Estonia may not show up on Americans’ radar too often. It is a tiny
country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the
territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million
inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population. As a friend from India
recently quipped, “What is there to govern?”
What makes this tiny country interesting in terms of governance is not
just that the people can elect their parliament online or get tax
overpayments back within two days of filing their returns. It is also
that this level of service for citizens is not the result of the
government building a few websites. Instead, Estonians started by
redesigning their entire information infrastructure from the ground up
with openness, privacy, security, and ‘future-proofing’ in mind.
The first building block of e-government is telling citizens apart. This
sounds blatantly obvious, but alternating between referring to a person
by his social security number, taxpayer number, and other identifiers
doesn’t cut it. Estonia uses a simple, unique ID methodology across all
systems, from paper passports to bank records to government offices and
hospitals. A citizen with the personal ID code 37501011234 is a male
born in the 20th century (3) in year ’75 on January 1 as the 123rd baby
of that day. The number ends with a computational checksum to easily
detect typos.
For these identified citizens to transact with each other, Estonia
passed the Digital Signatures Act in 2000. The state standardized a
national Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which binds citizen identities
to their cryptographic keys, and now doesn’t care if any Tiit and Toivo
(to use common Estonian names) sign a contract in electronic form with
certificates or plain ink on paper. A signature is a signature in the
eyes of the law.
As a quirky side effect, this foundational law also forced all
decentralized government systems to become digital “by market demand.”
No part of the Estonian government can turn down a citizen’s digitally
signed document and demand a paper copy instead. As citizens opt for
convenience, bureaucrats see a higher inflow of digital forms and are
self-motivated to invest in systems that will help them manage the
process. Yet a social worker in a small village can still provide the
same service with no big investment by handling the small number of
digitally signed email attachments the office receives.
Read More at the entire article in the link below..
http://www.eesti.ca/lessons-from-the-worlds-most-tech-savvy-government/article41332
