The very next day, everybody in the CECC press conference, including our Minister for Health, Chen Shih-chung, wore pink medical mask to show not only solidarity, but also make the boy the most hip boy in his class because only he had the color of the mask that medical officers, the heroes, wear. That’s radically trusting the citizens. The fair part is, for example, on distributing of the masks.
Of course. Can you explain just a little bit more just about…Because we’ve seen this in the past in Taiwan’s relationship with tech. The civic trust between, once again, society, government, and technology, has been quite strong. It’s something that regardless of…Even if Taiwan’s contact tracing technology was adopted in the US, there may be a lot of people who are just refusing to or…
The public opinion polls are not run by the career public service, so I see them not really in the purview of our open government work. We deal with how the government trusts citizens and how to make our open government data agree to international standards and publish upon collection if it’s not related to privacy, and so on, but none of the election’s opinion polls are state apparatus.
They see that the fellow public service are people too, and we build 20 percent of trust just by looking eye to eye, while in a projection, but still the idea is that that then, the public service don’t have to work with the rural people, the indigenous people, and the elderly as abstract numbers and text, which always privileged the people who are good at rhetorics, good at writing.
There are going to be three sessions: the first will be on democratic deficit, the second on development deficit, and the third on trust deficit. Since the Social Innovation Hub touches and works on the SDGs, we had to check whether the content and objectives of the event were aligned with the SDGs. We were told that for us to use the venues they had to be aligned with the SDGs.
Organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers are frameworks with multiple stakeholders. They’re not affiliated with the U.N., and aren’t managed by any particular government. They operate based on communication with stakeholders and transparent procedures, so developers around the world trust them. Their procedures are continuously changing, and the change process is transparent and shared. This is their core value.
It did take a lot of time, institutionalization, and hard work for the public service to start trusting , bit by bit, the citizens. And it does take technology—technology that highlights the bridges instead of the polarization—to show the public service that it does actually surface the signal, not just the noise. It actually saves you time instead of wastes your time when you engage the public in this particular way.
But if we concentrate on, for example, in Taiwan, because our election is January next year, first among the many democratic elections that year in the next year, we naturally focus on election meddling and specifically the pollution of information integrity and the fabric of trust . And that’s not just a robo call scams, although that are very bad already, but rather ways of synthetic media that pollutes the public forum.
Yeah, their CARL source OCR. I’m like, if you’re not going to trust our numbers, you’re going to publish your own numbers as open data. That’s the best way to clear up any errors or typos. They actually eventually worked with the legislature on that, and in 2018, published for the first time as open data. Again, public sector caving in to the demand of the social sector.
They did a prototype within three months and found out it really increased trust of the local people to the local clinic if they can do this kind of three-way video conferencing. After three months and it’s a good idea, they won the Presidential Hackathon Award. There’s no money. The trophy is a micro projector. If you turn it on, it shows the president giving the trophy to you.
One team looks at the Orchid Island. There was a helicopter that carries the patient to the mainland hospital, but it was raining, it was dark, and the helicopter crashed. They do the root cause analysis and found out that it’s because the local people do not trust the local nurses, because they lack the special medicinal training, and so they would insist that they get carried to the main island.
The presidential election is in ’96, which is around the time World Wide Web got really popular. There’s 10 years where the Taiwan civil society can experiment very freely with a lot of associations. Because it’s before the presidential election, the democratic apparatus is not yet fully formed. People don’t trust as much the governments as their neighbor associations. We call it the 10 year of civil society building.
Anyway, a trustworthy source. Then they learn that they don’t have to rely on content farm to get the information that they care about. Reputable news sources will also give them, in real time, the content, which is more reliable and may be framed in a way that is as addictive as the content farms, that is eyeball-catching as the content farms that, nevertheless, carries what was true about it.
And I trust that you already have the list of visa-free countries with Taiwan as well as the e-visa countries, with interesting exceptions like Colombians need to have a valid Shenzhen visa first and things like that. But it’s all very spelled out on the BOCA website. So, for the ones that are outside of that list, maybe we just do a kind of monthly refresh or something like that.
Again, not banning the use of SMS or other communication services for information exchange, but ensuring that the authenticity of the governmental officials are very easily identified. So it becomes very hard to impersonate a governmental agency and so on. So in short, we focus on making sure the provenance, the trustworthiness of the actor and the behavior layer, instead of clamping down on the content layer to protect the integrity of information.
And so, it’s essential to consider, of course, the potential short-term harms, like interactive deepfakes, which has the potential to unravel the trust that binds us together. But then, it’s equally important to apply AI so that we can coordinate with our cross-border partners to enhance information integrity, to build actual work examples of people working together so we can counter even greater risks that is in the horizon.
The meeting notes are all open, of course, as is in my ministry. And you can also see the lead researchers as well as the thematic research programs. And feel free to reach out to these people. They are the AICOE, the Center of Excellence within the National Science and Technology Council. And they’re also responsible for training Taiwan’s own open-source generative AI model, the trustworthy AI engine or TAIDE.
Next Thursday, we will introduce a new data schema so that they can have the opening hours and collecting hours and so on in different fields for the map to reflect. The map applications also have a forum where they can invent new ideas. For example, press a button to disappear from the map, which they later on implemented. This is about the fast iteration cycle that really wins a lot of trust .
Minister Chen, the commander even said the Pink Panther was his favorite childhood idol or something. Suddenly, the young boy become the most hip boy in his class [laughs] because only he has the color of the mask that the heroes wear. The fair part pertains to participatory accountability. When we’re rationing out the masks we work with the pharmacists, thousands of them that gets the trust from the local neighborhoods already.
On October 10, Missions Publiques and its global partners will deploy a global citizens’ dialogue on the future of the Internet in 80 countries of the world. The idea is to feed the process at the UN level about the future of Internet and its governance. Based on your experience, you know Internet can be a tool to fuel trust in society. It can also be a tool to fuel mistrust in society.
