When it initially looks cheaper, it’s actually not cheap at all when you’re looking in a long term, taking into account the political risk. We might as well pay more, but work with trusted partners. For example, Nokia or Qualcomm and so on, which are very unlikely to be taken over by state actor the next week.
The civic society already have more than 2,000. Nowadays, it’s tens of thousands. That builds a much closer solidarity with the nature, because chances are an average citizen will trust a nearby primary school teacher and the class of data steward and data competence learners rather than a random sensor from the EPA hundreds of kilometers away.
The public trust in those counting process is higher than the agents that spread the disinformation about the election process, which is why, by and large, and thanks to a contribution to TFCN and so on, by the election day, the clarification message has already spread to more people than the disinformation that tried to attack the voting process.
The idea that you can have the same kind of – actually, a better kind of – GDP growth. Not just for this quarter, but for this year, but for next year, too, in Taiwan, while countering the coronavirus. You can deepen the democracy and social sector’s trust and enlist the journalists simply by not using the word “fake news.”
No, I wouldn’t say so. I would say it’s very important for the government to trust the citizens, to make the state transparent to the citizens, to make our mistakes widely known and competently fixed in a accountable way in real-time, and be inclusive to all the different cultures of people who are residents or visitors.
Afterwards, it’s mostly about the fast iteration, the trust from the CECC to the people when the citizens report any new situations, like the young boy calling in, saying that he doesn’t want to wear the pink mask to school. The very next day, on the livestream conference, everybody wore a pink medical mask, and so on.
Sure. The idea of democracy is based on the idea that a plurality of perspectives, the plurality of voices together, when trusting each other, makes that the polity knows about itself more and know about the world more as a epistemic alliance. Without gender equality, this is basically just privileging one voice to the exclusion to the other voices.
If you keep only on paper your contact phone number but under a pseudonym and if you physically shred that that paper after four weeks of no local outbreak, then people actually trust them enough to actually leave their contact details. You can do a SMS or LINE to check that it’s actually their number before they enter.
There’s many innovations like this, where you can see for sure that this is working in the people’s interest in a coop spirit, instead of a capitalist spirit or even as their own enterprise spirit. Then people would trust that. The UK has a example of that, actually it’s the Scottish Highlands and Islands Development Agency.
Now the world is having the same debate on 5G, but what I’m trying to say is that the social sector is very important in Taiwan and by working with the people and not just for the people, the government slowly regained the trustworthiness by adopting the open government as the national direction around the end of 2014.
OK, great, yeah. The other thing, with this e-voting thing – at least if you do it with the secret ballot – anonymous in the end… imagine that Hong Kong would now make free elections with an e-voting, which is wrong… which contains components, let us say, of Mainland China or so. How trustworthy would the results be? [laughs]
I’m the last generation that remembers martial law. If you ask anyone who is younger than me, then they say of course that you need a second opinion on every information sources. They don’t grow up blindly trusting the authority, or even their teachers. They learn to fact check, even on the lectures, using Wikipedia and whatever.
I do think so. I think people are becoming more aware. Thanks to advanced regulations like GDPR, and so on, that there was a exploitive externalities that fueled the current, what many scholars have said as a surveillance capitalism. I think even the capitalist themselves have realized that this is not sustainable because trust is not a renewable resource.
The reason why is that this really challenge the legitimacy of the central government. If you have two numbers, one measured by the government and one measured by this participatory network, of course people are going to trust this number that’s participated by the citizen, even if those two disagree, and even if this one is more precise.
So we might as well play. This is like a sandbox, where we try with radical freedom, absolute freedom of speech, of assembly, and things like that, and see what works. What works, we can export or share with other democracies around the world to maybe convince them to stay with democracy, as low- trust as the idea is.
Yeah, because we’re a voluntary organization, so people only join voluntarily, and they collectively vote on what to tackle. The only thing to manage is the culture, or the expectation. If anyone want a quick fix of anything, this kind of open model slow process is not for that. It needs time. It needs space. It needs trust .
The rallying cry is open government. This is our team with about 20 to 25 full-time, 35 interns, so a reasonably sized office. This is our core values. Rebuild trust is the core. Then, empowering civil society is the second. Simplify the administrative process, the third. Then, foster innovation, like the risk absorbing environment for the public servants.
That’s right, so like having the civics classes empowering students and having the community colleges empowering lifelong learning students and the various different like spiritual centers and health centers and so on to help the helpers so that the helpers who are already a set of community organizers can then help foster a healthy trust ecosystem within their community.
