is consensus. People then naturally try to draft comments that will win votes from both sides of a divide, gradually eliminating the gaps.

"The visualization is very, very helpful," Tang says. "If you show people the face of the crowd, and if you take away the reply button, then people stop wasting time on the divisive statements."

The Computational Democracy Project - "A mass movement demanded upgrades to democracy and won, resulting in Polis' first national-scale deployment." g0v movement - "g0v is a community that promotes the transparency of government information and is committed to developing information platforms and tools for citizens to participate in society." 18f.org - "New site by members of 18F, the team within the US government that were doing some of the most effective work at improving government efficiency."

For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers.

However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called "the gold standard" of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET.

[...]

We're not done yet.

We're still absorbing what has happened. We're wrestling with what it will mean for ourselves and our families, as well as the impact on our partners and the American people.

But we came to the government to fix things. And we're not done with this work yet.

Bluesky CEO: imagine a 'world without Caesars' - "In a world of billionare-owned social media, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber wants to send a clear message. Decentralized open-source platforms, like the one she runs, prioritize user control over corporate interests."[2]

"If a billionaire tried to ruin things," Graber said of Bluesky, "users could just leave — without losing their identity or data." Bluesky's open protocol gives users the ability to "fork off" the network if needed, Graber added.

Bluesky, originally spun out of Twitter, has grown to over 32 million users. Its AT Protocol allows users to own their identities and their experience on the platform without Bluesky's permission.

"The key to what we're doing is shifting power back to users and developers," Graber said. Bluesky isn't just another social media app, she emphasized — it's a whole structural alternative to bigger platforms.

Graber drew a bright line between Bluesky and billionaire-owned social media in another key area: content moderation. Bluesky's opt-in approach lets users install third-party moderation services, filtering content to fit their preferences.

"Moderation is governance," Graber said. "It's about choosing how you want your digital space to be governed."

Digital Democracy - "In the fifth episode of Future Curious, we're looking at examples of digital democracy in action and ask how tech can upgrade our democracy."[3,4] also btw...

• Build and Fight Lecture #1: Kali Akuno & Thandi Chimurenga on Eco-Socialism - "The Build and Fight Formula is an educational and organizing framework developed to promote eco-socialism from below, centering on self-organized activities and institutions of the working class and oppressed people. The lecture, led by Kali Akuno and Thandi Chimurenga, outlines a methodology for achieving systemic change, emphasizing the need for collective coordination, radical transformation, and economic democracy."
• Build and Fight Lecture Part 2: Mutual Aid & Economic Resistance - "The Build and Fight lecture delves into the structural crisis of capitalism, the necessity of mutual aid, and the push toward economic self-determination. Akuno frames the discussion around Antonio Gramsci's concept that 'the old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.'[5] He argues that capitalism is failing to sustain itself and that alternatives must be built from the ground up."[6]