@darco First, thank you for the excellent work, I really appreciate your efforts on protecting people’s privacy and preventing mass data leakage!
I’m just here to raise an example on how to make government more likely to accept our “GIP, Government Improvement Proposal”.
First, this is a civili hacking group in Taiwan, which held hackathons periodically. Instead of introducing it formally, I’ll tell a story and you’ll soon find out how our government started to embrace the projects generated here.
In the beginning, it’s a bunch of geeks who wanted to build a better UI/UX to better represent government’s open data visually. It was: housing sales price data, court’s judgement data, traffic ticket data, or tax/household income data…
And of course the news started to pick up projects, some misunderstandings from gov side also appeared “You’re accessing our data illegally.” Ppl started to realize that their work are being used, not just some hacky incomplete projects. Something like a diaster map(typhoon, flooding, etc) were also generated, and even used by the commanding center in the governement. (better UI/UX than internal system and whiteboards)
The key takeout here is: even if the participants of the civil hackathon are decentralized, by having a regular hackathon schedule and a person/a placeholder org, where media and gov can contact - it forced the voted politicians to pressure government employees to understand such organization/hackathon, and their projects/mandates, etc.
Later, ppl starting to realize that it’s not enough to reinvent needs for your customer if you were never one of them. Some of the projects are for usual people, and this is still ok cause we are all users to such project.
However, in order to increase the leverage of the projects - there must be some projects that focused on improving government’s internal system and framework.
So here comes a big one…spiler alert: some of them joined the government temporarily, and accepted a huge paycut (for the public!).
and its repo:
Civil hacking is not a new thing, IRRC there’s one in the UK, in Singapore, and in the Baltic states.
Back to our main topic here: how can we make government accept this seemingly radical new paradigm of KYC?
My answer will be: do it in a non-profit way, and do it frequently. After you’ve gain that moral highground and news coverage…government and private sectors will contact you automatically, without the need to even persuade them.
This may sound VERY farfetched - and it indeed is.
We, as blockchain ppl, are essentially educating people of a new set of framework/paradigm. You never expect the time scale to be small…it’s 3yrs+. It’s also the same to educate government bureaucrats. And you better do it in a non-profit way so that ppl won’t question your motivation. (don’t worry about the competitors, trust me)
Of course this is just one way of doing it…however it’s the most efficient way as far as I know - step by step.
Hope that we won’t have another equifax data leak, and we can all have a future with kyc protected by zk primitives!