Participation Officer Network

Creating a citizen-accessible cross-ministerial network

How it started

29 Nov 2016, PDIS released an open letter looking for “passionate civil servants” who are interested in open government, consensus-based policy-making process, and are confident with communicating and collaborating with multiple stakeholders on various issues, especially cross-ministerial public issues. 12 Dec 2016, a list of names of 70 people were collected, they are then entitled as Participation Officers or PO.

PO Network

The PO peer support network works to drive cultural change; it plays a crucial role in Taiwan’s open government scene. POs are involved in conversation with civic society and governmental divisions. To do so, they must create a different culture from the one they inherited for many years.

PDIS spent about a month time and built up its own shared value, root from by Open Space Technology principles, which works best when the participants are present in a high level of complexity, a high level of diversity, and a high level urgency. PDIS then hosted a two-days consensus building workshop on 18th and 20th January 2017 and share the shared value. Since then, PO have involved in practical conversation between civic society and governmental divisions.

How it works - PO Network's operational mechanism

PDIS plays the role of facilitating weekly, monthly, and seasonal gathering with PO Network, which respectively are collaboration workshop for designing public services held every week, peer to peer network functioning review once a month, and a seasonal project milestones review. Topics for weekly workshops are mostly from the petition section of Join.tw, a petition website maintained by National Development Council.

Institutionalising the role as a Participation Officer

On 19 march 2020, Open Government Participation Officer Network Reformation was implemented, amended a year later on 20 April 2021. For more detail, please visit reformation section in the PO Network website.