Making public services trustworthy in the digital age

Technology is now embedded everywhere in the processes and decision making of government. This has created a challenging paradox. Technology offers great opportunities for better service delivery, better policy, better governance and more informed decision making, but brings with it greater risks of reduced accountability and auditability, entrenching biased or inequitable outcomes at scale, and making more difficult the transparency needed for auditing and for ensuring the ability for citizens to appeal decisions. A careful rethink is needed –  as a part of any digital transformation or digital government strategy we need to consider how we ensure visibility and traceability of technology-enabled decisions and the authority (and legality) behind them. We also need to rethink our approach to security and risk to be responsive in real-time to highly scalable and changeable issues, including machines as users. Otherwise we risk not only the creation of an unaccountable black box approach to public governance, but plummeting public trust in our public institutions with implications for social cohesion, justice, economic stability, and the perceived legitimacy of all that is administered by our public institutions.

To renew and maintain public trust, the biggest shift needs to be from ‘getting trust’ to ‘being trustworthy’. Too many efforts in this space start from the premise of ‘once people understand the benefits they’ll give us social licence to do whatever is needed’. It would be very helpful to ask people “what it would take to trust us?” I ask people that question all the time, and the answers are often surprising. These are all things to discuss authentically, early, regularly and openly with citizen engagement to drive policy development.

This talk will delve into some proposed foundations for a 21st century trust infrastructure that enabled transparency, auditability and appealability in real time and at scale. Hint, it involves rules, immutable decision logs, Gov as a Platform and culture.