For this particular one, because there was a lot of legislative inquiry, interpellation and so on about, you know, whether people actually trust mmoda to hold Facebook or made our TikTok account, whether that we’re effective against fraud and whether these measures are backed by citizens and so on. I guess there’s another legitimacy measurement, so we did do pre and post testing for all the 450 participants about their trust level in moda and in other related stakeholders, so that if we implement such expectations in law, are they happy with the…
Of course. In 2014, Taiwan’s people were already some of the most connected. I think there were already more Facebook accounts than the population. It was already hybrid connected. The government found that the communication capability was under strain, and public trust was very low, around 9%. The movement was a reaction to the loss of legitimacy of the government.
And so I think the idea here is again to radically trust the people and show the big tech companies that this is the measure that does not sacrifice freedom of expression. But the freedom of speech does not mean that we need to get foreign robots freedom of reach for free. I don’t think that’s in our constitution.
It is our pipeline from local experiments to national infrastructure. Each year ~200 projects from towns and agencies propose solutions (tele‑health, air/noise monitoring, zero‑knowledge credentials, zero‑ trust networking, etc.). The public uses quadratic voting: everyone gets 99 credits; 1 vote costs 1, 2 costs 4, 3 costs 9, 4 costs 16, etc.—so you seek synergies across projects.
Yeah, I think many of the most successful open source Commons infrastructure are reliant on offline communities, like literally people meeting every week. So that is why I refer to the meetups. So in a sense, the face to face nodes build the civic muscles, the trust between people, and then many of those different nodes link through weaker links online.
I think there’s also so many lessons learned from cybersecurity, and a bit of history is keeping repeating that right now. So really basic principles of cybersecurity that are just violated, I think that’s one argument making that instruction and code is not separate, basically, in the models of trusted and untrusted. So, it’s like 101 of cybersecurity.
[laughs] Let’s move a little bit to the side. You’re one of the central figures in coordinating Taiwan’s response to COVID pandemic. You spoke at length about how successful Taiwan’s experience was, based on establishing trust between the people – by listening to people, by reacting to their concerns quickly, by adding interactive talks, and all those things.
Now, in the global scene, the cybersecurity is moving towards this idea of zero- trust network architecture, or ZTNA. The idea is that we need to combine this biometric identification, the device identification, and many other factors, in order to access each and every service. We cannot rely only on passwords or any other single factor or intranet firewalls for defense.
Maybe I’m going off-piece here, but I’m really quite intrigued about these issues about what enables participation, what enables a strong culture, and the trust that isn’t a prerequisite for that kind of strong civics. Do you think that Taiwan’s particular situation which I don’t know how it feels, but includes significant feeling of threat?
If I remember things wrong and so on, I get corrected, immediately sometime by YouTube commentators. This is, of course, a good thing to earn trustworthiness with the citizens. We are not asking the citizens to be transparent. Even if people are feeling delinquent – I think that’s the kind of words that you were alluding to – that’s their liberty.
About that, what do you think is more prevalent in terms of the reason triggering the spread of COVID-19 fake news or other disinformation? Some researchers found that there are three, at least. Interpersonal relationship, I mean by saying here, if I close to you, then I tend to trust you more than the government or more than other sources.
If the data is only kept in your local storage, in something that you trust , like your firm, and it works in airplane mode with only Bluetooth on, then that is something that people can verify themselves. If it’s open-source, they can ask a friend with programming capability to verify that it does what it says on the tin.
I understand. That’s a very unique Taiwanese situation. It’s, I think, a big success of having a trusted government portal, if you will via .tw which can attract half of the audience of Facebook in a country like Taiwan. I can’t imagine the same proportion of any kind of government portal attracting that many people or half of…
They don’t need to fly the patients to the Taiwan mainland, and the local nurse gets more trust and gets more experience. That was not legal, actually. There was no telemedicine law for a nurse to be supervised by a doctor in the remote. They can do it if this doctor is by their side, but not over video link.
I would say first, that this process itself is a part of Taiwan’s identity. Just by engaging, in listening at scale, in radically trusting the citizen, we are already defining what Taiwan is. This is not because that people in Taiwan believed in any particular political system because the politicians say it, but rather because they have participated in it.
People just looked into the root cause. The local nurses say that they don’t feel that they have a lot of career there because the local people don’t really trust them. They don’t have any good way to practice into actual diagnosis or the treatment, because it’s always flown into the main Taiwan island to do so.
Using those different correlated data, the people in Academia Sinica are working on algorithms to make it more reliable and exactly solving the drifts and biases. They do publish on that. Because they’re above the administration, people trust that the Academia Sinica is not working for any party’s team. They’re superior, beyond the normal universities in that case.
It takes a great trust to hand to some other country’s team all your water flow, all your water pressure, all your scale down dimension and data. That is the kind of binding issues that binds all of our concerns together and build co creative teams together. I look forward to collaborating with the US more on that particular front.
...but rather 交, as in giving, in communicating, in exchanging, crossing over, and 代 as in representing, so giving you the right to represent me. K父代also means, when I say 給個交代, to give an account, meaning coming clear of how one has or has not abused that trust relationship, which is crucial when we think about GDPR or the various rights.
