A voice for change? Trust relationships between ombudsmen, individuals and public service providers

There has been a debate for years about what the role of the ombudsman is. This article examines a key component of the role, to promote trust in public services and government. To be able to do this, however, an ombudsman needs to be perceived as legitimate and be trusted by a range of stakeholders, including the user. This article argues that three key relationships in a person’s complaint journey can build trust in an institution, and must therefore be understood as a system. The restorative justice framework is adapted to conceptualize this trust model as a novel approach to understanding the institution from the perspective of its users. Taking two public sector ombudsmen as examples, the article finds that voice and trust need to be reinforced through the relationships in a consumer journey to manage individual expectations, prevent disengagement, and thereby promote trust in the institution, in public service providers, and in government.

Providing User Security Guarantees in Public Infrastructure Clouds

The infrastructure cloud (IaaS) service model offers improved resource flexibility and availability, where tenants - insulated from the minutiae of hardware maintenance - rent computing resources to deploy and operate complex systems. Large-scale services running on IaaS platforms demonstrate the viability of this model; nevertheless, many organizations operating on sensitive data avoid migrating operations to IaaS platforms due to security concerns. In this paper, we describe a framework for data and operation security in IaaS, consisting of protocols for a trusted launch of virtual machines and domain-based storage protection. We continue with an extensive theoretical analysis with proofs about protocol resistance against attacks in the defined threat model. The protocols allow trust to be established by remotely attesting host platform configuration prior to launching guest virtual machines and ensure confidentiality of data in remote storage, with encryption keys maintained outside of the IaaS domain. Presented experimental results demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed protocols. The framework prototype was implemented on a test bed operating a public electronic health record system, showing that the proposed protocols can be integrated into existing cloud environments.

Designing Policy Mixes for Resource Efficiency: The Role of Public Acceptability

Where the public acceptability of a policy can influence its chance of success, it is important to anticipate and mitigate potential concerns. This paper applies search frequency analysis and a form of claims-making analysis to identify public acceptability concerns among fourteen policies proposed by the EU-funded DYNAMIX project to achieve EU resource efficiency. Key points of contention in the corresponding public discourses focus primarily on trust, fairness, effectiveness and cost. We use our findings to provide specific recommendations for the design and implementation of the proposed policy mix which are intended to improve the public acceptability of contentious aspects, and highlight some broader insights for policymakers.

Media amplification of brand crisis and its affect on brand trust

This paper explores the ways in which consumers’ brand trust during a brand crisis is affected through direct experience versus when it is amplified through mass media. By using case-study methodology, our findings reveal that generalised public images of a product crisis initiate a public perception of risk, which provides more negative effects on brand trust than the actual consumers’ experience does. We introduce the media as a third partner influencing the trust relationship between consumers and brands, and offer suggestions for restoring and preserving customers’ brand trust.