Engaged California Aims for ‘Rough Consensus’

When I read last week that Engaged California, the state’s just-launched digital democracy platform, was modeled after a program in Taiwan that “used digital tools to help increase consensus building and build governance powered by the people,” I immediately knew that Audrey Tang was involved. 

Tang, who served as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister from 2016 to 2024, and has worked in Silicon Valley as an entrpreneur for decades, is probably the most forward-thinking computer scientist/bureaucrat on the planet. Launched in 2014, her invention, vTaiwan, is a “decentralized open consultation process that combines online and offline interactions, bringing together Taiwan's citizens and government to deliberate on national issues.”  

This exercise in “deliberative democracy” has met with breathtaking success; Tang reports that in 2014, nine percent of Taiwanese citizens reported that they trusted their government, and that number is now 60 percent. Engaged California promises to incorporate her ideas in the hopes of a similar transformation. 

Nathan Gardels, who joins Tang as one of the four principal partners named in a press release from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, quotes her as saying: “This is a way for government to work with the people, not just for the people.”

Gardels describes Engaged California as a “first-in-the-nation online public platform to help bridge silos and mend the breach of trust between the public and the institutions of self-government.” 

“It is a three-way tool that enables policymakers and administrators to listen at scale to average citizens outside of election cycles and be responsive; it invites citizens to directly voice their concerns and proposals on an ongoing basis; and it is a platform for Californians from all walks of life to interact with each other to find common ground.”

From protest to shared power

I first encountered Audrey Tang on Baritunde Thurston‘s “How to Citizen“ podcast four years ago and was struck by her story, her technology, and her humanity. Tang began her political career in 2014, when she and a mob of student activists broke into and occupied the Taiwanese Parliament building. Rather than commit mayhem, the students conducted parliamentary hearings, behind barricades, regarding a trade bill with China that they opposed. 

Tang had wired the hall with microphones and cameras to broadcast the proceedings to millions of Taiwanese citizens. She and her colleagues negotiated for weeks, with public participation, and then presented a bill to the Taiwanese Parliament, which ultimately passed. Two years later she was given her appointment as Digital Minister.

When Baritunde asked for her job description, she quoted from something pinned to her Twitter account:

“When we see the internet of things, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning.

“When we see user experience, let's make it about human-nature experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let us always remember the plurality is here.”

Baritunde: “That's poetry. It is.”

Audrey: “I'm a poetician, if you will.”

How e-Democracy Works

Thurston, who called Taiwan “the Mecca of innovation in government services,” gave his podcast listeners an excellent description of vTaiwan’s methodology, which involved something called “quadratic voting.” (We’re going into the civic weeds here, but I believe you might find it’s worth it.)

"Think of two axes, an X axis that runs horizontally and a Y axis that runs vertically. (Yeah, I'm taking you back to middle school.) The X axis is your “yay” or “nay,” and the Y is how strongly you feel about your yay or nay.

So let's say your town is voting on a citywide compost collection measure. On one end of your X axis would be a “yes—compost.” On the other end, “nope, I ain't composting.”

But it doesn't stop there because the Y axis gauges how strongly you feel about those votes. Maybe you plan to vote no, because you don't know that much about composting, but you heard it might stink up the city. You'd probably fall somewhere in the middle of the Y axis.

The same could be said for someone who's voting yes. They don't know much, but they hear it's “good for the environment.” They too would fall somewhere in the middle of the Y axis.

Once again, it doesn't stop there because users can continue to submit statements on composting. And the more you participate by up or downvoting those statements, the more refined your placement gets within this grid. 

So, composting will take the equivalent of 1 million cars off the road. That might lead to an upvote. Or, the budget will come out of the parks department. That could lead to a downvote.

The point is as users start to form opinions on composting, wherever you fall on these scales, you get placed within one of the four quadrants. And as the votes tally up, you start to see clusters of like-minded people, clusters that would be invisible to you in a purely binary yes-no world. And that's where the rough consensus begins to form."

Verbifying ‘Citizen’

As some of you know, we’ve been using the word “engage“ here at California Local for a long time—more and more in recent months. Last summer, my colleague Chris Neklason wrote about our role as a “civic engagement hub.” (He also namedropped Baratunde Thurston in that blogpost, as I did in the introduction to our book How California Works.)

Chris has been at it even longer—his first foray into the civic engagement arena came more than a decade ago with a thing called Civinomics, which may have been too far ahead of its time.

We are glad that, in coming months, we will be able to report to you as the state of California rolls out a tool that will help us live our slogan (“We Make it Easy to Citizen")—and maybe, fingers crossed, help heal the wounded online political realm.