vTaiwan (Part 4) – Online sources for my research

Here are dozens of links I used in my explorations of vTaiwan and my invitation for you to explore further one of the most remarkable transformational “hacks” of government I’ve seen anywhere.

Below are links to articles and videos through which I came to understand more of what is happening in and with vTaiwan. At first the diversity of descriptions – combined with my assumption that there was something solid there to understand – left me confused. I submitted a 10-page list of questions, concerns, and confusions to Audrey Tang before our first teleconversation – only to discover within minutes that there was little solid to understand and that many of my confusions arose from the fact that each report I’d read was someone’s perspective-simplified snapshot of a constantly evolving, many dimensional ecosystem.

Knowing that, you should keep in mind that my writings are MY perspective-simplified snapshot. Audrey has assured me that they are not OVERsimplified and that they do capture patterns that help embrace the complexity of that ecosystem. However, I have not gone over all the material below again and I’m sure I have missed a lot and reframed things to fit my sense of emerging coherence.

In any case, I don’t think I could ever claim to “understand vTaiwan” any more than I can “understand” even the city where I live. I would not be at all surprised if you were to immerse yourself in the materials below for weeks – as I have done – that you might see deeper, further, or other than I have seen. Note especially how many of the articles and interviews are from 2016 – halfway between vTaiwan’s birth in the 2014 Sunflower Movement and today in early 2018 – which I imagine happening then because suddenly people around the world started to realize there was something remarkable happening there. Yet so much of what vTaiwan does has changed since then…. and yet so much of how it does it and why is still the same.

If you do explore all this further – and especially if you know the Taiwanese version(s) of Chinese – do let me/us know what you see and what you think it means, especially for the rest of the world and for our collective journey into the future. I encourage you to put your insights into the comment sections below each of these (my) four recent posts about vTaiwan.

Blessings on the Immense Journey we’re all on together.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Links for further exploration

I think this is the best short (12 mins) video on how vTaiwan operates today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDUNWzsv5Pc
which can also inform geek networks like g0v who want to contribute their tech knowledge to better governance/democracy which is also well covered in this long essay “In Search of 21st Century Democracy: Two Weeks in Taipei”
https://civichall.org/civicist/two-weeks-in-taipei/

An immersion into the way vTaiwan worked 2 years ago, especially providing an introduction to the nonlinear dynamics of its subculture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcYg7z-mwKk&feature=youtu.be

The flavor of the subculture is also featured in Jerry Michalski’s recent interview with Audrey Tang
https://www.patreon.com/posts/taiwan-democracy-14794181

This detailed article was my introduction
vTaiwan: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberpunk Frontier of Democracy
https://civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/

An excellent though lengthy (2.5 hours) video of Audrey Tang describing vTaiwan in Paris
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcYg7z-mwKk&feature=youtu.be
And here’s an unedited transcript of that video done by my colleague Martin Rausch:
https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2016-03-02-conference-at-superpublic
The last 15 minutes contains a detailed description of their deliberation process addressing “the Uber issue” which is covered also in the following essay (and in Part 3 of this series of posts on vTaiwan)
https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blended-volition-3e9b75102b9b

QUICK SUMMARIES BY OTHERS

https://words.democracy.earth/hacking-ideology-pol-is-and-vtaiwan-570d36442ee5

https://apolitical.co/solution_article/taiwan-using-social-media-crowdsource-legislation/

https://www.nesta.org.uk/six-pioneers-digital-democracy/vtaiwan

FOCUS ON POL.IS

Hacking Ideology: Pol.is and vTaiwan (a brief intro with good embedded links)
https://words.democracy.earth/hacking-ideology-pol-is-and-vtaiwan-570d36442ee5

Pol.is in Taiwan – presentation by Colin Megill, one of the founders of pol.is
https://blog.pol.is/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5

The internet doesn’t have to be bad for democracy
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607990/the-internet-doesnt-have-to-be-bad-for-democracy

The evolution of pol.is (how it evolved into its current functionality)
https://blog.pol.is/the-evolution-of-the-pol-is-user-interface-9b7dccf54b2f

A Pol.is experiment in the US (The pol.is exercise was a success, although the follow-up left much to be desired….)
https://civichall.org/civicist/testing-tech-consensus-purple-town/

HISTORY OF VTAIWAN

https://medium.com/@audrey.tang/challenges-for-taiwan-s-civic-hackers-in-2016-385af61d6e79

https://medium.com/@audrey.tang/on-utopia-for-public-action-b4e5b2c816a9

DIGITAL TOOLS

https://blog.pol.is/digital-tools-open-up-taiwans-democratic-imaginations-d8f80432305c

https://civichall.org/civicist/two-weeks-in-taipei

FOCUS ON VIRTUAL REALITY

Virtual Reality for Civic Deliberation
https://medium.com/@audrey.tang/virtual-reality-for-civic-deliberation-e114234828fe

Building Empathy and Attunement through VR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EynGwOoxlSE

FOCUS ON AUDREY TANG

Channeling interview (text)
https://www.dumbofeather.com/conversations/audrey-tang/

How a Transgender Anarchist Genius Solved the “Uber Problem” in Taiwan (text)
http://www.outrightusa.org/2017/05/transgender-anarchist-genius-solved-uber-problem-taiwan/

MY LONG VIDEO CALLS WITH AUDREY TANG

First call Mar 23, 2018, along with Miki Kashtan
Video (3.5 hours)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO9WBDmBTSs
Transcript (you could scan it quicker than the video, but would miss the extensive whiteboard visuals and a lot of the personal “feel” of our engagement)
https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2018-03-23-conversation-with-tom-atlee-and-miki-ka
(Here are the whiteboard visuals as a static slide show – although I have a hard time using them in this isolated form, even though I participated in the conversation!)
https://issuu.com/pdis.tw/docs/2018-03-23_conversation_with_tom_at

Second call Mar 30, 2018, along with Shuyang Lin
Video (2 hours)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m51ngSl-iZk
Transcript
https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2018-03-30-conversation-with-tom-atlee

Third call Apr 6, 2018, along with pol.is cofounder Colin Megill and Tom’s colleague Martin Rausch
Video (3.5 hours)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJzzdYFJ3pM
Transcript
https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2018-04-06-conversation-with-tom-atlee-and-colin-m

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