Imagine a society where our collective intelligence is assisted by artificial intelligence to help make consensus-based decisions that protect minority rights, and have everyone leave the table with the feeling of being treated fairly. The opportunities generated by new technologies continue to change popular expectations and create opportunities for true participation in democracy—a vision of a fully accountable, collaborative, and effective government. Taiwan has been experimenting with future democracy for decades—at first just in academic circles, and now, after the 2014 Sunflower Movement (their “Occupy”), in a variety of open governance projects, across all sections of Taiwan society. One of their main methods is the award-winning vTaiwan open consultation process that brings Taiwan citizens and government together to craft country-wide digital legislation.

Our project is to bring Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister and 3 members of the Public Digital Innovation and Service team (PDIS) team that trains facilitators to run the facilitator training class that Taiwanese public servants rate “99% effective”, to New York City on June 11 & 12. Together, we will train a cohort of 30 NYC government officials, community organizers and academics in the vTaiwan methods of facilitation and consensus building. This multi-day training event will also be an occasion to celebrate and share facilitation traditions from diverse fields including governance, law, urban planning, and further grow the community of practice around the vTaiwan process for crafting legislation, which includes simultaneous facilitation for in-person & remote stakeholder meetings, structured conversation, and math-assisted consensus building. We plan to film the entire training event and publish under a share-alike license, to be widely circulated.

AwesomeNYC is excited to support this project and specifically the efforts to record these sessions to help spread the vTaiwan process to more of the world. This training session will be held on June 11-12, 2018, and you can still apply to attend.