In the spirit of international exchange and with the support of the Taiwanese government, we are pleased to announce the first English language opportunity to learn the facilitation methods that power the award-winning vTaiwan open consultation process and Participatory Officers program.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister will be here in person with other members of Taiwan’s Public Digital Innovation and Service team (PDIS) and Participatory Officers (PO) program.

vTaiwan is an open consultation process that brings Taiwan citizens and government together to craft country-wide digital legislation. The ‘v’ in vTaiwan stands for “vision”, “voice”, “vote” and “virtual”, as vTaiwan embarks on a “virtual venture” of open consultation processes with citizens. This successful initiative received the 2018 Future Voice Award.

The Participatory Officers program equips civil servants to engage with stakeholders to generate meaningful challenge statements and co-create possible solutions, reinforcing the quality of multi-stakeholder collaboration and better informing their agency’s policies.

Both programs emerge from, and work in partnership with, collaborative culture community g0v (pronounced “gov-zero): g0v.asia

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.

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. Equally important is how to bridge these three areas together.

Twitter: @FangJuiChang
Website: fangjuichang.com

Avross, Yu-Tang Hsiao

Avorss 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.

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.

Twitter: @shuyanglin
Website: shuyanglin.com
vero: shuyanglin

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.

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.

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.

Patrick Connolly (patcon) is an organizer of Civic Tech Toronto, a community of 3000+ members -- public servants, designers, technologists, local organizers, and engaged citizens of all sorts. He explores highly participatory engagement models through weekly "civic hacknights for everyone.”

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.