---
title: vTaiwan
type: platform
status: active
country: TW
website: https://vtaiwan.tw
logo: /assets/org-logos/vtaiwan.png
contact:
  checked: 2026-08-01
  email: info@vtaiwan.tw
  source: https://vtaiwan.tw/contact
summary: A Taiwanese open-consultation platform (launched 2015) that uses Pol.is-based
  deliberation to surface consensus on contested policy. Influential in its early
  phase but never legally mandated; now continues as a volunteer-driven civic lab
  as the state's participation efforts moved to other platforms.
concepts:
- consensus-mapping
- deliberative-democracy
- radical-transparency
- e-government
location:
  latitude: 25.033
  longitude: 121.5654
  name: Taipei, Taiwan
  precision: city
news_page: https://www.vtaiwan.tw/newsletters
events:
- date: '2015-01-01'
  title: Launched by g0v contributors partnering with Taiwanese government officials,
    following the 2014 Sunflower Movement
  url: https://congress.crowd.law/case-vtaiwan.html
  quote: In turn, former Taiwanese Minister without Portfolio Jaclyn Tsai attended
    a g0v.tw hackathon in December 2014 and asked the volunteers if they could “create
    a platform for rational discussion and deliberation of policy issues that the
    entire nation could participate in.”
  proof_level: high
  url_checked: '2026-08-12'
  notable: true
- date: '2015-08-01'
  title: Uber/UberX case — vTaiwan's first major deliberation using Pol.is, ~31,115
    votes from 925 participants
  url: https://congress.crowd.law/case-vtaiwan.html
  quote: 31,115 total votes (highest of any process to date)
  note: Also confirmed on the same page — "925 participants voted on Polis survey
    (opinion stage)".
  proof_level: high
  url_checked: '2026-08-12'
  notable: true
activity:
  manual:
    checked: 2026-06-07
    date: 2026-06-05
    note: website loaded. https://www.vtaiwan.tw/newsletters is it's news page. Latest
      is June 5, 2026 'vTaiwan Newsletter Issue Zero'. Its a mirror of their substack
      located at https://vtaiwantw.substack.com/p/vtaiwan-newsletter-issue-zero
    url: https://vtaiwantw.substack.com/p/vtaiwan-newsletter-issue-zero
  rss:
    checked: 2026-06-07
    note: No feed found
  scrape:
    checked: 2026-06-08
    hint: spa
    note: News page found, no machine-readable date
  sitemap:
    note: Sitemap found, no lastmod
    checked: 2026-08-17
last_checked: '2026-05-30'
---

vTaiwan is a civic-technology platform for structured public consultation, developed collaboratively by the Taiwanese government's digital ministry and the **g0v** civic-tech community. It grew out of the 2014 Sunflower Movement: at the end of that year, minister Jaclyn Tsai attended a g0v hackathon and invited the community to design a neutral platform for large-scale deliberation on specific policy questions. vTaiwan launched in 2015, built around **Pol.is**, an opinion-mapping tool that surfaces consensus rather than amplifying disagreement.[^demtech]

## How it works

Pol.is shows participants where consensus and division lie across a population without amplifying disagreement. Rather than threaded debate (which tends to polarise), participants vote on each other's statements and the system clusters them visually — surfacing points of agreement that might not be visible in conventional comment-based consultation, including positions that cut across ideological lines.

A vTaiwan process typically involves:

1. **Stakeholder submissions** — written positions from government, industry, civil society
2. **Pol.is consultation** — open to any citizen; results show opinion clusters visually
3. **Open meetings** — live-streamed, radically transparent discussions between stakeholders and government
4. **Output** — a summary of areas of consensus and remaining disagreement, passed to the relevant ministry

The government committed, in principle, to act on areas of clear consensus — but never under a legal mandate, a limitation that shaped what followed.

## The Uber case

The most-documented example is ride-sharing. When Uber sought to enter the Taiwanese market in 2015, it met strong resistance from taxi drivers and opinion polarised. As participants revised their statements on Pol.is, they converged on consensual positions — that the government should set up a fair regulatory regime, and that private passenger vehicles should be registered. The resulting regulation drew on those consensus points.[^demtech]

## Key people

- **[Audrey Tang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang)** — a g0v contributor and figure in the Sunflower Movement; appointed minister in 2016 and later Taiwan's first Minister of Digital Affairs. The driving champion of vTaiwan inside government.
- **[Jaclyn Tsai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaclyn_Tsai)** — Minister without Portfolio who attended a g0v hackathon in 2014 and invited the community to build the platform; the catalyst for vTaiwan.
- **Jason Hsu** — co-creator, a former activist who later became a legislator. Source of two of the most-quoted critiques: that vTaiwan is "a tiger without teeth" and that "legislators don't take it seriously."[^demtech][^noveck]
- **Colin Megill, Christopher Small, Michael Bjorkegren** — founders of [Pol.is](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol.is), the consensus-mapping tool at vTaiwan's core, built in Seattle after the Occupy and Arab Spring movements.
- **g0v (gov zero)** — the decentralised civic-tech community (founded 2012 by Chia-liang Kao and others) that co-developed vTaiwan. See [g0v](g0v.md).
- **Peter Jia Wei Cui** — program coordinator of the current volunteer-driven vTaiwan community. Quoted in 2025 describing its mission as providing "digital toolboxes and serving as a laboratory for deliberative discussion in Taiwan."[^peoplepowered]

## Significance and limits

vTaiwan remains one of the most-cited international examples of digital deliberative democracy with real legislative impact: by its own tally, around 80% of the ~26 issues it deliberated between 2015 and 2018 led to some government action, and its mailing list reached 200,000 by 2020.[^demtech] It is notable as a model because it was built collaboratively between government and a civic-tech community rather than as a pure government initiative, and because it prioritised consensus mapping over opinion polling or open-ended comment.

But its recommendations were never legally binding, and that proved a structural weakness. The platform has not driven a major decision since 2018; usability suffered from stitching together several tools with no unified interface, and COVID interrupted the in-person meetings central to the model.[^noveck] Scholarship places this in a wider pattern: in a 2024 study, sociologist Terrence Chen argues that Taiwan's digital-government initiatives largely produced "thin" democracy — citizens kept *monitorial* (watchful) or treated as *entrepreneurs/consumers* — rather than "strong" participatory democracy, because binding decision-making power never left officials' hands.[^chen]

## What came after

The government's appetite for participatory deliberation shifted rather than disappeared. The Digital Affairs Ministry built **[Join](join-gov-tw.md)** (join.gov.tw), a government-run consultation platform that reached a broader, older, less tech-savvy public and ranged well beyond vTaiwan's digital-policy remit into areas like drunk-driving, sexual assault, and child abuse. In 2023 the ministry also partnered with the Collective Intelligence Project on **Alignment Assemblies**, a Pol.is-based process for public consultation on AI governance.[^demtech] vTaiwan itself continues as a volunteer-driven civic laboratory — fully decoupled from direct government support — run by five to seven active contributors. Since 2024 it has organised a series of "Social Issue Meetups": hybrid events combining deliberative discussion with digital tools (Pol.is, Mentimeter, AI-assisted analysis), averaging around 50 participants per event.[^peoplepowered] Recent topics include the Fraud Crime Hazard Prevention Act (December 2024) and a March 2025 consultation with the National Human Rights Commission on a draft AI Basic Act.[^peoplepowered]

## Links

- Website: [vtaiwan.tw](https://vtaiwan.tw)
- Related: [g0v (gov zero)](g0v.md) — the civic-tech community that co-developed vTaiwan
- Related: [Join](join-gov-tw.md) — the government's own successor platform
- Blog: [Taiwan's digital democracy experiment: vTaiwan and g0v](../../blog/posts/2026-05-25-taiwan-digital-democracy.md)

[^demtech]: "it has transformed how the government brings stakeholders together, allowing for a more inclusive approach to legislation." Sebastian Cushing Rodriguez, ["Consensus Building in Taiwan, the Poster Child of Digital Democracy"](https://democracy-technologies.org/participation/consensus-building-in-taiwan/), *Democracy Technologies*, 2023.

[^noveck]: "vTaiwan enabled over two hundred thousand people to participate in crafting 26 pieces of national legislation" Beth Simone Noveck, ["Was vTaiwan such a big flop, after all?"](https://bethnoveck.medium.com/was-vtaiwan-such-a-big-flop-after-all-d6b365f916dc), *Reboot Democracy / Medium*, 22 November 2023.

[^chen]: "What kind of 'democracy' do new government-led digital initiatives facilitate? This paper discusses the issue by investigating the open government data policy in Taiwan in the 2010s" Terrence Ting-Yen Chen, ["Strong or thin digital democracy? The democratic implications of Taiwan's open government data policy in the 2010s"](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517241296038), *Big Data & Society*, November 2024.

[^peoplepowered]: "vTaiwan has always demonstrated how civic communities can innovate in democratic participation by combining open-source platforms, commercial tools, and AI. Currently, the community integrates tools such as Pol.is for large-scale opinion mapping" People Powered, ["Digital Participation Case Study: Taiwan"](https://www.peoplepowered.org/news-content/digital-participation-case-study-taiwan).

## See also

- [Consensus Mapping](../concepts/consensus-mapping.md)
- [Radical Transparency](../concepts/radical-transparency.md)
- [E-Government](../concepts/e-government.md)
- [Taiwan's digital democracy experiment: vTaiwan and g0v](../../blog/posts/2026-05-25-taiwan-digital-democracy.md)