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Status active
Type ⚖️ government
Country 🇹🇼 TW
Website join.gov.tw
Concepts E Government Direct Democracy
Last activity 2026-08-07 manual
Site loaded, active proposals visible on homepage across a range of policy areas.

Join (join.gov.tw)

Join (join.gov.tw, officially the Public Policy Online Participation Platform / 公共政策網路參與平臺) is a government-run civic participation platform operated by Taiwan's National Development Council, launched in 2015 with assistance from Digital Minister Audrey Tang's office.1 It grew out of the same 2014 Sunflower Movement moment that produced vTaiwan and g0v, but took a different institutional path: rather than a volunteer civic-tech collaboration, Join was built and is run directly by government, giving its recommendations formal procedural weight that vTaiwan's advisory-only model never had.

How it works

Join centres on a petition mechanism: any citizen can submit a policy proposal, and if it gathers 5,000 supporters within 60 days, the relevant government agency is legally required to provide a reasoned public response.2 Since January 2016 the Executive Yuan has also required agencies under its jurisdiction to post proposed regulations to Join for a 60-day public comment period before finalising them.1 The platform also runs open consultations ("眾开講"), legislative monitoring, participatory budgeting, and a channel to contact officials directly.

By June 2022, Join had received 13,853 total proposals, of which 289 reached the 5,000-signature threshold requiring a government response.2

Comparison with vTaiwan

Analysts studying both platforms describe a genuine division of labour rather than redundancy: Join is "a clear and well-designed platform, making it easy to petition and rally support," while vTaiwan's Pol.is-based deliberation is more tech-intensive and better suited to surfacing consensus on contested, multi-sided questions.2 Join's noted weaknesses are the mirror image of vTaiwan's strengths — "little in-depth interaction in the petitioning process," and a relatively low signature threshold that risks a non-diverse pool of supporters driving government attention.2 Join's strength is institutionalisation: formal procedural backing and dedicated participation officers inside government, rather than a volunteer community's continued goodwill.

Join also reaches further than vTaiwan ever did — an older, less tech-savvy public, and policy areas well outside vTaiwan's digital/tech remit, including drunk-driving law, sexual assault legislation, and child-abuse policy.3 In effect, vTaiwan proved the model was viable and the state absorbed it: a win for the underlying practice of digital public consultation in Taiwan, even as it left vTaiwan itself without the international spotlight role it held in the platform's early years.

See also

  1. "Make Full Use of Join.gov.tw", AmCham Taiwan / Taiwan Business TOPICS, 2017. ↩↩

  2. "Trailblazers of digital participation: Taiwan's Join platform and vTaiwan", Bertelsmann Stiftung. ↩↩↩↩

  3. DOD, "Occupy to Plurality: what the 2010s civic-tech wave built, and where it stalled", citing the vTaiwan org page's "What came after" section. ↩