Merge pull request pluralitybook#589 from joshuay1/main

Add information of vTaiwan and fix image in 02-02

contents/english/2-2-the-life-of-a-digital-democracy.md

@@ -32,11 +32,15 @@ Many Sunflower participants devoted themselves to the open government movement;
 
 ### vTaiwan and Join
 
-During this process of institutionalization of g0v, there was growing demand to apply the methods that had allowed for these dispute resolutions to a broader range of policy issues.  This led to the establishment of vTaiwan, a platform and project developed by g0v for facilitating deliberation on public policy controversies.  The process involved many steps (proposal, opinion expression, reflection and legisation) each harnessing a range of open source software tools, but has become best known for its use of the at-the-time(2015)-novel machine learning based open-source "wikisurvey"/social media tool Polis, which we discuss further in our chapter on 05-04 Augmented Deliberation below.  In short, Polis works much like a conventional microblogging service like Twitter/X except that rather than displaying content that maximizes engagement it shows the clusters of opinion that exist and highlights statements that bridge them to faciliate both consensus formation and the better understanding of lines of division.
+During this process of institutionalization of g0v, there was growing demand to apply the methods that had allowed for these dispute resolutions to a broader range of policy issues.  This led to the establishment of vTaiwan, a platform and project developed by g0v for facilitating deliberation on public policy controversies.  The process involved many steps (proposal, opinion expression, reflection and legisation) each harnessing a range of open source software tools, but has become best known for its use of the at-the-time(2015)-novel machine learning based open-source "wikisurvey"/social media tool Polis, which we discuss further in our chapter on 05-04 Augmented Deliberation below.  In short, Polis functions similarly to conventional microblogging services like Twitter/X, except that it employs dimension reduction techniques to cluster opinions. Instead of displaying content that maximizes engagement, Polis shows the clusters of opinion that exist and highlights statements that bridge them. This approach facilitates both consensus formation and a better understanding of the lines of division.
 
-<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pluralitybook/plurality/main/figs/vtaiwan-polis.png" width="100%" alt="vtaiwan-polis">
+<div align="center">
+    <img src="../../figs/vtaiwan-polis-ai.png" width="70%" alt="vtaiwan-polis">
+</div>
 
-vTaiwan was deliberately intended as an experimental, high-touch, intensive platform for committed participants.  It had about 200,000 users or about 1% of Taiwan's population at its peak and held detailed deliberations on 28 issues, 80% of which led to legislative action.  These focused mostly on questions around technology regulation, such as the regulation of ride sharing, responses to non-consensual intimate images, regulatory experimentation with financial technology and regulation of AI.  While these were generally viewed as successful by all parties, the intensive effort required, the lack of mandates for government to respond and the somewhat narrow scope has led to a relative decline of the platform recently. 
+vTaiwan was deliberately intended as an experimental, high-touch, intensive platform for committed participants.  It had about 200,000 users or about 1% of Taiwan's population at its peak and held detailed deliberations on 28 issues, 80% of which led to legislative action.  These focused mostly on questions around technology regulation, such as the regulation of ride sharing, responses to non-consensual intimate images, regulatory experimentation with financial technology and regulation of AI. 
+
+As a decentralized, citizen-led community, vTaiwan is also a living organism that naturally evolves and adapts as citizen volunteers participate in various ways. The community’s engagement experienced a downturn following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which interrupted face-to-face meetings and led to decreased participation. The platform faced challenges due to the intensive volunteering effort required, the absence of mandates for governmental responses, and its somewhat narrow focus. In response to these challenges, vTaiwan’s community has sought to find a new role between the public and the government and extend its outreach beyond the realm of Taiwanese regulation in recent years. A significant effort to revitalize vTaiwan was its collaboration with OpenAI’s Democratic Input to AI project in 2023. Through partnerships with Chatham House and the organization of several physical and online deliberative events centered on the topic of AI ethics and localization, vTaiwan successfully integrated local perspectives into the global discourse on AI and technology governance. Looking ahead to 2024, vTaiwan plans to engage in deliberations concerning AI-related regulations in Taiwan and beyond. In addition to Polis, vTaiwan is constantly experimenting with new deliberation and voting tools, integrating LLMs for summarization. The vTaiwan community remains committed to democratic experimentation and finding consensus among the public for policymaking. The earlier experience of vTaiwan outside of government also inspired the design of the official Join platform, which is actively used by citizens as a means of proposing issues and ideas to the government. 
 
 The Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS) that one of us established in 2016 to work with vTaiwan and other projects we discuss below in the ministerial role therefore supported a second, related platform Join. While Join also sometime used Polis, it has a lighter-weight user interface and focuses primarily on soliciting input, suggestions and initatives from a broader public, and has an enforcement mechanism where government officials must respond if a proposal receives sufficient support. Unlike vTaiwan, furthermore, Join addresses a range of policy issues, including controversial non-technological issues such as high school's start time, and has strong continuing usage today of roughly half of the population over its lifetime and an average of 11,000 unique daily visitors.