As a continuous effort to cultivate talents with knowledge and skills to preside over deliberative meetings, the 2021 Deliberative Democracy Talent Training sponsored by the Youth Development Administration (YDA) of the Ministry of Education (MOE) kicked off the training sessions based on the motif of “Deliberation in Taiwan; Deliberation of Taiwan”. Launched in May, the first phase fundamental training for facilitator and organizers was followed by Basic Training II for Deliberation Moderator on 25th September. This all-inclusive training program is open to trainees who have participated in the first phase basic training. In compliance with current measures for pandemic control and the rising trends for virtual meetings worldwide, the training sessions were conducted on-line in line with systematic curriculum for public deliberation coaching.
The Basic Training II for Moderators sets out from reviewing the tactics and models of deliberation and further extend to practice moderation skills and basic tools for online public discussions, so that students can acquire the deliberation skills through the course and relate them to arrays of topics, fields, and operating environments. In addition, case studies are introduced, and students are invited to contemplate on how they can facilitate social discussions and policy advancement under the influences of digital governance and inputs from public participation. It further reflects on the projected effects and challenges arising from new forms of public discussion, as well as the possibilities to instigate new routes for democracy.
The first class on 25th September focused on the mindset and tactics for deliberation. This year, the invited mentor, Kun-Bin Hung, from Let’s Talk shared the common methods such as ORID, mind maps, and KJ methods used by moderators when conducting deliberative discussions. In the second class, Wei-Ying Sung, Assistant Professor of the Department of Sports and Leisure at Hongkuang University, and Jing-Ying Ruan, a Let’s Talk deliberator mentor, taught the application and tool design of deliberations. This allows students to think about how to master deliberative skills and real-time applications for tools. From the third day onwards, elements of online public discussions were covered and taught by mentors of abundant on-line hosting experiences. Chung-Yueh Tsai, deputy chief executive of the Citizen of the Earth Foundation (CET); Wei-Shan Xiao, a civic education teacher at Taichung Municipal Wen-Hua Senior High School ; and Centre for Innovative Democracy (CID) of National Chengchi University, were invited to advocate and promote current policy and practice of national education, sharing various aspects derived from online discussions. Finally, to further respond the current trends on digital governance policy, the digital project manager of Foundation for Future Generations, Yu-Cang Lin, coordinated with HackMD community manager, En-En Hsu and PDIS researcher, Yi-Wen Chan, to confer the imperatives of public discussions, along with the impact and challenges coming from online participation for digital governance.
This interdisciplinary course design allows students to tap in different aspects of public deliberation and apply relative experiences to the upcoming Let's Talk proposal pitching. Students can thus have better ideas on the subsequent activity planning and exercise holistic strategy on process implementation. This one-month training program offers a wide range of informative courses for trainees till mid-October; please visit the Youth Hub website (Youth Hub website) for more details.