RightsCon Toronto 2018

Together with the RightsCon community, we want to dream about a future of consent-based governance through a hands-on exploration of on/offline tools and methods for building our digital futures. The small island country of Taiwan, with its long history of occupation, is now leading the world in participatory democracy. Their largely unknown open consultation methods will sound revolutionary to jaded ears within and alongside the embattled democracies of the West. At its core, their facilitation process is profoundly human, yet also finds traction in the 21st century 1) through moments of assistance by an opensource algorithm that breaks people out of echo chambers rather than placing us within them 2) through harnessing the power of digital surveillance to create serious conversation, by keeping “receipts” of in-person and remote deliberation. Together these futuristic facilitation practices bring radical transparency to how we collectively decide to govern divisive social issues, producing high-levels of consensus while protecting minority rights and having everyone leave the table with the feeling of being treated fairly.

We will begin by situating the practices within the civic hacker uprising that fostered it, through a community steward’s first-hand account of Taiwan’s g0v (gov zero) movement. We will then lead participants through a role-playing experience, where they will learn about the ORID structured conversation method, the open source algorithm Polis, other open source tools for accountability and transparency in large-scale group decision making, open source tools for maintaining trust and consent, success stories of these methods being deployed at scale.

Finally, we will open the floor to discussion so everyone can share knowledge around participatory processes. People will walk away with a renewed belief in rational deliberation at scale, and tools to put it into practice in their communities.