It is an administration-level resolution and the president said that in her October 10th speech. Misinformation is, of course, something that is global, that has come on. We see that misinformation affects trust on all the sectors of life, not just the public sector. Taiwan, as I said, is forced to innovate without sacrificing the freedom of speech, and assembly.
Taiwan’s time zone has not changed, certainly, [laughs] but they feel confident that if they can have a factual point-by-point response from each ministry about the impact of daylight savings time on energy, on tourism, on environment, on everything, then they feel this accountability means that the government trusts people completely to not abuse these numbers and evidences.
For our office, the core value is to increase the mutual trust between the public service and the civil society. After that, to empower the civil society to be able to participate meaningfully in public governance. Then simplify the existing workflow of public servants so that they can do more with less time, and to promote the idea of digital service.
They sometimes use the tools that we use, but especially around the controversial issues, where the stakeholders have no reason to trust one another, [laughs] they capture the whole meeting just so that the stakeholder can know that there’s no backroom deals. They use it selectively. They’re not saying, "All my ministry’s meetings are to be this way."
...expectation of individuals and then they take this and demand that out of their government. I think that’s really grassroots and really the way to gain the legitimacy is just by using it more often and to not start with the Taipei City. The Taipei City, or the Central Election Committee at the moment really has plenty of trust actually...
The trust level was really low in 2014. The approval rate of the administration back then was 9%. Anything the administration said at the time, automatically people would just say, “We’ll have none of this.” If you asked a random person on the street whether you will get democratic agency—‘nothing about you without you’—they’d say, “Of course not.”
And I’m Omezzine. For this episode, we’re going to look to a place where the relationship between humanity and democracy has actually improved over the last 10 years, which isn’t the picture in most of the world. A place that has grown stronger and stronger, where trust in government has gone from 9%—wait for it—to above 70%.
Urgency helps. A decade ago former President Ma Ying-jeou’s approval was 9 percent; any process that delivered more trust was worth trying. If you are already at 70 percent , you maintain systems but hesitate to renovate. I am discussing these methods this month at the Victoria Forum with Canadian practitioners; Canada is less polarized, but the need for innovation remains.
You mean in addition to replying emails to administrates? To the first question, the zero- trust network architecture is designed with this idea of assuming breach. That is to say, when I sign an official document, this phone verifies my fingerprint. Another piece of software, CrowdStrike, verifies my phone’s integrity. Another piece of software, CloudFlare, verifies that CrowdStrike is not misbehaving.
After that initial boost trapping experience, we found that there are corners within the government that are still paper based. Because they did not trust the old intranet security model. It was good reason. They found many threat actors, many threat models that led them to conclude that maybe a physical paper with physical seal, with physical signature, is actually more secure.
I just wonder if there’s some potential there, using zero knowledge proofs, to be able to have…there be an avatar and parallel to the world that you’re describing, which actually subscribe to in the broader sense, give people the ability to trust that this avatar is someone who knows what they’re talking about, and someone that they can…
You don’t have to queue in vain. You can go straight to the pharmacy or convenience store that still have some masks. Imagine if it relied, as it did initially, in the beginning of February, on the citizens’ input on crowdsourcing, then the numbers may be accurate, it may be inaccurate. The trustworthiness will fluctuate, depending on the availability of volunteers.
You see, for career public servants, our theory of change really is that of a Pareto improvement, meaning that I talked about reducing risk by early consultation, saving time by automation, and also increasing mutual trust by giving people credit when credit is due instead of asking them to remain anonymous forever. If things go wrong, it’s always my fault anyway.
For an organization to engage people, there are two main ways, just like knowledge management ideas, two main ways to improve the relationship. One is about accountability. Explaining automatically to everyone who trusted you with their data how this data are being used, and answer to each and every question from them, including updating, deleting, and otherwise making use of the data.
But if you start with a baby, or a young child, and more and more decisions about the life of the child are taken by an AI mentor, again, not an evil mentor that actually serves some corporation, a mentor which is supposedly really serving the interests of that child – it learns on the way, it changes – you trust the algorithm.
That means that for many issues such as disinformation, disaster relief, or things of public service nature, people tend to trust the social sector more than the public sector. If the largest charity like Tzu Chi publish a number about a disaster relief and then the government publish a number, chances are that the people mostly believe the social sector’s number.
It is ultimately graded by how subjectively fruitful the student feel at participating meaningfully in their local community, and autonomously decide which classes to enroll in, and things like that. I think the USR really showed people that it is possible for the academia to play not a planned economic role, but really a brain trust or a think tank role locally.
If I need to figure out everything on the basis of being transparent, it’s also a way of controlling and looking at everything to be sure that it’s in the way I would like it to be. While trust means that I just offer unconditional openness in a way because I think you won’t fail me and behave badly.
Of course, people think, sometimes wistfully, about the old power because at least there was something that they can rely on, without going through the fact-checking themselves. There is a kind of comfort in having one person that you can unconditionally trust . If that person gets things wrong, everybody is doomed, [laughs] but still, there is a certain comfort in that.
Now, that is a very bold move by a democratic country, basically trusting the citizen to not abuse data that’s traditionally reserved only for decision makers. What we are doing is essentially saying when in a democratic society, everybody has access to same data, then we can do science, because it’s better for prediction models to be accountable to everybody.
