唐鳳投書紐約時報 細數台灣數位民主成就

最後更新：2019/10/16 07:18

（中央社記者尹俊傑紐約15日專電）行政院政務委員唐鳳投書紐約時報，細數台灣推行數位民主的成就。她指出，數位科技增進公民對話、向政府灌輸社會創新精神，台灣讓人人都能發聲，正在為未來加強民主。

紐時網站今天刊出唐鳳題為「堅強民主是數位民主」（A Strong Democracy Is a Digital Democracy）的文章寫道，民主隨更多人參與而增強，只要焦點放在凝聚共識而非分化，數位科技依舊是加強民眾參與的最佳方式之一。

她表示，近年來，台灣政府與科技社群攜手打造線上平台和數位計畫，讓老百姓有機會在政策改革方面提案並表達意見，「台灣正由群眾外包民主，創造一個反應更積極的政府」。

唐鳳在文中舉的首個實例，是2015年上線、討論法規該如何制定或修改的平台vTaiwan。

vTaiwan集合公、私與社會部門代表，討論如何以政策解決主要與數位經濟相關的問題。唐鳳表示，vTaiwan上線以來，融合線上討論及利害關係各方當面商討，已處理30項問題，特別是棘手的數位政策問題，包括為如何管理叫車平台Uber（優步）獻策。

行政院Join（公共政策網路參與）平台是唐鳳舉的另一實例。這個平台與vTaiwan都運用名為Pol.is的討論系統凝聚共識，但處理的問題範疇超越數位經濟，例如課徵空屋稅、獸醫使用人藥醫治動物。

唐鳳寫道，vTaiwan與Join為台灣政府與公民開闢更多直接溝通管道，為政府帶來極大益處。官員不僅接觸到新點子與思維模式，也可發現核心公共服務需求。

此外，總統盃黑客松是集合台灣公、私與社會部門解決迫切問題的科技計畫。這項競賽去年首度舉辦，由民間人士或公務員組成的黑客團隊參加，設計改善公共服務的創新方案。獲獎團隊沒有獎金，而是得到政府會應用構想的承諾。

今年第2屆總統盃黑客松的獲獎作品之一，是司法院隊伍開發的裁判易讀與量刑參考小幫手。這兩項數位工具將判決書中法律用語即時翻譯成白話文，協助民眾看懂判決書內容，並運用機器學習，針對酒駕案件自動析取量刑因素。

唐鳳在文末寫道，總統蔡英文7月出席黑客松頒獎典禮時，期勉公務員致力滿足民眾需求時擁抱黑客精神，「勇敢去做、不要怕犯錯」。台灣運用數位科技增進公民對話、向政府灌輸社會創新精神，透過讓人人有機會發聲為未來加強民主。（編輯：周永捷）1081016

By Audrey Tang
Oct. 15, 2019
Democracy improves as more people participate. And digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation — as long as the focus is on finding common ground and creating consensus, not division.

These are lessons Taiwan has taken to heart in recent years, with the government and the tech community partnering to create online platforms and other digital initiatives that allow everyday citizens to propose and express their opinion on policy reforms. Today, Taiwan is crowdsourcing democracy to create a more responsive government.

Fittingly, this movement, which today aims to increase government transparency, was born in a moment of national outrage over a lack of openness and accountability in politics.

On March 18, 2014, hundreds of young activists, most of them college students, occupied Taiwan’s legislature to express their profound opposition to a new trade pact with Beijing then under consideration, as well as the secretive manner in which it was being pushed through Parliament by the Kuomintang, the ruling party.

Catalyzing what came to be known as the Sunflower Movement, the protesters demanded that the pact be scrapped and that the government institute a more transparent ratification process.

The occupation, which drew widespread public support, ended a little more than three weeks later, after the government promised greater legislative oversight of the trade pact. (To this day, the pact has yet to be approved by Taiwan’s legislature.) A poll released after the occupation, however, showed that 76 percent of the nation remained dissatisfied with the Kuomintang government, illustrating the crisis of trust caused by the trade deal dispute.

To heal this rift and communicate better with everyday citizens, the administration reached out to a group of civic-minded hackers and coders, known as g0v (pronounced “gov-zero”), who had been seeking to improve government transparency through the creation of open-source tools. The organization had come to the attention of the government during the Sunflower occupation, when g0v hackers had worked closely with the protesters.

In December 2014, Jaclyn Tsai, a government minister focused on digital technology, attended a g0v-sponsored hackathon and proposed the establishment of a neutral platform where various online communities could exchange policy ideas.

Several contributors from g0v responded by partnering with the government to start the vTaiwan platform in 2015. VTaiwan (which stands for “virtual Taiwan”) brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy. Since it began, vTaiwan has tackled 30 issues, relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders. Though the government is not obligated to follow vTaiwan’s recommendations (a policy that may soon change), the group’s work often leads to concrete action.

VTaiwan partly relies on a unique digital tool known as Pol.is to ensure its crowdsourced policy debates remain civil and reach consensus. Using Pol.is, any vTaiwan participant can post a comment about the topic or policy being discussed. Crucially, other users cannot directly reply to these statements, which reduces the likelihood of trolling and abuse. Instead, they can click “agree,” “disagree” or “pass/unsure” on each comment.

Using real-time machine learning, Pol.is analyzes all the votes on the comments to produce an interactive map that groups like-minded participants together in relation to other, differently minded users. The map lays bare the gaps between various groups — as well as any areas of agreement. Ideally, this incentivizes people to post comments that attract more supporters, creating a path toward consensus.

VTaiwan has been used to solve a number of particularly thorny digital policy problems. In 2015, it helped break an impasse over how best to regulate Uber, which had arrived in Taiwan two years earlier prompting opposition from taxi drivers.

In 2016, hundreds of ordinary citizens using the platform managed within a few weeks to come up with new regulations for online liquor sales, after multiyear discussions among business and social groups had broken down. And in 2018, vTaiwan helped to create new regulations for the platform economy.

Taiwan also relies on another civic engagement platform called Join, this one maintained entirely by the government. Though similar to vTaiwan in that it uses Pol.is to create consensus, Join tackles matters beyond the digital economy, such as vacancy taxes and drug prescriptions for animals. Compared to the hundreds of thousands who have debated issues on vTaiwan, Join’s website has hosted 10.6 million unique visitors — almost half of Taiwan’s population — since it began in 2015.

Together, vTaiwan and Join are opening up more direct lines of communication between Taiwan’s government and its citizens, producing tremendous benefits for the former. Officials are exposed to new ideas and ways of thinking, while identifying core public service demands.

The Presidential Hackathon is yet another tech initiative bringing Taiwan’s public, private and social sectors together to solve urgent problems. At the event, the first of which was held last year, teams of hackers — composed of either private citizens or government workers — compete to design the most innovative improvements to the nation’s public services. Instead of prize money, the best teams receive a promise from the government that it will apply their ideas.

One of the top teams in this year’s hackathon included officials from the Judicial Yuan, the judicial branch of the Taiwanese government. The team developed two digital tools to make the nation’s judicial system more legible and transparent for everyday Taiwanese.

Drunken driving is an issue of broad public concern in Taiwan. And in recent years, the differing sentences handed out to drivers involved in high-profile accidents have led to public confusion about why some punishments can be so light compared with others.

One of the digital tools developed by the Judicial Yuan team addresses this confusion by giving the public a better sense of why punishments can differ for the same crime. Any user can simply enter in the relevant data for a hypothetical drunken-driving offense, such as blood alcohol concentration and the type of vehicle involved. The application then lists the appropriate penalties for the case, while also showing sentences from real-world drunken-driving cases that are similar to the one described. (The team analyzed over 50,000 verdicts from previous drunken-driving offenses to create the tool.) In this way, users get a better understanding of how slight changes in, for example, blood alcohol concentration can lead to radically different penalties.

In the closing speech of this year’s Presidential Hackathon, President Tsai Ing-wen encouraged government officials to embrace a hacker spirit as they work to meet the public’s needs. “Do it bravely; dare to make mistakes,” she said. In Taiwan, digital technology is boosting civic dialogue and infusing government with the spirit of social innovation. By giving everyone a voice, Taiwan is strengthening its democracy for the future.