And 12 years ago, it was pretty bad. Taiwan was very polarized. The trust in the democratic institutions were crumbling. The president in 2014 was enjoying 9% of approval rating. In a country of 24 million people, that’s 20 million people automatically against whatever the government says.
The outcome: share the Taiwanese experience of building civic infrastructure of horizontal trust that is anti‑fragile against polarization, radicalization, and the authoritarian narrative that “democracy only leads to chaos and division.” Spread the message of empathy across info/cyber/social domains.
Previously, you have to speak pretty good mandarin to con someone speaking mandarin and understand a local Taiwanese context. But now you can mount it from anywhere in the world, speaking no mandarin at all, just simply by copying a voice and communication style of someone you trust .
So even just between me and myself, I can get different trust systems, assign different social connection recognitions and so on. And for these two, the Lithuanian e-resident, Audrey, and the Taiwanese citizen, Audrey, to count as one vote. These are kind of the minimally viable examples.
We’re currently… So, we just closed the bid for the local partner, domestic partner for testing and verification. We’re working with research institutes and so on, like not for-profit telecom providers, because that creates a competition dynamic but rather with trusted labs and so on.
The incubator will start later this year, and hopefully by next year we’ll have a GDPR compatibility. So, we need legal support there as well to recognize essentially Taiwan as part of the CBPR and GDPR system, so that the data can still flow freely with trust .
As I mentioned, the Cybersecurity Management Act is being planned to take care better of the zero trust architecture, which was not the norm before. Some considered ZTA expensive when the Management Act was first introduced, and I kept telling them Google has been doing this for years.
The reason why was that if you are tied to specific desktop computers, even if you say you want to do zero trust , you end up with something that’s the worst of both worlds. You know what I’m talking about? I don’t have to elaborate.
We have seen that it paid real dividends because people in Ukraine, they have built this mutual trust . There’s civic participation portals and all sort of e-government stuff. When they turn overnight, they include this crowdsourcing reporting drone target or whatever, and watching Euro vision platform.
We’ve seen many other jurisdictions where the national and the municipal governments were on complete different sides. If you do that a couple of times, people lose all trust in the country epidemic measures, because their mayor say a different thing from the chancellor or the premier.
Maybe if I interpret a little bit of what Hal is saying is, first of all, building the trust that you develop when you’re working together on something, is a very good first step before you get to more sophisticated things like platforms and project management systems.
Definitely. I was trying to search for a term that’s stronger than norm, but not quite doctrine. Maybe I’ll call it ethos. The ethos of the earlier designers, I think, is just as simple as, let’s trust future generations. That’s a very strong ethos.
… trustable . Sometimes the disinformation getting spread wider because the personal efficacy. Here, if someone just don’t care about it, “I don’t care about this. I don’t have any issues about that, and I don’t care about it.” Which one is more dominant in here?
Not for purely altruistic or for social movement reasons, but rather to share the development cost to make sure that the accountability is easier to build. They can win the trust from users by treating them not as users, but as co-collaborators, co-developers, and so on.
I think there’s a lot of trust just in public service that this way of working actually makes everybody more effective, in the sense that they can go home every day sooner, rather than working overtime. The foreign service people would understand what I’m talking about.
All the 12 different ministries send people who are section chief level or higher to this place. We share food, share music, and then we use high-bandwidth teleconference to link those places together. In Taiwan, we say meeting face-to-face builds 30 percent of trust , 見面三分情.
I think it’s a pretty comprehensive and GDPR-compliant way to do research. It actually has a lot of buy-in from UN and other places. I think this place is where I can think of a data steward, data trust , or mid, however, we call it.
For this kind of strategy to be effective among the public, there needs to be a baseline level of trust in political leaders, which is something that, at least in some other countries, may be a bit lacking. What are the countermeasures for that, or is that just...?
Nonetheless, I think it can build the trust . That’s why I’m ambivalent. On one hand, you don’t get average people, but you do get them to see that government is responsive, and you get them involved. I think that’s a really, really good thing.
