And we achieve that not through some top down or lock down measures and so on but through people generally understanding through the work of journalists, and civic journalists, the science between each variants of the virus. There’s a general trust from the public sector to the population to fully expand what we’re doing.
With our zero trust architecture, what we have done is essentially saying just now install this antivirus on your phone which doubles as a, what we call, mobile device management tool so that from the point you install this, you don’t have to use passwords anymore. From that point onward, you just use your fingerprint.
Building on top of the agenda movement. By the way, this entire assessment is now public, everybody gets to assess. You can trust the citizens because they’re going to crowd moderate themselves, and you only have to provide a summary response to the more rough consensus points that convinced everyone from all the different aisles.
Then, the result, even if it’s pure noise and no signal at all, it’s not a bad thing compared to the businesses’ usual situation. Actually, it’s better because everybody see the mess that we’re in. That’s by definition good for the mutual trust axis, if not for the other two axes.
In 2014, I think the administration only had an approval rate of 9.2 percent [laughs] from the people, the historic low in terms of trust . We rebuilt from that using nothing but crowdsourcing and this digital public infrastructure. Promise and delivered responding to the here and now and encouraging people to share these viral memes.
Before long, when there is a natural disaster, like the September 21 earthquake around the turn of century, the social sectors’ numbers are widely much more trusted than the government’s numbers, partly because in 1999, which was the year around the earthquake, we’re still only three years into the first directly elected presidential term.
Again, wear a mask to protect yourself from your own hands. That works really well. Queues, spokesdogs really works. The trust from the government to the citizens so that anyone can call a hotline, and essentially ask a scientist or a proxy of a scientist and through a chat box and so on. That really works.
I think there’s two things we learned during the pandemic. The first is that we really trusted the citizens. Not only just about the civic technologies, which you probably have already heard about, but also about the resilience, about how the local people, even in the nightclubs, and the intimate drinking bars, and so on.
Also, the trust that the government places on the civil society and the private sector for not misusing those numbers. We relinquished all the copyright claims. All you have to do is to attribute the original source, URL, but otherwise you’re free to do anything. That’s opened up this gate for open innovation ecosystem.
That also amplified, we see, in other places that if you’re authoritarian to begin with – if you make citizen transparent to the state – then that tendency also gets amplified. If you rely on multinational tech companies as a more capable fiduciary trust of people’s data, then we also see in places that gets amplified.
What I think is interesting about what you just said, I think that there’s, when people write about such things as a high degree of social trust or a high degree of social cohesion, to me often, it’s treated as that’s the explanan, so to speak, when it should be the explanandum.
If the regulator spends time mostly doing machine-automatable work, in computer science it’s called trivial, it doesn’t mean it’s unimportant, it means its structure is simple. It’s simple-structured work I think are prime candidates for this kind of trust first relationship to then take away from the regulator’s burden.
Now, we’re moving gradually up on the value chain. We’re now much more famous now for, for example, AIoT, which is assistive intelligence on Internet of things. For example, a smart water pollution detection network, a smart air pollution detection network, a trustworthy distributed ledger, also known as blockchain, applied to the civil IoT.
What we have discovered is as long as it’s bi-directional high-speed live streaming, then it’s good. In Taiwan, we say [foreign language] . Face-to-face builds 30 percent towards trust and live streaming in high definition maybe builds 20 percent. If it’s not high quality, then it’s negative 20 percent.
There’s citizen scientists. There’s the Environmental Protection Agency. There’s various other people monitoring various parts of the air. The most important thing is for them to respect and trust each other, and mutually use those different micro sensors and so on to get a more holistic pictures of what air quality is like.
Through this, we solved not just our local social and environmental issues through economic approaches but using the SDGs as a map to unite the efforts together. Just by saying "Taiwan can help", we mean specifically, 17, 18, which is the availability of reliable data that people from across sectors, across jurisdictions, can trust the data.
We went there, took five hours explore every single options using the Policy Lab methodology of mind-mapping. Basically explored all the different options before setting on the insight that we should actually retain people’s trust on their local hospitals, and so we really should build a larger hospital, after exploring all the different options.
In early 2000s, I also participated in the so-called spam wars. At that point, people thought that email is helpless and email may soon go away because it costs nothing to send junk mail. It wastes everybody’s time. It also degrades the trust that people put on each other’s messages around the Internet.
Of course, if your perspective is about security and a lack of the possibility for government to manipulate things, maybe the difference is between a system that can work even if you don’t trust the government anymore, versus a system that can work pretty well as long as everything’s copacetic in terms of government.
That is our driving value. Everything that we do is centered around this rebuilding trust . On the civil society side of course, I’m the minister with a portfolio in charge of social innovation and use the empowerment. In that, we try to build a civil society that can look at new issues facing the society.
