Plurality in the German-speaking world

German is spoken in three countries: Germany, Austria and Switzerland (together called DACH). Switzerland is known for its referendums, and Germany and Austria too have held "citizens' assemblies", in which citizens chosen by lot or similar methods talk things through [1][2][3]. This article follows how Plurality, a book written out of Taiwan's experience, reached this region.

In short

The book Plurality by Audrey Tang and E. Glen Weyl was, in the German-speaking world, translated by five volunteers on GitHub (a site for building documents together) and published in 2026 as the German edition Pluralität – Die Zukunft kollaborativer Technologie und der Demokratie. The publisher named in the imprint is RadicalxChange, an organization Weyl founded [4].

Around the same time, SPRIND, a German federal agency, announced a citizen-participation project modeled on Taiwan and Tang. The actual vote used quadratic voting (quadratische Wahl) [5][6].

For example

The German edition Pluralität (2026). It was translated and edited by five people: Andreas Fauler, Ferdinand Ferroli, Martin Rausch, Jennifer Victoria Scurrell and Reinhard Zeitler. The ISBN of the printed book is 978-3-00-086092-8, and that of the e-book is 978-3-00-086093-5 [4]. Amazon.de's sales page gives a release date of February 6, 2026, and 531 pages [7].

Appearances in Berlin and Zurich (2024–2025). On May 29, 2024, at re:publica, a Berlin event on digital society, Tang and Weyl talked about the book's framework, with Frederike Kaltheuner as interviewer [8]. On August 3 of the same year, Opendata.ch invited Tang to Zurich. The announcement says the talk would be about what Switzerland can learn from the book [9]. The Swiss online magazine Republik also announced it as an evening to hear about the new book Plurality [10]. On December 4, 2025, Tang gave a talk at the University of Zurich after receiving the Right Livelihood Award (also called the "Alternativer Nobelpreis", the alternative Nobel Prize) [4], and Republik published a German translation of it [11].

SPRIND's citizen hackathon (2026). SPRIND announced the project on January 16, 2026, at the DLD conference in Munich. The announcement said it would take Taiwan and Tang as its model and use Pol.is and Quadratic Voting adapted to German conditions [5]. In practice, 13 issues were drawn from 27,707 submissions, and citizens ranked them by quadratic voting (with up to 100 points each). After that, 21 teams began building prototypes [6]. The details are in the article on Germany's citizen hackathon.

In more detail

The translators

The repository (storage space for documents) of the German translation branched off from the original book's repository, and its license is CC0 (copyright waived, so anyone can use it freely). The first German commits were "Create 01 Vorwort.md" (creating the preface) on March 4, 2024, and "First German Batch" the next day, March 5 [12]. Both were made by an account called XQTStrategy, and Fauler's personal website links to an X account of the same name [12][13].

Fauler describes himself as a co-initiator of building a German-speaking hub of the ⿻ Plurality movement [13]. In the speaker profile for an international conference in 2025, he is RadicalxChange's co-lead in Germany [14].

The commits of Zeitler, one of the translators, began in September 2025 and continue until August 2026, after the release date on the sales page [12][7].

After the joint translation, Rausch decided that a shorter, more approachable book was needed, and wrote a story of Taiwan's democracy, Durch jeden Riss fällt Licht (Light falls through every crack). According to Rausch's website, the way to write it became clear at Tang's post-award talk in Zurich in 2025 [15].

How the book is made

The German edition's imprint says that the book is open source and may be copied freely, with or without naming the source. But the same imprint also carries the line "© Radicalxchange 2026" [4].

The German edition has a section of recommendations from people in the German-speaking world. The recommenders include Reinhard Bütikofer, co-chair of a German–Taiwanese dialogue platform; the writer Navid Kermani; Alexandra Geese, vice-chair of the Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament; Günter Krings, deputy leader of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag; and Anke Domscheid-Berg, a former member of the Bundestag. Politicians from different parties appear side by side [4]. Bütikofer, for example, writes that the book describes strategies and solutions based on Taiwan's practice, and that these should be developed in the German-speaking world too [4].

The translators also added translators' notes. In chapter 2-1, for example, they explain that Taiwanese politics is divided into two camps: the "blue", centered on the Kuomintang, and the "green", centered on the Democratic Progressive Party [4].

Prehistory: Tang and the German-speaking world

When Tang was 11, her family lived for a year in the Palatinate in south-western Germany, because of her father's doctoral studies [16].

On October 28, 2019, Tang told a visiting group from the Studienstiftung, a German scholarship foundation, that Taiwan was prototyping a democracy focused on plurality. At the end she also said, "whenever we hear that 'the singularity may be near,' let us always remember that a Plurality is here." [17]

In an October 2024 interview with the business paper Handelsblatt, Tang said that at re:publica earlier that year she had felt great interest in building public digital infrastructure, and that acceptance was spreading in Germany. She also called the strength that comes from having many suppliers "Pluralität" [18].

Weyl's earlier book Radical Markets (co-written with Eric Posner) was published in German translation by wbg Theiss in 2019 as Wir sind der Markt [19].

Links with participation in the German-speaking world

In 2018, "Aufstehen", a movement launched by the left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht and others, used the opinion-gathering tool Pol.is at its start. Participants could rate more than 60 statements [20].

In addition, on May 10, 2023, the German Bundestag decided to set up "Ernährung im Wandel" (Nutrition in transition), a citizens' assembly of 160 people chosen by lot [2]. Austria had a climate citizens' assembly (Klimarat) in 2022, with 100 people chosen to form a cross-section of society [3]. As for Switzerland, swissinfo set Switzerland, as the "Weltmeisterin" (world champion) of old, analog direct democracy, alongside Taiwan as the front-runner of digital participatory democracy [1].

However, the sources on the citizens' assemblies listed here do not mention Tang or the book. The most direct link is SPRIND. In a conversation at DLD, Tang said "we are co-creating the Presidential Hackathon model here in Germany" [21]. SPRIND's Digital Democracy Lab also lists virtual assemblies, quadratic voting (Quadratisches Abstimmen) and more, and says its model is Taiwan [22].

How it differs from a citizens' assembly

The Bundestag's citizens' assembly "Ernährung im Wandel" is a format in which 160 people chosen by lot talk things through with the help of neutral moderators and experts [2]. SPRIND's vote, by contrast, is an online quadratic vote, and its ranking counts as a weight when teams are selected [6].

Tang herself, asked in a 2025 interview with a German regional newspaper whether Taiwan's approach could be transferred to a country like Germany, answered that for most countries it is easier to start at the local level first [23]. In the Swiss newspaper NZZ in 2026, she named, as what Switzerland, which votes with paper and pencil, needs first, a decentralized digital wallet that can show that one is a citizen, an adult and so on without revealing one's identity [24].

What is debated

• Doubts about Taiwan as a digital democracy paradise. Quentin Lichtblau, a reporter for Republik, wrote after reporting on the ground in 2022 that it was hard to verify from outside whether digital democracy is really flourishing in Taiwan. Lichtblau also wrote that after a few weeks of reporting you see that Taiwan is to a large extent a bureaucratic and analog society. About Cofacts, the citizens' fact-checking platform, the article reports the doubt of the Taiwanese entrepreneur T. H. Schee that, compared with the volume of disinformation from China, it is a drop in the ocean [25]. → Criticisms of Plurality
• Skewed participation and dependence on political will. In 2024 the German outlet relevant. cited the Bertelsmann Foundation's assessment that Taiwan's participation platform vTaiwan suits educated, tech-savvy people. It also presented the researcher Meichun Lee's point that its operation depended heavily on the political will of the authorities to propose items and implement the conclusions [26]. A German-language contribution under Tang's name also acknowledges limits: about 200,000 people took part (less than 1% of the population), a lot of voluntary effort was needed, and there was no clear mandate for the government to act [27].
• What will be realized in Germany is not yet visible. The IT news site heise reported on SPRIND's project and concluded that what will actually be realized in German government offices remains to be seen [28].
• A review of the German edition of Radical Markets. Sven Lehmann, on a book review site, summed up that, although the authors do not say so explicitly anywhere, the basis of the proposals is a "Marktradikalisierung" (radicalization of the market) that would auction almost everything, elections included [29]. → Radical Markets
• A common mix-up: the ISBN. In the imprint, 978-3-00-086093-5 is the number of the e-book, and the printed book is 978-3-00-086092-8 [4]. The Amazon.de sales page is listed under the …0935 number [7]. In the German National Library's search interface (SRU), no catalog record was found under either number as of October 2, 2026 [19].

Where it fits in Plurality

The German edition translates the original chapters as they are. The heading of chapter 3-0 is "Was ist ⿻?" (What is ⿻?), and the text defines "⿻ 數位 Pluralität" as technology for collaborating across social differences [30]. → ⿻ Plurality

The mechanisms actually put to work in the German-speaking world are Pol.is (Aufstehen, and SPRIND's announcement) and Quadratic Voting (SPRIND's vote) [20][5][6]. On Quadratic Funding, too, the RadicalxChange blog has an explanation in German by Fauler and others (2020) [31].

The "⿻ Plural Stack" text published by Fauler and others in 2026 argues that what Europe needs is not big tech companies of its own but open protocols (agreements for communication and interconnection) that nobody can monopolize [32]. → Digital public infrastructure

Other regions are covered in the articles on Japan, the Netherlands and Flanders, Denmark and Norway. The bibliographic details of each edition of the book are in Editions and translations of the book.

Further reading

1. From Taiwan to Germany (English, record of a conversation, DLD 2026, CC0) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2026-01-17-From-Taiwan-to-Germany-How-Radical-Participation-Leapfrogs-Public-Trust.md
2. PDF of the German edition Pluralität (in German, book, CC0) — https://github.com/akinorioyama/plurality_tentative/releases/download/latest/pluralitat-german.pdf
3. Repository of the German translation (in German, translated text, CC0) — https://github.com/GermanPluralityBook/pluralitaet
4. German translation of Tang's Zurich talk, "Wir, das Volk, sind die Superintelligenz" (We, the people, are the superintelligence) (in German, talk, Republik) — https://www.republik.ch/2025/12/10/rede-audrey-tang-wir-das-volk-sind-die-superintelligenz
5. SPRIND's announcement of the project (in German, announcement) — https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/deutschland-was-geht
6. Republik's on-the-ground report from Taiwan (in German, article, critical) — https://www.republik.ch/2022/12/09/kann-taiwan-den-cyberkrieg-oder-nur-die-utopie

Sources

1. swissinfo, "Schauplatz Taiwan: Was die Schweiz und die Insel voneinander lernen können" (Scene Taiwan: what Switzerland and the island can learn from each other) (2019, in German) — https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/demokratie/digitale-demokratie_schauplatz-taiwan-was-die-schweiz-und-die-insel-voneinander-lernen-koennen/45393382
2. German Bundestag, "Bundestag setzt Bürgerrat „Ernährung im Wandel" ein" (Bundestag sets up citizens' assembly "Nutrition in transition") (2023, in German) — https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2023/kw19-de-buergerrat-945440
3. Wikipedia (German), "Klimarat der Bürgerinnen und Bürger" (CC BY-SA) — https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimarat_der_B%C3%BCrgerinnen_und_B%C3%BCrger ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
4. Front matter, imprint and translators' notes of the PDF of the German edition Pluralität (CC0) — https://github.com/akinorioyama/plurality_tentative/releases/download/latest/pluralitat-german.pdf ［CC0］
5. SPRIND, "Deutschland, was nervt? Deutschland, was geht?" (Germany, what's annoying? Germany, what works?) (2026-01-16, in German) — https://www.sprind.org/worte/magazin/deutschland-was-geht
6. Deutschland, was geht?, "Über den Bürger-Hackathon" (About the citizen hackathon) (in German) — https://deutschland-was-geht.org/about
7. Amazon.de sales page — https://www.amazon.de/dp/3000860932
8. re:publica 24, session description (2024-05-29) — https://re-publica.com/de/session/plurality-future-collaborative-technology-and-democracy
9. Opendata.ch, event announcement (2024-08-03) — https://opendata.ch/events/plurality-with-audrey-tang/
10. Republik, event announcement "Im Gespräch mit Audrey Tang" (In conversation with Audrey Tang) (in German) — https://www.republik.ch/veranstaltungen/im-gesprach-mit-audrey-tang
11. Republik, "Wir, das Volk, sind die Superintelligenz" (2025-12-10, in German) — https://www.republik.ch/2025/12/10/rede-audrey-tang-wir-das-volk-sind-die-superintelligenz / "Ein Abend mit Audrey Tang" (An evening with Audrey Tang) (announcement, in German) — https://www.republik.ch/2025/11/05/ein-abend-mit-audrey-tang
12. The GermanPluralityBook/pluralitaet repository and its commit history (CC0) — https://github.com/GermanPluralityBook/pluralitaet ［CC0］
13. Andreas Fauler's personal website — https://www.fauler.me/
14. MyData 2025, speaker profile — https://conference.mydata.org/2025/speaker/1803308/andreas-fauler
15. Martin Rausch, "Bücher" (Books) (in German) — https://www.martinrausch.com/buecher
16. Deine Korrespondentin, "Eine Hackerin als Digitalministerin" (A hacker as digital minister) (2021-10-06, in German) — https://www.deine-korrespondentin.de/eine-hackerin-als-digitalministerin/
17. German Academic Scholarship Foundation visits (2019-10-28, CC0) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2019-10-28-German-Academic-Scholarship-Foundation-visits.md ［CC0］
18. Handelsblatt, interview with Tang (2024-10-10, in German) — https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/international/audrey-tang-es-gibt-die-chance-wieder-vorne-dabei-zu-sein/100071934.html
19. German National Library, SRU search results (CC0) — https://services.dnb.de/sru/dnb
20. heise, ""Aufstehen": Wagenknechts Sammlungsbewegung setzt auf Umfragetool Pol.is" ("Aufstehen": Wagenknecht's movement relies on the survey tool Pol.is) (2018, in German) — https://www.heise.de/news/Aufstehen-Wagenknechts-Sammlungsbewegung-setzt-auf-Umfragetool-Pol-is-4154397.html
21. From Taiwan to Germany: How Radical Participation Leapfrogs Public Trust (DLD 2026, CC0) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2026-01-17-From-Taiwan-to-Germany-How-Radical-Participation-Leapfrogs-Public-Trust.md ［CC0］
22. SPRIND, "Digital Democracy Lab" — https://www.sprind.org/digitales-beteiligungslabor
23. Schwäbische Post, interview with Tang (2025-02-27, in German) — https://www.schwaebische-post.de/welt/politik/kuenstliche-intelligenz-im-kampf-gegen-demokratieverdrossenheit-setzt-taiwan-auf-internet-und-zr-93592424.html
24. NZZ, interview with Tang (2026-04-11, in German) — https://www.nzz.ch/technologie/polarisierung-setzt-energie-frei-aber-man-darf-sie-nicht-in-extreme-lenken-sagt-taiwans-cyber-sonderbotschafterin-audrey-tang-ld.1926179
25. Quentin Lichtblau, "Kann Taiwan den Cyberkrieg – oder nur die Utopie?" (Can Taiwan do cyberwar, or only utopia?) (Republik, 2022-12-09, in German) — https://www.republik.ch/2022/12/09/kann-taiwan-den-cyberkrieg-oder-nur-die-utopie
26. relevant., "Taiwan: Wenn Hacker an die Macht kommen" (Taiwan: when hackers come to power) (2024-11-21, in German) — https://www.relevant.news/taiwan-wenn-hacker-an-die-macht-kommen/
27. Audrey Tang, "Was wäre, wenn Partizipation nicht nur Mitreden, sondern Mitgestalten bedeutet?" (What if participation meant not just having a say but shaping things?) (reform-staat.org, in German) — https://reform-staat.org/was-ware-wenn-partizipation-nicht-nur-mitreden-sondern-mitgestalten-bedeutet/
28. heise, "SPRIND Citizen Hackathon: Germany, what annoys?" (2026) — https://www.heise.de/en/news/SPRIND-Citizen-Hackathon-Germany-what-annoys-11150621.html
29. Sven Lehmann, review of Wir sind der Markt (streuverluste.de, 2020, in German) — https://www.streuverluste.de/buch-wir-sind-der-markt/
30. German edition, 3-0 "Was ist ⿻?" (CC0) — https://github.com/GermanPluralityBook/pluralitaet ［CC0］
31. RadicalxChange blog, "Quadratic Funding" (in German, 2020-11-11) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/quadratic-funding/ ［CC0］
32. RadicalxChange blog, "Europe Doesn't Need Its Own Big Tech. It Needs Protocols Nobody Can Capture." (2026-06-17) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/the-plural-stack/ ［CC0］