I’d like to just ask a little bit about how democratic these platforms really are at this stage. Given that the people using this technology and this platform, I would argue, still come from a relatively narrow subsection of society, I wonder whether there is some inherent bias in both their views a
We need to compare it with the status quo and the situation before it existed, which was even less democratic. Before, we would have public hearings that were only attended by people like lobbyists, people that could make the travel to Taipei, and people who are mostly represented by large-scale associations – civil society or private sectors. The constituents of those associations did not have the full transcript of what their representatives said in such situations. We would get a summary, but not see the process of how a rule was made.
If you compare it to the pre-existing system, I would argue it is definitely more democratic. If you were not interested in this topic and you did not participate in the decision-making process, but in the future you wanted to look at the process, or the audit trail, of how this rule came to be, you can always go back and get the full history.
As a multi-stakeholder governance platform, we are very careful in saying, “We are here to record the process of how the stakeholders talk to each other.” Of course we are not saying, “People who are unrelated, people who did not have the means to participate, are automatically excluded.” But we realize they may not want to dedicate so much time in the initial stages to the agenda setting.
It is not fully democratic; this is not a referendum system. This is a system that makes transparent the negotiation between stakeholders and includes some missing stakeholders who were not previously represented. But if you are not a stakeholder, chances are you may not get involved in this process.