I think that’s also what Code for Japan is known for, is that the cross-sectoral trust is very high. I think we should work together to bring this message out, that it’s not just about the civic tech people or the government people signing MOUs.
Through open API, open data, the community can be built around public service. Once the community really trusts the government to deliver on its open by default promises, then the open source will find a large number of people who want to co create and maintain with you.
This is a coalition effort. People who are still treasuring freedom of speech, we’re now very closely tied together to pool our resources, to share our training curriculums, to train the trainers, and to facilitate a thriving journalism scene to let people regain trust on proper journalism.
You have your own ideology of radical transparency. You’ve described it as a proactive approach, rather than reactive. When you’re talking about ministers and the government forging connections with people, do you see this as a way that you can personally build trust with your constituency?
The career public service, I think they trust me to know what their risk, their fears, their doubts around public participation. I would never take them by surprise. All the transparent record, actually, they get 10 working days to edit. Everything said in it are very professional. [laughs]
Exactly, because it’s a sociology problem. The usual way for a high stake election is that you get extra for all the parties, and then they jointly witness the process and earlier process beforehand. It’s delegating the trust to the parties, like five or six parties.
We have seen what algorithmic time does to markets — the 2010 flash crash, where U.S. markets plunged and recovered in minutes. We can see what it does to trust — Europol has warned that organised crime is using AI-driven impersonation to scale fraud and evade detection across jurisdictions.
The fact that the civil society always comes up with ways that respects the privacy, the personal data, and so on, but can nevertheless effectively respond to the challenges of our time such as contact tracing and so on, that trust need to be amplified. It need to continue.
I’ll admit that our ministry, the moda, is currently the only ministry – along with our two administrations – to fully implement Zero Trust Architecture here in Taiwan in a national government, simply because the legacy systems take a lot of effort to migrate to this new mobile-first world.
It only works with the maximally trusted people, with real time open API. When Minister Chen Shih-chung got the interpellation from that MP, who used to be a VP — name is Ann Kao — used to be a VP of data analytics at Foxconn. She knows something about data.
Well, I’m still working on the same project, right? Democracy as a social technology for swift trust and things like that. That was my research topic when I was 15. So I guess I never switched to a different project. I’ve been working on the same project.
Simply put, we do not invent new data collection apparatus or touchpoints during the pandemic. We rely on already tried and true and widely trusted and understood ideas such as the universal healthcare IC card, such as the SMS, as I mentioned, the QR code, and things like that.
You realize of saying the Afghanistan withdrawal where this question of people, allies of the US are saying, “Well, maybe we can’t trust them as much.” Does Taiwan feel a little bit more vulnerable, so to speak, in the light of last month’s catastrophe in Kabul?
I was saying that, if we make digital competence part of primary school education, then we leave the society the betterment of the democracy, to the people 20 years younger than me and I trust they’ll be much more suitable than I would to take the democracy forward.
Inertia doesn’t mean that it doesn’t move. It means that it moves towards the path of the least resistance. The career public service, as a rule moves toward anything that reduce their risk, anything that saves their time. Then more interestingly, anything that improves the mutual trust .
Yeah, definitely. That’s why we call it the Taiwan Model. The Taiwan Model, its first and foremost this trust from the government to its citizens. We do not, for example, institute a very top down emergency state when there’s issues like the community spread on nightlife district.
It, of course, may do some contact tracing. Because it’s new technology invented after the pandemic, had we rolled it out, then the privacy budget, the privacy implications, the service security implications will be much less trusted because it’s new technology. Everybody understand this physical quarantine idea.
There is one more question I like to ask you while we have just a few more minutes. Maybe it’s a bit of a smaller [laughs] conspiracy theory inquiry. It has to do with people’s trust with technology as it pertains to contact tracing and digital fence.
I’ve been fascinated about the way that you’ve talked about your anarchistic point of view and relating your analysis of Taiwanese civil society and the trust in civil society to the development of the state after martial law, but really in that 10-year lead-up period.
It continuously surprises me that if I focus only on reducing the risk, reducing the chores, and improving trust between the government and the people, how innovative the career public service are. There’s no difficulty whatsoever, but that is because I don’t boss and order people around.
