Which is to say that that’s not something that explains the success, it is something that has to actually be explained. Whereas so often this attitude toward social trust is that it’s either something that magically exists in a society, or it’s something that doesn’t.
Participation offices as well as any public servant that take place into this direction conversation with people, people see that it’s really the public service serve the public. Not just the minister. This really improves the trust between the career public servant, the civil service, and the civil society.
There are also people in Taiwan who are much more, I would say, authoritarian‑leaning. They would also like people to trust less the institutional democracy and media. There are certainly both sides quite prevalent also. They sometimes reinforce each other. I wouldn’t say that one certainly cause another.
If we focus our energy on what we call a common understanding, then we can actually see, for many issues, people actually have a rough consensus and we should just go ahead with those rough consensus. When this part is tackled, then people feel much more trust with each other.
Now if you are a university that restructure empirically around the sustainable goals, if you teach all the business school people how to make circular design, if you teach all your humanities people how to use digital technology to rebuild social trust , suddenly, you are a organizer for social innovation.
They win no matter what. They address people’s fears. People trust them more. If this new auditing strategy doesn’t work, it’s me to blame for the MPs. They are in a no-lose position just by virtue of having a public conversation about fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
In any case, we’re really progressing and using distributed ledgers to give accountability across the different sectors. The other thing that I mentioned about the sandbox system, is really the sandbox system is a data collaborative system designed to have trust of the entire, for example, self-driving cars.
I think her idea of participation officers is really quite brilliant. The problem is, it does nothing to really build that trust . I think that’s something that you need to figure out how to do in a time of disinformation, misinformation -- which is another different thing -- and alternative facts.
You’ve touched on a couple really important points. One of the reasons for the rise of the populist movement is because, for example, there is a lot of distrust. With better communication, you are gaining that trust but you’re also educating people about what really is going on.
Of course, that is the end game. If there is an organizational actor, as some have speculated, to sow social discord, of course, that is the endgame they want of their society, that the trust is so broken that nobody want to talk authentically about their experience or feelings anymore.
It shows enormous trust to just share data about water pressure, about water quality this way. Of course, the taxpayers in New Zealand probably pay for the initial cost of producing these data, but it is entirely voluntarily association, because there is a business to be made there as well.
Second, it creates a legitimacy crisis. When the Environmental Protection Agency’s number are different from the number that you personally have set up, even though the equipment there is not as precise as the EPA one, people are going to trust their own numbers, rather than the EPA numbers.
It’s very interesting because we’ve been within kind of counter public...My boss and I have been kind of thinking about how to measure a city’s engagement. One of the core foundational principles of how we went about it is that trust is a two-way street.
This is very important to see that only a living relationship between the data so-called producers, so-called data processors and so-called data users or consumers, they need to trust each other through a accountability framework that enables constant interrogation, constant relationship between all those different people involved.
No government binding power whatsoever. A way to apply the vTaiwan process to the IBS staff judicial reform to increase trust between the people, and the judicial system by deliberating things like citizen’s jury, and -- we don’t have a jury system by the way -- many other possible innovations.
To rebuild trust , the whole idea is that for people who are assembling and measuring their counter-power and petitioning and whatever, we have participation officers to contact them immediately. For this example, I think it’s within the first 48 hours that our PO decided to contact the petitioner.
I think that’s really good, the way that I’m showing the trust , that there’s nothing to hide for me. Based on this, we try to give more stakeholders to discover this way of working together with the government, and then input their ways and their own views.
Actually no, it is just the facilitators, the initial team of maybe 10 people who built this website. As I explained they come from the three sectors. The logic is basically if you go on this website you have to trust the system operators anyway because it is cross sectoral.
