Towards a Model of Online Petition Signing Dynamics on the Join Platform in Taiwan

Since 2015 all citizens in Taiwan and since 2018 also residents can use the online platform called “Join”. The platform allows registered users to propose, discuss and review governmental policies. The ongoing practice currently makes Join one of the most innovative and successful cases of digital policy co-creation worldwide. However, due to the language barrier little is known about its contents. Internationally available research results are scarce. This article provides an overview of the platform’s functionalities as well as an overview of the research published to date. In addition, a first descriptive inroad to online petition dynamics is made. The case studies are based on the dataset available on the government’s Open Data portal. The goal of this paper is to lay the groundwork and provide the context for a more comprehensive quantitative analysis of online petition signing dynamics in Taiwan.