User:Cadencehsu/sandbox

Article Evaluation

Talk:Civic technology

Possible Articles to Work On
# 1: Politics and technology

Overall, the article is well-written and has a good amount of sources that are up-to-date and relevant. However, the "leapfrog democracies" section could use more examples of other countries rather than just Tunisia and Estonia. Additionally, the "GovTech and Politics" section could use a lot more information. The definition/overview of GovTech is effective but could use a little more detail. The section could also use more examples of GovTech aside from just LabHacker.

# 2: Internet activism

This article is structured well and is also well written and sourced. While the information under the "Uses" header is sufficient, I think there could be more added to the "Use in Political Campaigns" and the "Non-traditional activism" sections. In particular, I think it would be interesting to add more historical examples to the "Use in Political Campaigns" to see how media activism has evolved over time and its changing effects on political campaigns.

# 3: Issue advocacy ads

The "History" section of this article is well written and detailed. However, the start of the article-- specifically the "Interest versus express democracy" section lacks adequate sources and citations. Moreover, parts of the article aren't written in a completely neutral or encyclopedic tone. I would recommend adding more to the "Interest advocacy" and "Express advocacy" sections and rewriting some sentences in a more unbiased tone. Lastly, I think it would be useful to add more examples of modern issue advocacy ads towards the end of the article.

Finalize your topic

I plan to work on the article Civic technology. I plan to make contributions to section 3 of the article--Civic Technology in Asia--specifically, the portion on Taiwan. I will add information in that section regarding the development of Taiwan's digital democracy and include modern examples like their COVID-19 response using civic technology.

Bibliography:

INSISA, Aurelio, The strategic communications of techno-democratic statecraft : the case of Taiwan, Policy Briefs, RSCAS, Global Governance Programme, EU-Asia Project, 2021/25

Retrieved from Cadmus, European University Institute Research Repository, at: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/71756

Lee, Shin Haeng. "Digital democracy in Asia: The impact of the Asian internet on political participation." Journal of Information Technology & Politics 14.1 (2017): 62-82.

Lee, Tsung-Ling. "Legal preparedness as part of COVID-19 response: the first 100 days in Taiwan." BMJ Global Health 5.5 (2020): e002608.

Tang, Audrey. May 12, 2019, "Inside Taiwan’s new digital democracy," Economist, https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/03/12/inside-taiwans-new-digital-democracy

Wang, C. Jason, Chun Y. Ng, and Robert H. Brook. "Response to COVID-19 in Taiwan: big data analytics, new technology, and proactive testing. at: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/71756

Start Drafting Your Contributions
I. General overview of civic tech in Taiwan (under Taiwan section)

II. Modern developments in Taiwan civic tech (under Taiwan section) --> digital democracy

III. Government-led initiatives

IV. Citizen-led initiatives (add on to current article) on COVID

V. Citizen-led initiatives (create new paragraph)

Taiwan
Taiwan is home to one of the world’s most vibrant civic technology sectors. The country is highly ranked internationally for its technological innovations including open data, digital inclusivity, and widespread internet participation. Taiwan’s growing digital democracy is based on collaboration and participation, with Digital Minister Audrey Tang describing Taiwan as striving to create a democracy with a “culture of listening”.

The Taiwanese government has made internet accessibility one of its core policies. In fact, as of 2019, approximately 87% of Taiwan’s citizens over 12 years old had connectivity to the internet. This widespread use of the internet has helped facilitate online political participation by giving citizens a platform to express their political opinions. Through the internet, Taiwanese citizens are able to directly contact political figures through online channels and publicly voice their political beliefs. Taiwan's policy towards technology has allowed its growing civic technology sector to flourish, with new innovations being made that foster even more political participation. The online platform called "Join," for example, was created in 2015 to give Taiwanese citizens a way to discuss, review, and propose governmental policy. Overall, the development of the internet and the emergence of new technologies in Taiwan has shown to increase political participation among its citizens.

Government-led initiatives
Taiwan's Digital Minister Audrey Tang has made strides to increase communication and collaboration between the government and the general public. Networks of Participation Officers have been established in each minister to jointly create new governmental policies between the public sector, citizens. and other government departments through collaborative meetings. New governmental policies in Taiwan have helped foster technological advancement. The Financial Technology Development and Innovative Experimentation Act passed in 2017 that created a Regulatory Sandbox platform to support the development of FinTech in Taiwan. This sandbox enables entrepreneurs and companies to experiment freely with new technologies without legal constraints.

Citizen-led initiatives
The g0v movement was created in 2012 with the goal of engaging more citizens in public affairs. It is a grassroots and decentralized civic tech community composed of coders, designers, NGO workers, civil servants and citizens designed to increase transparency of government information. All of g0v's projects are open-source and created by citizens. The g0v community has participated in a variety of social movements, including the "Sunflower Movement" in 2014 where it provided a crowdsourcing platform, and the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement where it provided live broadcasting and a logistics system. The vTaiwan (v for virtual) was created initially by members of g0v and later as a collaboration with the Taiwan's government. vTaiwan is a digital space where participants can discuss and deliberate on controversial topics. It uses a conversation tool called pol.is that leverages machine learning to scale online discussion.

Civic technology in Taiwan was a key component of the country's successful response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Partnering with the Taiwanese government, the civic tech community used open data to create maps available to citizens that visualized the availability of masks--making the distribution of PPE more structured and efficient. Big data analytics and QR code scanning also were used in Taiwan's response to the pandemic, which enabled them to send out real-time alerts during clinical visits and track citizens' travel history and health symptoms. Taiwan's response to the COVID-19 is representative of the country's shift towards a ‘techno-democratic statecraft’ and positioned them as a new leader in the international sphere for digital infrastructure.

Response to peer reviews
Thank you for the feedback! In the "Taiwan" section, I first plan to replace "indeed" with "in fact" to maintain a more encyclopedic tone in my article. I also agree that the word "open-mindedness" in “Taiwan's open-mindedness towards technology" could be interpreted as sounding a bit biased, so I also plan to replace the phrase with "policy". Lastly, I didn't notice that I capitalized the g in "g0v", and plan to edit that in the "Citizen-led initiatives" section. In terms of the smaller details, I plan to make sure the second citation in "connectivity to the internet" is after the sentence without the extra period. There is also a detail that I will fix by adding punctuation in quotation marks in the ("online platform called "Join",) phrase.