Public trust can be rebuilt faster than many people expect, and one of the best ways is citizen engagement, this inspiring DLD26 conversation between Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, and Zarah Bruhn of Germany’s Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovations, SPRIND, illustrates.
Tang points to the 2014 Sunflower Movement, where protesters didn’t just object to a trade deal with China but also steered the government to their desired version. “We used technologies to listen to the half million people on the street and many more online on what do they really want for trade deals with Beijing”, Tang explains.
Today, Taiwan’s Join platform lets citizens bring up policy concerns, while “presidential hackathons” produce solutions, from the ground up. The result is a system that can scale participation without turning into chaos and even solve problems like deepfake scams without censorship, as Tang points out.
Bruhn aims to bring that model to Germany, through SPRIND’s “Germany, what sucks” challenge – an attempt to channel public frustration into innovation. “Everyone in Germany can hand in ideas how Germany can work better”, she says. People can also “vote on the best ideas. Which ones do you like most? Where do you agree? Where do you disagree?”
Watch the video to explore this session in detail. If you prefer to read, you can find edited excerpts in issue 4 of DLD’s magazine The Promptah.
