Plurality in Finland

In Finland, hardly any translation of the book *Plurality* or reporting on Audrey Tang or E. Glen Weyl can be found. What stands out is how the Sitra fund brought in Polis, an online tool for gathering opinions, in 2023, and how it was renamed Voxit in 2025.

How can you gather the opinions of many people without turning it into a fight? On social media, the strongest opinions tend to stand out. In Finland, people have answered this problem by bringing in a tool used in Taiwan and trying it out on a national scale. The book Plurality itself, by Audrey Tang and E. Glen Weyl, seems to be little known in Finland, however.

In short

No Finnish translation of Plurality has been found. Reporting on Tang or Weyl is also hard to find [1][3].

What stands out is the work of Sitra (the Finnish Innovation Fund, Suomen itsenäisyyden juhlarahasto). Since 2023, Sitra has brought into the country Polis, an online tool that gathers opinions and shows where people agree and where they split. It has been used for national discussions too, and in 2025 its name was changed to Voxit [4][8]. → Polis

For example

Bringing in Polis (February 2023). Sitra announced that it would fund a Polis trial run by DigiFinland, a company responsible for digitalizing public services. The announcement describes how, in Taiwan, Polis was used to decide on what terms the ride-hailing service Uber could operate [4].

Tang's keynote and a national discussion (September 15, 2023). On the International Day of Democracy, Sitra held a webinar and invited Tang, then Taiwan's digital minister, to give the keynote. According to Sitra's report, nearly 400 people took part [5]. On the same day, a national discussion called "Mitä mieltä, Suomi?" (What do you think, Finland?) began. It ran for four weeks, and 18,000 people joined in [6].

Asking citizens how AI should be used (September 2025). Sitra and the technology consultancy Reaktor announced that they would ask citizens, in an online discussion, how AI should be used in public services. From the results they plan to build a set of rules that can be used in the training data of language models (AI that writes text). The announcement says that such a rulebook based on citizens' views has not been made anywhere in the world before [7]. → Alignment Assemblies

In more detail

The book and translations

A search of Melinda, the union catalog of Finnish libraries, found only the English original (2018) of Radical Markets, the earlier book by Weyl and Eric Posner. Not even the English original of Plurality was found [1].

Among the 160 copies (forks) of the book's original repository on GitHub, there is no Finnish translation (a provisional count by this site, October 2026). Finnish is also absent from the list of languages on the book's official site, plurality.net [2]. A search of the public broadcaster Yle's articles found no article matching "Audrey Tang", and Google News (in Finnish) found only one. The search tools available were limited, however, so this does not show that no articles exist [3]. → Book editions and translations

From Polis to Voxit

According to a Sitra working paper, Polis was tried, with Sitra's support, in five wellbeing services counties (the regional units responsible for health and social services). More than 12,000 people took part in a total of 33 discussions [9].

From September 5, 2025, the name changed to Voxit. The renaming was decided by the new open-source (anyone can see and use the code) Voxit community in Finland. Users' feedback also played a part. In Swedish, polis means "police", so the name was awkward to use, especially in Swedish-speaking areas. The Polis name continues to be used internationally, but from now on Voxit will be a separate platform from the one the original community keeps developing [8].

Finland as Tang describes it

In an April 2025 conversation, Tang brought up Finland while talking about the World Happiness Report. Taiwan has been the happiest country in East Asia for two years, and Finland is the happiest overall. According to Tang, during a visit to Finland, the people at Sitra were eager for this connection. Tang said that Sitra sees happiness as rooted in the "social fabric", and wants to spread its process across the Nordic countries and use technologies like Polis to shape policies such as AI governance [10].

As Tang remembered it, the most divisive point in "What do you think, Finland?" was a feeling among older generations: that the language they had used all their lives was being abandoned or frowned on by younger people, and that they were tired of having their words corrected all the time [10].

In a video of another conversation (Ep. 553), a speaker who appears to be Tang also says that the Finnish discussion gathered almost a million votes, more than any Polis conversation in Taiwan. This comes from the video's automatic captions, however, and the vote count has not been checked against Sitra's materials [11].

Colin Megill, the developer of Polis, also said in 2025 that Finland, like Taiwan, runs its own instance of Polis [12]. In another talk, Megill noted that by the time of a 2023 Sitra post, 18,000 people had taken part in national-scale discussions (this too from automatic captions) [13].

Earlier ways to take part

Finland had ways for citizens to take part in politics well before Polis.

Citizens' initiative (kansalaisaloite). The law took effect on March 1, 2012. With the support of 50,000 people, a proposal can be brought to parliament. According to Finnish Wikipedia, of the 1,664 initiatives submitted by April 2025, four became law [14]
otakantaa.fi. An online forum where citizens can comment on government matters. It became permanent in 2003 [15]
Deliberative citizens' panels. Panels where citizens chosen by lot or other methods talk things through at length. With Sitra's support, more than 20 were held in four years. Among municipalities, the city of Turku was the first to make one permanent, in 2024 [16]

On the digital public infrastructure side, Finland uses X-Road, the same data-exchange platform for government as Estonia. In 2018 the two countries connected their platforms to each other [17]. → Digital public infrastructure · Plurality in Estonia

Before the contacts with Tang

In 2019, the researcher Tanja Aitamurto told Tang about being part of a very big project in Finland developing democratic innovations. Aitamurto also explained that Finland had run many experiments in crowdsourcing citizens' views online for policymaking [18].

At a 2021 webinar, Hélène Landemore, a self-described "deliberative democrat", put questions to Tang comparing a Finnish experiment Landemore had been involved in (on regulating snowmobiles) with Taiwan's vTaiwan [19].

In a 2020 conversation, when a question compared how resilient Taiwan and Finland are against disinformation, Tang answered that Finland was a main source of inspiration when Taiwan drew up its 12-year curriculum for primary and secondary schools. That curriculum makes media and technology literacy one of nine core competencies [20].

What is debated

Skepticism about Community Notes. On Meta's move to Community Notes, in which users add notes to posts, Yle reported in January 2025 the views of the journalist and nonfiction writer Johanna Vehkoo. Vehkoo expressed skepticism, but did not entirely rule out that fact-checking by citizens could work well [21]. → Community Notes
Not only Polis. Sitra itself, in a statement to the European Commission, wrote that Polis is "vain yksi esimerkki" (only one example) and that there are many other tools for participation [22].
Thin sources. Much of what is written here comes from Sitra's own announcements. The research for this article found no Finnish-language material discussing the book Plurality [1][3].

Where it fits in Plurality

The book mentions Finland alongside Estonia. In the English edition, chapter 3-3 "The Lost Dao" lists countries that have excelled in various aspects of ⿻ (Plurality), and says that Finland "has built on and scaled the success of its neighbor", Estonia. In the book's assessment, Finland extended digital inclusion (everyone sharing in the benefits of digital technology) deeper into society, the educational system and the economy than Estonia, and also adopted elements of digitized democratic participation [23]. Chapter 5-5 "Adaptive Administration" names the Finnish government's Kela-Kelpo project as one of the leaders in AI tools that help people find their way to public services [24].

What is spreading in Finland, however, is not the book's argument itself but the practice of Polis, a tool the book introduces. The connections with Tang, too, grew apart from the book, through conversations with researchers and contacts with Sitra.

Articles on other countries and regions:

Sources

Search results from Melinda (the union catalog of Finnish libraries) via SRU (2026-10-02) — https://sru.api.melinda.kansalliskirjasto.fi/bib
List of forks of pluralitybook/plurality — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/forks ［CC0］
Search results from Yle's article search API (2026-10-02) — https://yle-fi-search.api.yle.fi/v1/search
Sitra, "Sitra ja DigiFinland tuovat demokratiainnovaation Suomeen – Polis-alusta mahdollistaa uudenlaisen keskustelun" (2023-02-06) — https://www.sitra.fi/uutiset/sitra-ja-digifinland-tuovat-demokratiainnovaation-suomeen-polis-alusta-mahdollistaa-uudenlaisen-keskustelun/ ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
Sitra, "Översikt till förvaltningsrådet 3/2023" — https://www.sitra.fi/sv/artiklar/oversikt-till-forvaltningsradet-3-2023/ ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
Sitra, "Mitä mieltä, Suomi?" — https://www.sitra.fi/mita-mielta-suomi/ ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
Sitra, "Suomalaiset pääsevät ensimmäisinä maailmassa laatimaan pelisääntöjä tekoälyn käytölle julkisissa palveluissa" (2025-09) — https://www.sitra.fi/artikkelit/suomalaiset-paasevat-ensimmaisina-maailmassa-laatimaan-pelisaantoja-tekoalyn-kaytolle-julkisissa-palveluissa/ ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
Sitra, "Rakentavan keskustelun verkkoalusta Polis on nyt Voxit" (2025-09-04) — https://www.sitra.fi/uutiset/rakentavan-keskustelun-verkkoalusta-polis-on-nyt-voxit/ ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
Sitra, "Asukaspaneeli- ja Polis-kokeilut hyvinvointialueilla 2023–2024" — https://www.sitra.fi/julkaisut/asukaspaneeli-ja-polis-kokeilut-hyvinvointialueilla-2023-2024/ ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
2025-04-03 Interview with Polly Curtis (transcript) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2025-04-03-Interview-with-Polly-Curtis.md ［CC0］
"Plurality: How Taiwan Managed to Unite Its People Through Tech" Ep. 553 (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPduXixHPj0
Colin Megill on Computational Democracy (The Futurists EPS_294, 2025-05-16, video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqYSTS44xjE
TICTeC 25: Pol.is 2.0 sneak preview (video) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8kMOg4EPQA
Finnish Wikipedia, "Kansalaisaloite" — https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansalaisaloite ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
Finnish Wikipedia, "Otakantaa.fi" — https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otakantaa.fi ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
Sitra, "Kansalaispaneelit" — https://www.sitra.fi/projektit/kansalaispaneelit/ ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
Finnish Wikipedia, "X-Road" — https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Road ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
2019-02-06 Conversation with Tanja Aitamurto (transcript) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2019-02-06-Conversation-with-Tanja-Aitamurto.md ［CC0］
2021-03-09 GovAI Webinar: The Frontier of Democracy (transcript) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2021-03-09-GovAI-Webinar-The-Frontier-of-Democracy.md ［CC0］
2020-01-16 The International Republican Institute visits (transcript) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2020-01-16-The-International-Republican-Institute-visits.md ［CC0］
Yle, "Meta vaihtaa faktantarkistajat X:stä tuttuun toimintoon – asiantuntija on skeptinen" (2025-01-24) — https://yle.fi/a/74-20138852
Sitra, "Sitran lausunto Euroopan komission demokratian kilpi -aloitteesta" (2025-06) — https://www.sitra.fi/artikkelit/sitran-lausunto-euroopan-komission-demokratian-kilpi-aloitteesta/ ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
Plurality, 3-3 "The Lost Dao" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/3-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 5-5 "Adaptive Administration" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-5/eng/ ［CC0］

We welcome error reports and questions ("What is…?"). Submissions become public issues.

Report an error in this article ・ Ask a question