Plurality in Thailand

In 2024 a translator in Bangkok produced a complete Thai translation of the book *Plurality*, which can be read on the book's website. No printed Thai book has been found. Before the book arrived, Thailand already had Cofact, a fact-checking project that grew out of Audrey Tang's visit, and exchanges with Taiwan's civic technologists.

LINE, a chat app widely used in Thailand as well, has a service where you can send in a rumor or a suspicious news item and have volunteers and an editorial team check it. This service was brought to Thailand from Taiwan, where it was first built. So by what route did Plurality, the book by Taiwan's Audrey Tang (ออเดรย์ ถัง in Thai) and E. Glen Weyl, reach Thailand?

In short

In July 2024 Plurality was translated in full into Thai under the name of Chusana, a person in Bangkok whose GitHub account is chusanap [1]. It can now be read as the Thai edition on the book's website, plurality.net [3]. However, the research for this article (October 2026) found no printed book or publisher.

In Thailand, two foundations were already in place before the book. One is Cofact, a system for checking facts together, brought from Taiwan after Tang's visit to Thailand in 2019 [4]. The other is exchange in civic tech (people using technology for the public good) that learns from g0v, Taiwan's community of civic hackers [5].

For example

A disinformation conference in Bangkok (June 2019). Eight Thai civil society organizations held the "International Conference on Fake News", and Tang gave a keynote about Taiwan's experience with Cofacts (collaborative fact-checking). On its own "About Us" page, Cofact explains that cooperation came out of this conference and led to Cofact in Thailand [4]. On the same trip, Tang had dinner with Thanathorn (ธนาธร), leader of the Future Forward Party [6].

The Thai translation is published (July 14, 2024). In a single update titled "Complete Thai 1.0.0", chusanap put the translated text of 35 files onto GitHub (a website for making documents together) all at once [1].

A keynote in Bangkok (November 2024). At Devcon SEA, a conference of Ethereum developers, Tang gave a keynote titled "⿻ Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations". The organizers' description introduces ⿻ Plurality as a philosophy that promotes collaborative diversity [7]. In its write-up of the talk, the Thai business outlet Thairath Money introduced Plurality as "แนวคิดพหุนิยม" (the idea of pluralism) [8].

In more detail

Who translated it

The GitHub profile of the translator's account, chusanap, gives the name "Chusana", the location "Bangkok", and, as a blog, a Substack (a personal publishing site) called "The Soulful Systems" [1]. The author of that blog gives the name Chusana Prasertkul, and describes being born in Bangkok, growing up in boarding schools in the UK, studying psychology and taking an MBA, and co-founding a food tech company [9]. Since the three details match, they are probably the same person. However, no document has been found in which the author states the connection with the account [1].

In an essay dated July 23, 2024, Chusana wrote of being deeply unsettled after reading Plurality and one other book. The essay notes that the book was made open source (in a form anyone can inspect and change), and that its Discord (a chat space) has channels for 16 languages for translation. It ends in Thai, inviting Thai readers to join the Discord and saying that translators from English to Thai are badly needed [10].

How the translation was done (by hand or by machine, and with or without helpers) is not recorded in the update history or in any explanatory document [1]. Chusana does write about using an AI assistant built with ChatGPT when writing blog posts, but this is not an account of the translation [9].

Is it an official translation?

This point is easy to misunderstand. Chusana opened a request (PR #962) to have the translation taken into the book's original repository (pluralitybook/plurality), but it was closed without being merged. In a comment on the book's repository, akinorioyama explained that each language version stays in its translator's repository, and that plurality.net is designed to read it from there and display it [2].

The list of translations in the original repository's guide (ReadMe) has no line for Thai. Only the guide in the translator's copy has one [1]. On the other hand, the settings of the plurality.net site include Thai, and make it one of the six languages listed on the top page [3]. In other words, Thai is displayed on the site but not listed in the book's own list of translations. → Book editions and translations

How terms are translated

The Thai translation renders Plurality as "พหุนิยม", which literally means "pluralism". Chapter 3-0 explains that the symbol ⿻ is used in place of this word [11]. In the English original, Plurality and pluralism are different words, but in the Thai translation "pluralism" in chapter 2-1 is also "พหุนิยม" [12]. In the translation, the two words are not distinguished.

Links with Taiwan (2018–2019)

Klaikong Vaidhyakarn, head of Thailand's Social Technology Institute and also in charge of party registration for the Future Forward Party, wrote a paper as a fellow of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy on why g0v succeeded and how it could be carried over to Thailand [5]. When Klaikong spoke with Tang in October 2018, Tang said, "I cannot be seen as partial to any party in Taiwan" [13].

In an interview in Bangkok in June 2019, Tang mentioned that Klaikong had summarized the main points of her talk on Twitter and that the summary was quickly shared by hundreds of people. She also said that parties, whatever their side, are very interested in the digital economy and society [14].

In December of the same year, Chadchart Sittipunt, who had been the Pheu Thai Party's candidate for prime minister, visited Tang in Taiwan and said that a run for Governor of Bangkok was possible [14][15]. Tang introduced the quadratic voting used at the Presidential Hackathon. Each person has 99 points, and one vote costs one point, but putting four votes on the same project costs 16 points. Tang explained that with a method where everyone votes for just one project, most people feel they have lost, but with quadratic voting everyone feels they have won [15]. → Quadratic voting · g0v

Cofact: bringing Taiwan's system over

Thailand's Cofact is operated by ChangeFusion and OpenDream, and points readers to where they can get Taiwan's original source code [4]. At its launch in April 2020, a ChangeFusion developer said the idea had been inspired by Taiwan's example [16].

Tang has since repeatedly cited Thailand's Cofact as evidence that Taiwan's tools can be taken to other countries. In 2024 she said, in effect, that Cofacts exists not only in Taiwan but also in Thailand, which shows it is not a matter of exceptionalism (something special to Taiwan alone) [17]. According to a Cofact report from May 2024, Cofact visited Taipei from 2 to 5 May 2024 to mark its fifth anniversary [18]. → Cofacts

Thai practice that overlaps with the book

The civic group WeVis began by presenting Bangkok's city budget in an easy-to-understand form. When the governor launched a policy called "Open Bangkok", WeVis began formal collaboration with the city [19]. For DreamCon, which gathers discussion about amending the constitution, WeVis considered Pol.is and Arguman as discussion tools and chose Arguman. But Arguman was no longer maintained and did not support Thai, so, inspired by its approach, WeVis built a system of its own [19]. → Polis

What is debated

Criticism of Tang's office from the g0v side. Klaikong's paper reports that Tang's work was strongly criticized by the civic tech and open data communities as falling short of expectations. According to the same paper, Tang replied that she is rather an anarchist and wants to create an atmosphere in which cooperation arises easily [5]. The paper concludes that in Thailand, open spaces where different groups exchange views and build agreement have not developed, and that free expression is hindered [5].
Can Taiwan's approach be carried over? In a 2022 article, Thailand Policy Lab, run by a national development agency together with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), wrote that vTaiwan is not yet a process in which everyone in the country can take part, and that people on the margins risk being left out. It also cautioned that what happened in Taiwan will not necessarily succeed elsewhere [20]. → vTaiwan
"Democracy washing". Thanisara Ruangdej, co-founder of WeVis, warned against leaders who are not serious going through the motions of participation, which she calls "democracy washing". She also said that WeVis tried for five years with the national budget after the coup and failed, and that results came at the city level [19].
Caught between state control and free expression. Supinya Klangnarong (สุภิญญา กลางณรงค์), a co-founder of Cofact, recalls that in its early days, as the state tried to tighten control and society also called for it, it was hard to propose ways of dealing with harmful speech while protecting free expression [21]. Tang also said in 2020 that, because of a different political climate, Thailand's Cofact mainly deals with health rumors [17].

Common misunderstandings

That a Thai book has been published. What can be confirmed is only the web edition under CC0 (a form anyone may use freely) and the translated text on GitHub. The research for this article also found no reviews or criticism of the book written in Thai.

Where it fits in Plurality

The English edition of the book does not take up Thailand. Cofacts appears in chapter 2-2, "The Life of a Digital Democracy", as a project that came out of g0v, but the Thai version is not mentioned [22]. Thailand's Cofact is something Tang has talked about outside the book, as an example that can be carried to other countries [17].

The Thai story can be read as Taiwanese civic tech such as Cofacts, g0v and vTaiwan going out beyond the country. A path like Japan's, from a translation community to a published book and on into a party's policies, is not yet visible in Thailand.

Articles on other countries and regions:

Sources

chusanap/plurality-thai (GitHub account, update history and ReadMe) — https://github.com/chusanap/plurality-thai ［CC0］
pluralitybook/plurality, PR #962 "Thai Translation" — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality/pull/962
Source of plurality.net (Thai settings) — https://github.com/pluralitybook/plurality.net ［CC0］
Cofact, "About Us" — https://cofact.org/about-us
Klaikong Vaidhyakarn, "Civic Tech and Digital Civic Participation: Taiwan's experiences and how to replicate to Thailand" (2018, CC BY 4.0) — https://socialtech.or.th/archives/224 ［CC BY 4.0］
Thairath, "“ธนาธร” คุยถูกคอ “ออเดรย์ ถัง”" (2019-06-19, in Thai) — https://www.thairath.co.th/news/politic/1595486
Devcon SEA, "Keynote: ⿻ Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" (2024-11-12) — https://app.devcon.org/schedule/3MNMHA
Thairath Money, write-up of Tang's talk (2024-11-13, in Thai) — https://www.thairath.co.th/money/tech_innovation/digital_transformation/2825423
The Soulful Systems, "About" — https://chusana.substack.com/about
Chusana Prasertkul, "Why Digital Democracy?" (2024-07-23) — https://chusana.substack.com/p/why-digital-democracy
Plurality, Thai edition, 3-0 "⿻ คืออะไร" (in Thai) — https://plurality.net/th/read/3-0/
Plurality, Thai edition, 2-1 "มุมมองจากหยู่ซาน" (in Thai) — https://plurality.net/th/read/2-1/
Record of a conversation between Tang and Klaikong (2018-10-10, CC0) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2018-10-10-Conversation-with-Klaikong-Vaidhyakarn.md ［CC0］
Record of an interview with Tang in Thailand by the Central News Agency (2019-06-20, in Chinese, CC0) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2019-06-20-中央社於泰國訪問.md ［CC0］
Record of Chadchart's visit (2019-12-23, CC0) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2019-12-23-Chadchart-Sittipunt-visits.md ［CC0］
Cofact, article on the launch (2020-04-17, in Thai) — https://blog.cofact.org/th/สกัดข่าวลวง-เปิดตัว-cofact-พื/
Collected records of Tang's conversations (2019–2024, CC0) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript ［CC0］
Cofact, "5 ปี โคแฟค สู่แรงบันดาลใจที่ไต้หวัน" (2024-05-14, in Thai) — https://blog.cofact.org/th/special-report-taiwan-study-trip/
People Powered, case study of WeVis (2025-11-04) — https://www.peoplepowered.org/news-content/wevis-supporting-participatory-democracy-in-thailand-through-locally-developed-digital-tools
Thailand Policy Lab, article on digital democracy in Taiwan (2022-08-05, in Thai) — https://thailandpolicylab.com/digital-democracy-taiwan/
The Kommon, interview with Supinya (in Thai) — https://www.thekommon.co/cofact/
Plurality, 2-2 "The Life of a Digital Democracy" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-2/eng/ ［CC0］

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