Can Consistent Trust Decisions Bring People Back to Work?

In the continuation of the mediaX webinar series “Thinking Tools for Wicked Problems”, Ajay Madhok, mediaX Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Founding Partner of Reboot Digital, looks at this large scale issue. As countries slowly reopen after the coronavirus lockdowns, many are trying to ramp up their Testing infrastructure because tests are necessary to make people confident enough to resume their life. Bringing people back-to-work is a grand challenge that requires more than wearing masks, and conforming to hygiene, screening, and distancing.

A key component of reopening the economy will be a lot more Testing to establish trust and inform safer behaviors. But trust is earned and not machine-learned or contact-traced. Therefore, any plan to reopen must facilitate the trust employees need to work safely with each other and with their customers and visitors.

This webinar presents a decentralized, privacy-respecting trust layer to enable a consistent user experience of trust decisions between any two peers, such as a visitor and a business. A consistent experience is a design affordance critical to achieving public trust, just as consistent user experience of car controls(steering wheel, turn signals, brakes) enables any driver to drive any car safely.

The framework uses the same trust triangle between a bank(Issuer), a holder(Prover) and a merchant (Verifier) as the physical credential of a credit card we carry in our physical or mobile wallets today. It leverages the existing secure Data-exchange protocols and PKI infrastructure to Issue, Exchange, and Verify Health credentials privately and securely.

Read Ajay’s Blog, “Enabling The Economy To Reopen”

Presenter

Ajay Madhok

Ajay Madhok is a growth architect and the Founding Partner of Reboot Digital. Having experienced innovation from both sides by helping grown-ups innovate and building startups to disrupt them, Ajay’s expertise is in translating good ideas into successful new products. He is fascinated by corporate innovation models, and his research focus is on organizational resilience through perpetual renewal. The purpose-built startup is one such model that draws on his experience in combining foundational assets of an enterprise with startup talent to create new growth vehicles. Ajay builds startups, advises venture funds, and consults with large corporations to amplify their innovations efforts. He is an advisor to Playground Global and a member of the technology advisory council of Harman International. He earned his B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, and an M.S. degree in Mathematics from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India.