Ya-Wei Chou
Contributions
-
How Does Taiwan's Civil Society Leverage Technology and Citizen Activism to Enhance the Transparency of Parliament?
In 2025, many citizens in Taiwan were dissatisfied with how parliament reviewed and cut the national budget. Civil society organizations and advocates criticized the budget review process for turning budget cuts into a tool of political retaliation between parties, with essential funding for national defense, critical infrastructure, and social welfare being significantly cut or frozen without clear justification.
Rather than waiting for solutions, these groups took action. By leveraging technology, data, and citizen participation, they developed a crowdsourcing social media bot and a data visualization website to monitor how legislators decided to cut or freeze government budgets. This initiative not only increased transparency in the budget review process but also addressed long-standing issues in parliamentary open data, which for decades had been released in fragmented, unstructured, and non–machine-readable formats.
In this article, data journalist Zoe Lee from READr, who led the project, explains how Taiwan’s civic tech community once again mobilized to advance parliamentary transparency. -
AI for Democracy, More Digital Participation Best Practices from across the World, and More in the New Digital Participation Guide!
This year, People Powered collaborated with us again to update their Digital Participation Guide and Rating by adding a chapter on how AI can facilitate public participation, as well as including more case studies of best practice from around the world. Come and take a look!
-
Why Do We Need the Civic Tech Project and Community Handbook to Save Our Democracy in Crisis? Find out What Our Panellists Said at our Release Event!
On May 29, we invited experts from around the world to join the online release event for the Civic Tech Project and Community Handbook, which was co-developed by g0v Jothon, us, and all the contributors. The experts analysed the current crisis of democracy and explained why the handbook can inspire action to tackle it.
-
Students in Bonn Test an AI Tool for Public Debate
The Global Innovation Hub is exploring how digital tools can support transparent and inclusive public deliberation. One such tool is “Talk to the City” (T3C), an open source system that collects participants’ arguments, organizes them by theme and provides an overview of the discussion.This opportunity arose when Iris Müller from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation’s NRW office and Zoë van Doren from the Berlin office organized a student event in Bonn on the potential reintroduction of conscription.
