vTaiwan Open Consultation & Participation Officers Training

June 11-12, 2018 Prime Produce
424 W 54 th St New York, NY 10019

vTaiwan and Participation Officers (PO) network bring people directly into governance and help lawmakers implement decisions with a greater degree of legitimacy.

The nature of challenges that are most important right now are ones that don’t have a single owner. It is our priority to tackle complex challenges that are crucial to our society and work collaboratively with all disciplines. In order to explore how we could all work and think together, Taiwan has been experimenting with bringing citizens and government together in a civic deliberation process for crafting legislation or policy at national scale.

In the spirit of international exchange and with the support of the Taiwanese government, g0v vNetwork organizers are pleased to announce the first English language opportunity to learn how vTaiwan and PO network work, the design behind them and the difference, as well as their impacts so far.

This two day training in NYC will be highly interactive and led by a delegation from Taiwan, including: Digital Minister Audrey Tang and members of the Public Digital Innovation and Service team. We invite you to be an integral part of this inaugural opportunity!

Day 1vTaiwan Open Consultation Process

vTaiwan is a public-fund, private-operated community. vTaiwan is an open consultation process that brings Taiwan citizens and government together in online and offline spaces. There are various collaborative open source engagement tools used in vTaiwan that shapes an interactive environment based on evolving rough consensus. “vTaiwan culture” is drawn from open source culture, strongly adhering to principles of transparency and collaboration, self-organization and distributed responsibility. vTaiwan is also an open space, a combination of time and space run by participants to work on cases brought in.

Day 2Participation Officers (PO) Collaboration Workshop

PO network is a network of 75 public servants in the central Taiwanese government. The PO collaboration workshop supports a multi-stakeholder governing system that provides an innovative alternative for cross-ministerial collaboration and online/offline civic participation that helps address diverse problems. The system is responding to open government values and aims to reinforce the trust between citizens and the government.

Audrey Tang

Audrey Tang, a civic hacker and Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of Social Innovation, is known for revitalizing global open source communities such as Perl and Haskell. Audrey served on Taiwan national development council’s open data committee and K-12 curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project. Prior to joining the cabinet, Audrey was a consultant with Apple on computational linguistics, with Oxford University Press on crowd lexicography, and with Socialtext on social interaction design.

Avross Yu-Tang Hsiao

Avross is a senior legal consultant of PDIS.tw and a legal researcher at the Science and Technology Law Institute of Institute for Information Industry (III). She provides consultation toward public participation and law reform. She also supports vTaiwan project and contributes to the development of the multi-stakeholders approach to open government. She has a particular interest in privacy and information right in the digital realm, regularly publishing articles on law journals. Avross has authored two books on gender issues and holds a master degree in law from National Chiao Tung University.

Fang-Jui Chang

Fang is currently working as a Service Designer/Consultant at PDIS. She leads workshops and meetings to tackle diverse social issues across departments as well as organisations and private sectors. The aim of this is to deal with cross-ministerial issues and enhance a better organisational culture from inside to outside of the government. She is a hybrid designer who graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Service Design. Over the past 5 years of work experience, she has worked as a multi-dimensional designer covering a wide range of disciplines across diverse industries. Her main body of work has focused on projects in healthcare, education, urban planning, finance, and transport. She strongly believes that a designer has an obligation to work for the benefit of society and the environment as well as the commercial industry.

Shu Yang Lin

Shu Yang Lin is re:architect & international liaison of PDIS.tw, who has worked with international teams as interaction designer and creative technologist before she co-founded PDIS with the Digital Minister of Taiwan. She leverages her passion and skills in interaction design and HCI (Human Computer Interaction) to rethink the interaction between the government and the civil society. The computer science background helps her assist the digital transformation in Taiwan’s open government scene. Her work as re:architect in PDIS means constantly reflecting and reshaping the culture in the team and overall in the government.

Apply to Attend

In an effort to create an inclusive, diverse, and effective training experience, we request that you submit an expression of interest. From the received applications, we will select a professionally and demographically diverse cohort of 30 people, with the capacity and influence to deploy participatory processes at scale. Selected participants will be invited to purchase a ticket.

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected]

Apply Today

Organized by vNetwork

vNetwork is a a collection of nobodies moved by the work in Taiwan to learn and bring the practices to their cities. Our group meets online and offline. Join us today by signing up for g0v slack.

Claudina Sarahe (CS)

Claudina Sarahe (CS) is an innovation strategist, technologist, organizer, and critical explorer. She heads Composites Collective, a consultancy and think-tank/lab that operates at the intersection of complex systems, design and technology, and society to transform organizations and teams.

Devin Balkind

Devin Balkind is the executive director of Sarapis, a nonprofit that bring open source tools and techniques to nonprofits and governments. He’s passionate about the intersection of open source and participatory democracy movements.

Darshana Narayanan

Darshana Narayanan is a scholar and transnational consultant, whose work bridges Neuroscience and Society. She works on Polis, a conversation tool that breaks open echo chambers. She has a Ph.D. in Psychology & Neuroscience from Princeton University.

Liz Barry

Liz Barry is co-founder and Director of Community Development at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. Motivated by the potential of people working together humanely at scale, her practice bridges place-based grassroots organizing & online commons-based peer production.