Taiwan's E-Participation in Public Policy-- A Comparison Study Between vTaiwan and Join Platform

Major countries in the world has classified e-participation as a critical index of innovative services of government in order to establish a two-way communication channel between citizens and government. Those countries encourage their citizens to take part in the process of public policy making through e-participation as well as build an open government as a goal. E-participation has become a channel that cannot be ignored for people to participate in public policy making. In Taiwan, vTaiwan and Join have been established in 2015 in order to provide a mechanism of online participation in the process of public policy making and are different from traditional public participation. This study aims to explore how e-participation can benefit people to join in the process of the making and implementing of public policies in order to achieve the goal of open government and of good governance. This research utilized the framework of evaluation for e-participation recommended by the United Nations to design a framework to evaluate Taiwan’s e-participation mechanism. Through three dimensions – institution, participation, and technical tools, document analysis and in-depth interview were used to conduct this research in order to compare the operations between vTaiwan and Join. The result of this research shows that vTaiwan and Join have differences in patterns of operation, placing importance on organization, and resulting from different level of participation. On vTaiwan, most of participants is familiar with internet and gives recognition to the Minister without Portfolio for her attitude being responsible for the operation. As a result, these participants generally have higher willingness to participate and can reach a consensus easily; therefore, vTaiwan has established a prospective experimental model for Taiwan’s e-participation in public policy. The Join platform is lack of the discussion of bringing participants’ opinions into the process of decision making; hence, it has less influence upon policy making. However, the Join platform has its contribution on institutionalization of the mechanism for Taiwan’s e-participation in public policy making as well as to introduce itself into ministries. Nevertheless, both vTaiwan and Join have common problems, such as lack of comprehensive laws and regulations corresponded to their operations, insufficient integration into administrative operations, a relatively narrow group of users, sometimes information provided that is difficult to understand, and function of mediators varied because of different personality, etc. In conclusion, this research provided governmental agencies with several suggestions, which are learned from the experiences of vTaiwan and Join, for establishing a two-way and open channel of communication and space for dialogue by making good use of information and communication technology (ICT).