Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has called for public participation in a series of participatory budgeting workshops this month, touting a method that would allow Taipei residents to help shape city policies, making for an “open government.”
The first workshop to train “budget reviewers” is to open in Nangang District (南港) today.
Participatory budgeting is a policy central to Ko’s administrative style, which is built upon a vision of an open government that incorporates public opinion in the decisionmaking process.
The two basic principles of participatory budgeting are “budget transparency” and “training,” which is why the city has planned workshops across its 12 districts, Ko said on Facebook.
He said the workshops comprise of three stages designed to help residents understand participatory budgeting policy and help show how proposals are to be submitted and voted on, as well as cultivate their ability to moderate and take minutes.
Eighteen class hours are allotted for the three stages, and participants who complete the training and pass an evaluation will be qualified to moderate discussions, Ko said.
The city government has invited academics at universities and community colleges to take part in designing the workshops to fine-tune their operations, he said.
Department of Civil Affairs division head Wang Tien-tung (王添棟) said that participatory budgeting contrasts from the traditional government-led model, since it is a “bottom-up” policy that puts the public at the helm.
He said that although it is a nascent concept for Taipei, the city is a latecomer to a community of more than 1,500 cities worldwide, including some Chinese cities, that have embraced the practice.
Wang said that the policy was introduced by the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in 1989, where it received many favorable reviews and inspired the rest of the world to follow suit.
He said that the department would call on the public to submit ideas they have about certain projects before putting them to an Internet poll; the ideas favored by voters would be taken to the workshops, where they are discussed and made into official proposals.
The proposals are then taken to a review committee comprising academics and experts, who would provide professional input and suggestions on how the ideas could be refined, he said.
He said the committee would take on an auxiliary role and assured that it would not interfere with policymaking.
Wang said that the department’s goal is to attract at least 2,700 applicants for the first-stage workshops, with the first batch of budget reviewers to be announced in April next year.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching