Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
karlsnotes.com
karlsnotes.com
Without externalizing the cost of all the time wasted, it's just too easy to push time-costs on to the consumers/citizens. It's already a huge problem, and I suspect a major cause of loss of productivity in the western world.
When you only have to handle the simple stuff, it's much easier to make it a great experience. AAA is basically the EZPass lane for the DMV.
That's not to say that a full-service DMVs shouldn't be significantly better in most cases, though.
- The contractor had no budget. Our servers were out of date and we were running out of date OSes and software. We were all paid below standard and overworked.
- We had a tiny budget at the agency to buy things at the very end of the year. We ran up to date software and OSes, except for a few large complicated systems that were setup with grant money. We were all paid well below standard. I was no longer on call at all times of the day and night.
Contract awards go to the lowest bidder.
Where I live that's exactly what we have. We have a number of privately owned tag agencies that handle most requests which don't require an in-person visit to the DMV (like a new photo id).
This is fast and takes far less time than visiting the DMV. The various DMVs are bloated beasts with too-large budgets, yet they can't seem to staff people at all their windows.
See also: bans on common-sense measures like including sales tax in price tags, making it easier to pay income taxes.
Yes. The strategy is known as "starve the beast" [1] and it is pursued with ferocious determination by its proponents. The goal is to create some kind of minimal government libertarian paradise.
Yes you can see, the beast has been horribly starved.
Spending on services that are multipliers of productivity is very different than spending on the military, for example. Spending on public services that improves citizens' life like healthcare, parks, schools, culture, easiness of bureaucracy (e.g.: permits for construction, licencing of activities, etc.) is a completely different beast than spending on politicians benefits, military drills, and so on.
Do you not have driving tests in Sweden? Does Sweden allow residents to submit any random picture of their choice for their drivers license?
As an American, the only times I have to go to the DMV are when I have renew my license (every 4-5 year), and that seems mainly to take a (simple) vision test and get my photo taken. They also give tests to new drivers and people moving in from out of state.
It's very, very easy.
The last time I personally did license renewal, I waited approximately that long without an appointment, and the place had a line out the door.
Theoretically yes, but practically it's moot. Were I live I don't think I've ever had to wait in line more than 10-15 minutes, even at what seemed to be "busy times." If the wait times are that short, it's more trouble to make an appointment and still wait about that long.
That's nice for you. Every time I've gone to my local DMV I've waited at least 45 minutes, even with an appointment. Luckily I work remotely so I could work from the waiting area, but most people don't have that luxury and are forced to take an indefinite time off of work to go to the DMV.
That's not something you can generalize about in the US. Here, driver licensing is a state-level function, it's done >50 different ways. It's not even official done by the "DMV" everywhere, but that's what they call in in California, so that's what they call it on TV. Even in my state it's hard to generalize, since they allow contractors to perform almost all the common functions in their businesses.
For example marking employees by how quickly they “process” someone (aka Handle Time) actually incentivizes employees to not listen, to tell people the wrong information, and to push them to be somebody else’s problem. The customer who might have taken 10min now takes 5 here, 10 there, 20 over there, 20 min of a supervisor’s time, and countless minutes taking up space in the various lines waiting to be told something else.
If a system runs like that it almost doesn’t matter how much staff they have because all those staff feel overworked and overskilled.
Woe to you people off the golden path.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/claim...
I AM convinced it's a major problem. Maybe not for white-collar people on Hacker News who have paid sick leave, random leave times and no expectations of certain hours, and high pay. But for many working class people in the US dealing with bureaucratic nonsense IS a big deal.
Isn't there a US law on this? The Paperwork Reduction Act?
I know the time required to fill out an NSF proposal is "how long is a piece of string" but parts of it (some of the financial portions) are as boilerplate as an IRS tax form.
Ideally people would have a single universal identifier and then I'd never need to put my date of birth or tax number on another form again.
In the more general case of data collection I believe people collect data simply because they can. I strongly believe that the PII collected by advertisers and others is mostly never used. A liability they take on with no benefit.
For example, almost 20 American states require license renewal every 4 years or more frequently:
https://ballotpedia.org/Driver%27s_license_costs_by_state,_2...
When I renew, there's no test (not even vision), and they don't even retake my picture or let me update my height. They just print the same ID with new dates
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Obviously, Americans filing tax information the government already knows every year is another canonical example
Of course, I'm now 33 and still using a picture of 21yo me on my license which gets me second glances from bar tenders, TSA, etc. But if it keeps me from having to go in to the DMV...
It's possible that it would have been more complicated if I had changed my address or needed to change any other information.
I did have to go to an appointment to convert my previous ID into a REAL ID, so maybe that's what you mean.
So technically yes, but an 8 year REAL ID that has to be renewed in person would be strictly better.
It takes months of classes and driving hours, exams and tests to get one where I live. Renewals mean getting your eyes checked, no photos etc.
At least that was my experience in New Jersey.
Its just so that governments (and academic institutions, nonprofits, healthcare, etc.) are the natural environments for bureaucratic bloat.
New Jersey for example just enacted a "safe passing" law earlier this year in an attempt to make bicyclists and pedestrians safer. But existing drivers will never have to demonstrate that they know this because we never retest people after they get their license once.
There's a growing number of organizations advocating for pedestrian and cyclist safety but they have a lot less funding and fewer connections that equity groups which protect drivers. If you have the opportunity in your area, donate to such a group or help make one yourself.
Devil's advocate: Maybe you shouldn't be driving, if you might fail a driving test. Being tested on this should be a complete non-issue for anyone with a few years of real world driving experience.
Edit: Most changes are not rocket science, you simply need to be aware of them.
It's easy to believe that road safety isn't that important when you're surrounded by several tons of plastic and metal armor.
The reason we have licenses (aka controls on who can drive cars) is to curb dangerous and irresponsible driving, mark drivers for driving egregiously, and remove people or not allow drivers on the road when they don't have the motor skills to navigate a vehicle on the road.
Knowing the rules is secondary, if not tertiary. Otherwise bicyclists should also have licenses and license plates because rules apply to them as well.
Here in Sweden it doesn't matter how much right of way you have, if you are driving a car you're responsible for the safety of others in the road, even more if they're a pedestrian or cyclist. It's not excuse that a pedestrian was jaywalking or whatever bizarre law to limit access to the road for people you got in the US, you are ultimately responsible for the safety of other users. You're drilled and tested on that in your driving lessons and exams, you will fail your driving test if you fail to yield for a pedestrian at any moment, even if it was just briefly not pressing the brake pedal way before another road user is in danger.
This is a false equivalence, yes, the road is shared and has rules but one user of the road is safely driving on tons of metal powered by hundreds of horsepower, the other is pedaling a bike.
Degree and level matter. Don't hold such a black-and-white view of the world, it's reductionist and not very smart.
Cars are absolute murder machines.
Yeah it's pretty ridiculous, especially when you hold things like mutual funds. You have to figure out how much to pay every quarter. Why can't the gov't bill me with the info they already have?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once-only_principle
Basically the government isn’t allowed to ask you for any information more than once. They already know!
Why would having every government department, hospital, doctors/dentists office keep your data separately, probably in some unsecured excel file or whatever?
When we have one registry for everything, they can keep it secure by having some proper security guys design and audit it, we can see who has accessed my data and when, etc. If a hospital would keep your health records in their own system then.. they'd probably have some low paid IT guy design something and leak it accidentally online.
10 years ago people would have called you paranoid now you're already too late
On the other hand, when these connected systems are in place it's not like employees can just tap your name and get the data, there is some Auth process with your eID/certificate.
It all boils down to people's trust in the government. In Scandinavian countries that trust is high. In Southern European countries it's very low (and much lower in the US).
Edit: grammar
Compare that to buying a house in the US where you need to use all kinds of third party title insurers etc., because you can't necessarily be sure the person selling you the land actually has ownership of the land in the registry at the moment you are doing the sale.
Also, payment systems in India charge merchants something like 0.1% or less, while credit card companies charge merchants 3-5% in the US. In India everything is cheap because online transactions are very secure ... your Aadhar identity allows you to generate one time codes that are sent to vendors to authorize payments. Even if the one time code is stolen, it can only be used one time. Contrast that with the USA where if someone just gets your social security number and address, they can often impersonate you and charge thousands of dollars against your identity. That insecurity has spawned billions of dollars of costs in the US economy and enriched Visa and Mastercard. Its dead weight on the economy.
Even that is excessive. Digital signatures (if available) do the job.
Whenever you have bigger countries you almost always have several levels of local governance - state, county or Land. These local governments often work with full autonomy and do not share date with the central government.
In this case even solving such simple and basic thing as a centralised login solution is difficult since why would the owner of the centralised login solution should have knowledge of which citizen used which local governments service?
I believe that’s why we see so many unfinished systems not working together because they have to be built completely separately by each local government since they operate in autonomy.
> Whenever you have bigger countries you almost always have several levels of local governance - state, county or Land. These local governments often work with full autonomy and do not share date with the central government.
Here this is particularly relevant with healthcare. In some regions I get full coverage with my regional card with no questions asked. In others I have to go through hoops, and apparently they have no way of knowing my clinical history.
> In this case even solving such simple and basic thing as a centralised login solution is difficult since why would the owner of the centralised login solution should have knowledge of which citizen used which local governments service?
In Spain they tried to solve this with DNIe (your national identity card has a chip) and cetificates. Turns out it's quite difficult to make it work for 99% of the people, and even if you're tech savvy some government portals make it SO HARD that you just want to give up.
In a job I had before they used VMs with Windows XP and IExplorer for some services.
It improved a lot in last years, but the improvement is in areas where you have to pay money, they've got fast for that. Everything else is still a mess.
So in the end they'd come up with Cl@ave 365 with is a login/password solution you have to set up in person into some government office but it doesn't give you access to the full catalog of services, so you still need DNIe/Certificate.
The thing is, they still get the money from you. Nobody gets fired. Friendly contractors still get money. There's no rush to improve. They have no incentives.
But the worst thing is that they have this mess going on, and when old people goes to some government office they tell them to go online and do their own thing.
Pretty much like companies. Feels nice to pay taxes for a service isn't being provided.
There's people pushing to get this fixed, but the spanish state is... like an angry elephant.
Hay países en el este de Europa que claramente están progresando, sus estados, su economía, su sociedad.
España cada vez está más dividida, pobre, y su sociedad más tensionada.
En cambio lo que oirás es que si los nacionalismos, que si LGTBQ o qué malos son unos o los otros en todas direcciones.
No tengo nada en contra ni de esos grupos ni de indepes ni de nadie a nivel personal. Tan solo pienso que no es lo fundamental y toda esa gente se mete ahí para sacar tajada.
Por eso no voto ni votaré.
In Spain we have so many layers of bureaucracy that it's making me glad I left. Public notaries, the State Registry, and the Cadastre, are some of the most archaic institutions I've had the misfortune of dealing with. They even look at me like I'm an alien when I ask about digitized records (escrituras) or at least an index.
On the other hand in Singapore I paid my taxes and my company taxes in literally less than 5 minutes. In Finland I had an integrated citizen experience. Even in Germany, despite the reputation, things were somewhat integrated between the tax authority and the social security.
The Catastro is now digital too, I managed to get a nota simple through their website.
But yeah it's always a lot of friction. There's a clear lack of integration that makes everything difficult.
A nationwide digital ID, that can be used to authenticate someone,
We have a National Id Number for every citizen and residence permit holder, that acts as a global foreign key for all the services, the number alone can't be used for anything, is public, and should not and is not used for authenticating anyone.
The Id number enables the next thing: it is mandated by laws that every type of information should only be stored once. My name, date of birth, where I live and document photo is stored in the citizens registry. If elections start then the local municipality knows who are it's residents and everyone is sent an e-mail or letter about where they can go to cast the vote. If I want to renew my driver's license then I can choose to use the photo I last used to get a new passport or Id document.
The one place to store one type of information is enabled by the national id number, because we know exactly that this person in this registry is the same one with the same number in the other registry, even though they may have the same name and date of birth, there is no possibility to confuse someone. And this makes keeping data safe easier, because it's easier to secure one database, than twenty ones that some random government departments would otherwise have to store my name, address or whatever else they would need. And their data would be mostly out of date, since it would get updated only when I interacted with them.
It's important to point out that a key part of this is having personal privacy protection (eg GDPR) that prevents private companies from abusing this identifier for their own nefarious purposes. Without private protections, such an identity number becomes a vulnerability for individuals. Like in the United States as it stands, it's a feature that giving out your social security number might result in a huge headache, otherwise every retailer would demand it for their consumer surveillance ("loyalty") programs etc.
But having strong protection for privacy is a must also.
Every time someone accesses my data in the national registries the access is logged - who did it and when. For example I can see that the city I live in is checking if I still live there, because they offer free public transport to residents. Also I can see that the doctor I visited looked at my data, maybe also the aphotecary where I got my prescribed medicine from, because.. all the prescriptions are also digital documents, very-very rarely something is put on paper (for example, when a vet doctor prescribes some antibiotics and I can get them from the apothecary). Othewise I just give them my id card, they look at the number, type it in, and can see what I have been prescribed.
I'm a tech guy and I do think that this is good news. I just hope that the people in charge of designing these systems have also thought about what happens if these systems catastrophically fail. And that measuring things like '820 years saved' are only really claims you can make after waiting a long period of time to ensure it's proven itself stable.
This has been standard procedure (not at Svalbard, obviously, but at one or more secure offsite facilities) for every critical data system I’ve ever personally encountered in regulated industry, though rotations are usually weekly/monthly rather than yearly.
Are they testing the backups and restoring from them regularly, because if they aren't there isn't any backup happening.
But I don't blame you for asking, when there are stories of irreplaceable nuclear test data being stuffed on some RAIDs and then nobody replacing the disk failures for years and years...
https://www.riigiteataja.ee/aktilisa/2280/3201/8002/Lux_Info...
The solar storm will strike individual systems that aren't connected as well.
So if we're talking about "black swan disaster scenarios" or "catastrophic computer virus", I don't see any difference between Estonia and other countries.
"Sorry I know this document has to have your legal name, but unfortunately the system can't handle a character with an accent have you thought about changing your name instead?"
I mean I am starting to see more and more places, that don't have a til or register, just a tablet and an app which sure saves you some overhead, but if a backhoe decides to dig through the fiber line, congratulations your shop just got shut down until it works agian.
Now people will say "bad things could happen in the old days to!" That is true, but the difference was if bad things happened you generally had some measure of control and ability to effect change and at least find some temporary stop gap, the problem is now we have lost all autonomy because the shift to digital has also meant loss of control and locality.
Back in the day if the power went out you could open up a receipt book and a ledger and keep taking payments until it came back on, now you can sit and twiddle your thumbs.
My point is if you are "digital first" that means you are "digital only" and you sure as hell need to figure out a backup quick because it turns out shooting magic beams of light, across continents, has many more failure cases than a locked file folder.
This is nothing a good UPS and a standby 5G modem couldn’t handle. Digital systems can be made reliable and redundant, but most people don’t want to go through the effort (or expense) to make it happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_government_in_the_United...
Only a very small percent have an archivist.
I think Austria moved even more services to the digital age then Estonia. It is not fancy, nor modern. But a lot of documents primarily exist only in a digital form (all laws, court files, official documents, financial administration documents, ...). They are often printed out, but they are just a random piece of paper, just a "copy" of the original. The official and valid version is the digitally signed PDF.
It is mostly implemented via some really boring and antiquated Java Server Pages HTML forms, that are not always easy to use. But they work nearly all the time, and once you send them you immediately get a signed and legally binding confirmation that it was filed.
The roots of the system go back to the early 2000s, and used elliptical cryptography right from the start. Which was really hard back then to deal with, because most libraries or applications didn't support it yet. For example native Windows support came only with Windows 7.
In Austria everyone and every company that has E-mail is required to accept digital signatures. If you cancel your phone contract with a signed PDF via E-Mail the company can't refuse to accept it, as every court will instantly decide in your favour.
Adopting a single, simple (in terms of complexity) revenue model per polity would eliminate much interaction. For example a 20% flat income tax with a $25000 deduction would allow the IRS to pre-fill your return on a post card. Eliminating “fines as a revenue stream” would dramatically reduce local court and LE interactions. Reducing permitting, etc.
Not only would the citizen experience improve but we would also need less government resources.
Of course, there are reasons why we do all these things, but we rarely if ever revisit implemented government programs to see if they are meeting their goals and if their cost exceeds their benefit.
Given that, I much more support “less government” rather than “the same amount of government but most of it online”.
We had a hurricane here and Mom applied to the Red Cross for disaster relief. She got a PIN for her online banking which she doesn't have or ever will.
There are quite a few people without computers. It's maddening to see some or proposed government services only be offered exclusively on the Internet.
If you for any reason don't want to, you can still visit a government office in person to do your business.
Well.. he finished the Technical University with cum laude in mechanics, that maybe helps.
Nowadays most people read (in my country, UK), though completing forms can have high literacy/intelligence demands. Some lack computer skills but almost everyone (in my country) has some access to computers in free local government libraries and in other local community centres. It's not terribly convenient, granted.
So should we avoid offering services that need literacy to access, or just those that require computer literacy? I'd argue neither, but people should have long transition periods (multiple years) when a system is moving to access only via computer and government should ensure all communities have ongoing access to computers where that's reasonable.
Careful still, public services are also a matter of human representation, of accessibility, to nurture the relation between (all) the citizens and the state (as it also is in the private sector, between a brand and customers).
Moving public services online is great IFF it does not remove at the same time a satisfying option for offline/physical access to the same services, for those that are not able to use the online access (disabled, old, unused to computers or tablets, remote areas, etc. - those are still a significant part of the people, and even if, an equal access to public services is a must).
I'm just reminding, from a local experience (France), that in general, moving/reducing/replacing (public) services physical presence to online services has to be carefully considered & planned over quite a long period of time, especially regarding accessibility.
Website: https://www.id.ee/en/
Timeline of implementations: https://e-estonia.com/story/
Github: https://github.com/open-eid
So it would seem that all the worker bees in government offices rely on having access to those backend databases during USA office hours, and the only time they can realistically be shut down is while the civil servants are off the clock.
Long ago, the Best Buy website also closed then opened during business hours.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=hours+in+860+years+%2F+...
For the US if you automate public services you are going to eliminate Federal, State, and Local bureaucratic jobs as well as the support roles to interface to these services. For example if you automated taxing, you would eliminate IRS employees as well as accountants and software services such as Turbo Tax. In the US we don't have universal healthcare, universal free education, etc. so you be eliminating millions of jobs without a safety net. Automation would have terrible economic repercussions. The extreme level of graft and incompetence would mean the actual automated services would not be very good and would be horrifically expensive to produce and maintain.
I will take my number and wait on line.
…later…
“Hello sir, you’ve just started a new job. In order for that to happen I’m going to need copies of your passport, driver’s licence, medicare card, citizenship certificate, and one recent bank statement showing your full name and address.” [Actual experience of mine, recently. Australia.]
“Sure! Here they are, which random web portal that I’ve never heard of would you like me to upload them to?”
[1] https://e-estonia.com/solutions/cyber-security/ksi-blockchai...
On a serious note, while the eID/digital gov system is great and all it does have some jankiness. The address search system everyone uses has been a PITA for a while and the tax system still keels over for a day or so when the possibility of submitting returns opens. Then we had the case of one dude scraping several hundred thousand ID card pictures [0].
Also the broadband part is so-so. Estonian internet is notoriously expensive and slow compared to our near peers [1].
[0] https://news.err.ee/1608291072/hacker-downloads-close-to-300...
[1] https://news.postimees.ee/7635673/estonia-s-home-internet-sp...
I live bits that give rare insights into other cultures.
The description of the appropriate reddit page google-translates to "let's meet at the fire".
Is that correct?
"Hiiele" is the allative form of "hiis" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiis_(sacred_site) )
X-Tee, the protocol that allows information sharing between goverment systems, is also a horrible pice of XML and SOAP with some crypto sprinkled on it.
> The Estonian government estimates that going digital has saved the state and its citizens, 820 years in time and resources
As for privacy, What is privacy? Do you have something to hide?/s
How does moving things online work for those in poor economic conditions since they might not have online access (no smart phone, etc).
It should be "820 years PER YEAR", and with a 1.3M people in Estonia, it equates to 5.4 hours per year. JUST 5.4 hours per year. Not impressive.
In-person paper voting is the only reasonable system.
at all, ever