The theme of the 10th Creative Bureaucracy Festival, which took place in Berlin in early June, was ‘Creative Bureaucracy – Stronger Democracy’. It was a nod to the concern present in most of the sessions I attended during the day-long event: the increasing influence of far right political parties and movements, growing public dissatisfaction with parliamentary democracy, and the challenge these present to preserving and strengthening democratic space and public trust in government and its institutions.
If there was a word of the day for me, it was “trust”. This was signalled from the very first session, in introductory remarks by the Festival’s co-founder Charles Landry. Born in London to German parents who had escaped from the Nazis, Laundry evoked the 1930s when he said, “Again, trust has become fragile… And when trust weakens, something else takes its place.” While he was referring to the rise of populist far right movements in Europe, Landry was quick to note that the erosion of trust in government is an OECD wide phenomenon.
But what exactly are we talking about when we discuss trust? How do we define, preserve and build it? The following article will unpack these questions in relation to some of the discussions that took place during the Festival.
Effective service delivery and trust
“A strong democracy is about developing stronger institutions that people can believe in,” claimed Philip von Haehling, Managing Director of PD, a German in-house management and strategic consultancy that works exclusively with the public sector. “We don’t lack ideas, what we lack is delivery.”
The most common lens through which the trust issue was explored throughout the Festival, this framing touched on several issues: the need for government to deliver functioning services; the challenge facing public administrators in terms of working smarter, with less staff and less resources; and the need to close the gap between those in government who design policy change and those who deliver it.
It was also linked to the argument, made by some speakers I listened to over the course of the day, that our current institutions are not fit for purpose to solve complex issues. As one speaker put it: “No one owns problems or is on top of them. This is the perception of a lot of the public and it is eroding democratic support.”
“A good example is AI,” claimed Tamara Srzentić, the Former Minister of Public Administration, Digital Society and Media of Montenegro. “A lot of people in government talk about AI but no one seems to be on top of it. There is a view that there is no structure around it and that its development has been decoupled from social connection.”
A strong example of the connection between trust and efficient digital services was made in an inspiring presentation on Rumah Pendidikan, the integrated national digital platform offering dedicated services to stakeholders in the Indonesian education system. Developed by the Indonesian Ministry for Education, it features a mixed tech stack of open source and proprietary solutions and has been implemented countrywide.
The platform was designed to reverse below minimum competency identified in Indonesian school students in literacy and numeracy and provide data and resources to teachers and school principals. There were significant challenges unique to Indonesia in getting the platform up and running: an administrative area made up of seventeen thousand islands, major linguistic diversity, and very differing levels of technological capacity and know-how amongst teachers and principles.
The platform required not just a technical solution but a mindset change to the way that government bureaucrats thought about education provision. And, crucially in terms of building both trust and a lasting digital infrastructure, the platform was able to survive attempts by the new administration post national elections in early 2024, to kill it off. The platform has been so successful that early indications that it might be replaced were met with a concerted social media lobbying campaign by the teachers, which convinced the new administration to shelve its plans.
The importance of open source technology
The value of open source software was another component of the discussions around building trust. “Citizens do not care which government agency provides a digital service,” said digital strategist Pamela Krosta-Hartl. “They just want it to be reliable.”
According to Krosta-Hartl, open source technology is not just an economical software licensing model, its “most important lessons are cultural”. It can help to avoid a common problem plaguing government service delivery – different levels of government using scarce resources to solve the same problems repeatedly. “Open source enables collaboration at scale. Many of the digital challenges today are common. No single country in Europe needs to solve basic problems by themselves.”
Open source can also play a vital role in helping to build secure software pipelines and digital solutions that can support digital sovereignty, another key topic for many of the Festival’s participants
Data sovereignty is the concept that states have the right to control their own digital future. This means not only having authority over the data they possess, but also the hardware and software that make up their digital infrastructure, ensuring these are governed by local laws and values rather than being reliant on, or controlled by foreign tech giants or external nations. This has become a major strategic concern in Europe, not only due to the huge amount of data that governments are sitting on, but because reliance on foreign tech giants can create dangerous vulnerabilities, from political coercion to supply chain issues.
Signalling this concern, in early June the European Union presented a European Technological Sovereignty Package, a set of measures to strengthen Europe’s technology sovereignty by increasing capacity in areas like semiconductor production, AI, and cloud computing. Open source technology will play a major role in the package.
Do we need to think about trust differently?
But is our current way of thinking about trust enough to meet the challenges we now face? This was a question hinted at by former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou early in the Festival’s proceedings but to my knowledge not followed up in any of the subsequent sessions. Discussing the decline in trust in parliamentary democracy, he noted that it is not enough to just give the public participation via a parliamentary vote every three to four years. “We need more direct forms of participation,” he said.
This comment made me think of ongoing work being facilitated by Link Digital, which examines the concept of trust through the perspective of open data, open source systems, and digital infrastructure. This argues that in an era of black-box algorithms and fractured public narratives, society has moved past the point where trust can simply be assumed or demanded on the part of governments, no matter how efficient their service delivery may be. Instead, trust must be treated as an engineered, structural property.
Central to this framework – which Link Digital’s Executive Director Steven De Costa expounded on in this public talk in Canberra in early 2026 – is the concept of causal continuity; the collective ability to transparently trace and agree on how data or the conclusions drawn from it came to be. In other words, data portals and algorithmic processes need to stop hiding their inner workings and be completely observable, communicable, and externally accountable.
This definition of trust, which differs from the one which dominated much of the discussion at the Festival, requires building open public data infrastructures with communities rather than just about them, grounded in explicit statements of intent. It also requires governments to stop treating data as a product for public “access” and instead build open, observable data pipelines that allow citizens to explicitly verify the intent, source code, and logic behind every bureaucratic and algorithmic decision.
The framework – which is already influencing the way that we build open data portals – and the challenge it presents to governments in terms of being fully open is something Link Digital would like to see more discussion about.
