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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Taiwan does not let online votes directly pass laws. Instead, it uses digital participation to bring residents, businesses, civil-society groups and officials into policy discussions. Two channels are often grouped under the phrase “crowdsourcing laws”: the civic-society and government collaboration vTaiwan, and Join, a government-run participation platform.
What “crowdsourcing laws” means in Taiwan
The phrase is shorthand for using public input to inform policy—not for handing legislative authority to an online platform. Participants can surface concerns, compare views and help shape recommendations. Those contributions may influence government work, but vTaiwan recommendations are not automatically binding, and formal government institutions retain responsibility for policy and lawmaking.
Taiwan’s model combines different participation channels rather than relying on one website or a single voting mechanism. vTaiwan is associated especially with deliberation on digital-economy policy. Join is a broader, government-maintained platform for participation, including petitions and consultations.
How vTaiwan works
It brings affected groups into policy discussion
After the 2014 Sunflower occupation and broader calls for political openness, Minister Jaclyn Tsai proposed a neutral platform at a g0v-sponsored hackathon in December 2014. g0v contributors and government collaborators began vTaiwan in 2015. The process brings together people from public, private and social sectors, with much of its work focused on issues in the digital economy.
Pol.is maps agreement without ordinary reply threads
For online discussion, vTaiwan has used Pol.is. Instead of organizing debate as a chain of replies, the tool invites participants to submit short statements and respond to other statements with agree, disagree or pass/unsure. Its analysis maps response patterns and groups participants by opinion, helping make areas of division and possible agreement visible.
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The design aims to draw out statements that can find support across groups. It does not count those signals as a lawmaking vote, nor does the software enact policy. As Audrey Tang put it in a Ministry of Digital Affairs interview, “Utilizing Polis allowed us to transform conventional voting inputs into structured natural language inputs.” She also argued that referendums, petitions and voting can have “insufficient bitrate” to convey comprehensive solutions; that is her explanation of the approach, not a measured technical statistic.
Discussion can inform policy without deciding it
Tang described the Uber case as an early use of the Pol.is method in 2015. She said that turning simple voting inputs into structured natural-language contributions helped stakeholders—including Uber, taxi drivers and passengers—identify areas of agreement. Government accounts also credit vTaiwan with contributing to discussions about Uber regulation, online liquor sales and platform-economy rules. These examples show the process being used on concrete policy disputes; they do not establish that consensus alone produced a law.
A Taiwan Public Digital Innovation Space explainer published in 2019 said vTaiwan had tackled 30 issues. That is a historical figure from that explainer, not a current total. The same article reported 10.6 million unique Join visitors since its 2015 launch, a cumulative figure that should not be read as an annual count of active participants.
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Join is maintained by government and has a wider participation remit than vTaiwan’s early emphasis on digital-economy deliberation. Ministry material describes Join as combining participatory budgeting, e-petitions, regulatory consultation and collaborative meetings with civil society. The distinction is about institutional role and purpose; the available accounts do not establish a complete, current feature-by-feature comparison.
| Aspect | vTaiwan | Join |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs it | A civic-society and government collaboration. | A government-maintained national participation platform. |
| Main role | Deliberative exploration, particularly around digital-economy policy. | Broader participation, including petitions, consultations, participatory budgeting and collaborative meetings. |
| How people contribute | Pol.is statements and agree, disagree or pass/unsure responses can help map opinion clusters. | Ministry material describes channels such as e-petitions and regulatory consultations; a full current inventory is not established here. |
| Effect on government | Recommendations may inform policy work but are not automatically binding. | A ministry account says petitions meeting its stated threshold can bring an issue to a minister’s attention and receive responses; the account does not make participation equivalent to a binding lawmaking vote. |
What the ministry says about petitions and participation
In a Ministry of Digital Affairs account, the ministry says an e-petition reaching 5,000 signatures can bring the issue to a minister’s attention, and that responses to petition points take an average of 60 days. These are ministry-reported descriptions, not independently audited service-level statistics; check Join’s live rules for the current threshold and process.
The same account attributes to Audrey Tang an estimate of about 10 to 12 million Join participants annually in a population of 23 million. Its publication date, denominator and counting method are not established here, so the estimate should not be treated as a verified current participation rate—or as evidence of deliberative depth or policy impact.
Can anyone submit a proposal to Join?
A Join FAQ dated July 2, 2018 says proposals must fall within the Executive Yuan or its subordinate agencies’ areas of responsibility. It lists possible screening grounds such as being outside that remit, being unclear or focused on an individual interest, or concerning a matter already before the legislature. Because those rules come from an older FAQ, consult the live Join platform’s rules before relying on specific eligibility requirements.
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The useful innovation is the connection between digital participation and policy discussion: people can contribute ideas and see patterns that a simple yes-or-no vote may obscure. But the channels have different roles, and neither the number of online participants nor the appearance of agreement proves that a recommendation becomes law. In a 2019 explainer, Taiwan’s Public Digital Innovation Space described vTaiwan’s recommendations as not binding on government, while saying the work often led to concrete action. That characterization reflects the explainer’s account at publication time.
For readers asking how Taiwan “crowdsources laws,” the precise answer is that it crowdsources input into policy deliberation. vTaiwan uses structured discussion and opinion mapping; Join offers government-run participation channels with routes for petitions and consultation. Officials and formal institutions still decide what action to take.
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