The digital road to development – Cybernetica brings data exchange to Benin

March 2019

by Federico Plantera

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Estonia. However, our path encompasses a clear vision for the present and the future. It is a declaration of commitment towards what makes countries progress – development in all its digital and societal facets.

The story of Estonia and the country it has become now is rooted in history: with zero legacies – legal, IT systems or others – there was lot of work to do. The process that led us to be one of the most advanced digital societies in the world was built layer by layer, with the crucial help of those companies that could capitalize on their skills and knowledge to contribute to the making of yesterday’s goals and today’s achievements.

If the main character of this story is the role of public-private partnerships, then the parents of our digital society are two elements that, as highlighted by the World Bank, make the foundations of our e-government ecosystem: digital identity and interoperability. Saying that “they worked well” in Estonia would be an understatement, so why not use them, following these steps, to foster the development process of other countries as well?

From Estonia to international interoperability

Cybernetica has been working across four continents to advocate the importance of having information systems communicating efficiently and securely. Their Unified eXchange Platform (UXP) is what sustains the renowned Estonian solution, enabling interoperability and secure data exchange, now also updated with monitoring and security components, and a portal to quickly deliver services. After implementing the platform in Ukraine, Greenland, Haiti, and Namibia, the company is taking it to full-scale deployment also in Benin, together with e-Governance Academy.

Now, here is a perfect example of how collaborations start: state visits, talks, the involvement of partners, counselling, training, piloting. Yes, we know, easier said than done if we put it this way, but in the end, it actually boils down to a linear series of steps – when everything goes well. And that’s exactly what Riho Kurg, Head of Data Exchange Technologies at Cybernetica, had the chance to see in Benin:

“African countries have demonstrated that they have potential, and leaders are trying to make a change and have an impact. They see that the government should be available for citizens 24/7, and that the benefits involve both sides of the table.”

When change does not represent a mere wish, but a concrete will to move forward, it’s also much easier to make the transformation happen. “I’m happy to admit” –  Kurg continues – “that we were positively surprised by the amount of technical expertise that the people involved in the training have in Benin, they kept our technical staff really on their toes with all their questions.” Two years have passed since the beginning of this cooperation, and Cybernetica, e-Governance Academy and the Government of Beninare now getting down to the pilot phase of the project when key elements of the platform are put into place, tested, and studied by government experts. Subsequently, the phase of full implementation will take place, including the setting up of the services and interfaces that citizens and organizations will use.

Once reached the implementation stage, the creation of an ecosystem of support and consultancy to government leaders and officials plays an important role. Within the realm of this project, the task of e-Governance Academy is to support the Government of Benin in developing the national e-government framework enhancing interoperability, focusing on the organisational setup and regulatory aspects. Moreover, e-Governance Academy will organise training sessions for the officials and IT specialists of Benin, to provide the necessary knowledge on interoperable solutions, guidelines, procedures and key standards.

However, one aspect that we could never overlook is the cultural change that technology can bring to the way of thinking and doing things. We may be talking about UXP, but what Cybernetica is addressing is the need for a new kind of governance, in Europe as much as in Africa. Having users and service providers interact in a digital environment for information exchange is not something that happens overnight, and that’s why governments should get on board on this journey as soon as possible. “The technological challenges are a different matter, but the main point is about not missing chances for making investments which will take several years to become visible, but that will show significant results. It’s a question of people’s mindset: if there is political will, any challenge can be overcome,” Kurg states.

Where to next?

From the cold temperatures of Greenland to the equator and beyond, countries are embarking on the journey of digital transformation to change governments and society. Benin and Namibia have already started, but will other places in Africa follow the same path? “We see that there’s huge potential for creating digital impact in the continent, but in order to achieve that, the foundations of a digital society need to be there: digital infrastructures, skills and human resources, internet and telecommunications, digitized databases – these are the foundational elements of a digital society, and interoperability is certainly among those,” Kurg explains.

Saving time, saving money, providing better services, cutting on eventual cases of corruption. Taken together, it sounds like the recipe for a public sector utopia, but Africa is one of the places where countries are already showing how there’s room on Earth for a setting like that. Cybernetica, also in cooperation with e-Governance Academy, the Estonian ITL, and several other partners, is willing to be part of this process. The purpose is to provide the needed expertise that already contributed to the making of our digital nation. The Transform Africa Summit, coming up in May 2019 in Rwanda, shows that a SMART Africa aims to achieve bold goals and milestones in digital development. Now more than ever we know that setting an example is important, but learning and cooperating towards a common target is what can truly make the difference.

Resource: e-estonia

CAN AI BE A FAIR JUDGE IN COURT? ESTONIA THINKS SO

25/03/2019

GOVERNMENT USUALLY ISN’T the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia’s chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation’s push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens.

“We want the government to be as lean as possible,” says the wiry, bespectacled Velsberg, an Estonian who is writing his PhD thesis at Sweden’s Umeå University on using the Internet of Things and sensor data in government services. Estonia’s government hired Velsberg last August to run a new project to introduce AI into various ministries to streamline services offered to residents.

Deploying AI is crucial, he says. “Some people worry that if we lower the number of civil employees, the quality of service will suffer. But the AI agent will help us.” About 22 percent of Estonians work for the government; that’s about average for European countries, but higher than the 18 percent rate in the US.

Siim Sikkut, Estonia’s chief information officer, began piloting several AI-based projects at agencies in 2017, before hiring Velsberg last year. Velsberg says Estonia has deployed AI or machine learning in 13 places where an algorithm has replaced government workers.

For example, inspectors no longer check on farmers who receive government subsidies to cut their hay fields each summer. Satellite images taken by the European Space Agency each week from May to October are fed into a deep-learning algorithm originally developed by the Tartu Observatory. The images are overlaid onto a map of fields where farmers receive the hay-cutting subsidies to prevent them from turning forests over time.

Recourse: wired

Interoperability as the meeting point for a digital Nordic league

March 2019

by Federico Plantera

A digital highway for governments, a fundamental tool to make citizens’ lives easier – X-Road is taking over Northern Europe. More and more countries are deciding to take the way of interoperability for their internal and external data exchange.

Can we say that this was never in our plans? Well, we really can’t, and there’s a very simple reason. We have dreamt of our platform to be able not only to connect our public and private information systems, but also to provide an efficient and reliable solution for our neighbours and friends to walk the path of e-governance. As of this month, with two more exciting projects finally coming to life, we can say that we’re giving ground for fruitful cooperation across borders from corner to corner in Northern Europe.

Our geographical area is becoming increasingly interconnected. At the end of February, in Helsinki, the Estonian Ministry of Justice and the Finnish Patent and Registration Office signed an agreement that officially signals the kick-off for the data exchange between the countries’ respective business registers. Only one day later, in Tallinn, the Icelandic and the Estonian Prime Ministers jointly announced that the insular country – the first to recognize the independence of Estonia in 1991 – is the latest government to decide to implement a data exchange solution inspired by our national trusted and secure platform.

X-Road has been up and working in Estonia since 2001, making our country one of the pioneers of e-governance on the global scale. Today, at its coming-of-age, it connects over 1000 public and private organizations that exchange data through the secure layer on a daily basis. As one of the three pillars that make our digital society, together with confidentiality and integrity, availability allows information to be at the disposal of institutions and enterprises 24/7, enabling traffic of over 900 million one-time connections established every year.

The fact that the concept behind X-Road has gone international doesn’t really represent a novelty – already in 2016, the Prime Ministers of Estonia and Finland signed a joint declaration to foster cross-border data exchange and e-services between the two countries. Many parallel projects have started since then, even the formal creation of an intergovernmental agency to further develop the data exchange platform – the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS). With entrepreneurship minister Rene Tammist inviting Iceland to join the organization, this could represent another step towards the creation of a Nordic digital ecosystem open to other countries in the area willing to participate.

Iceland

The country became a partner of NIIS in September 2018 while already in the process of implementing Straumsins, the Icelandic counterpart of X-Road. As the Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs of Iceland Bjarni Benediktsson stated after the February 2019 meeting, “We are making great efforts to update Iceland’s public sector systems. We are very excited to implement new technologies and hope to cooperate more closely than before with Estonia and Finland. A joint data exchange platform in the form of X-Road creates a good basis for that.”

One of the interesting sides of the cooperation is that Iceland is ready to embrace the full potential of interoperability by aiming to connect both public and private sector entities to the exchange platform, as it already works in Estonia since the very beginning. Minister Rene Tammist commented on the topic, “The more countries using the same technology, the easier it will be to develop international cooperation.” Another bonus according to Tammist is facilitating the movement of information for people’s travelling and employment abroad.

Before Iceland, a data-exchange based platforms has been exported also to the small Faroe Islands, where the local Ministry of Finance initiated the project Digital Faroe Islands.

Finland and the business registers

The cooperation between the two business registers of Estonia and Finland represents another step towards a better integration of the countries’ information systems to ease the burden of bureaucracy for cross-border inquiries. “It is the unique X-Road application that makes the secure and simple data exchange between Estonian and Finnish authorities possible. X-Road leaves a record of any and all operations, making targeted data use easy to control,” emphasized Viljar Peep, Deputy Secretary General of the Estonian Ministry of Justice.

X-Road will enable cheaper, faster and more accurate data exchange between the commercial registers of the two countries, making the information stored by both public agencies mutually available. And though the main advantage will be for authorities, as the platform gives them the possibility to organize their work more efficiently, the successful implementation will also generally save some trees by cutting down on the paper work. With only a few last tests to go, X-Road is ready to function and to connect the two business registers.

Resorce: e-estonia

i-Voting – the Future of Elections?

March 2019

by Juvien Galano

The internet has been part of the election ecosystem for many years now, yet its uses remain mostly as an auxiliary, often times for campaign propaganda or for transmitting results.

But between February 21 – February 27, the internet played a different role in the Estonian Parliament Elections – this time as a means to fill and cast ballots. It is now the 10th time Estonia used internet voting (i-voting) as an option to exercise this democratic right which was introduced in 2005.

We joined the election observer programme, organized by State Electoral Office, together with election observers, election experts, policy-makers, and media, who were equally curious about how this small Baltic state is able to pull such a sensitive, nationwide scale endeavour despite the persisting threats of cybersecurity and trust issues surrounding an election. We followed the topic of i-voting from the preparation to the actual tallying of i-votes to rounding up the numbers, to give you the behind the scenes of what is going on in the digital side of the election in Estonia.

To keep yourself on track with our coverage, watch Head of State Electoral Office Dr. Priit Vinkel‘s e-Talks video, a tech talk series of e-Estonia, discussing the journey of i-voting as a logical progression for service delivery after activities like e-tax or e-health have made inroads to citizens routines. He also gives an overview of what i-voting is and how to maintain its reliability over the years.

The Trend

Dr. Vinkel was one of the presenters at the State Electoral Office hosted seminar for election observers from over 40 countries.

The seminar was held in Tallinn Creative Hub, an abandoned Soviet-era powerplant that served as perfect juxtaposition to Estonia’s digital ambitions, experts, and election administrators weighed in on the state and future of the Estonian elections.

The head of the Electoral Office opened the discussions by presenting key figures: more than 880,000 voters, 1,099 candidates, 451 polling stations, 10 party lists, 15 independent candidates, and a whole lot more. More statistics are available at valimised.ee.

Professor Dr. Robert Krimmer from the Tallinn University of Technology presented a different set of numbers – the cost of internet voting. An article about his research team’s work was published recently on ERR’s website, revealing that i-voting is 50% cheaper than conventional paper voting.

Cyber security expert on election technology Liisa Past talked about the threats and vulnerabilities of an election system.

“Election technology must be introduced very carefully, it must be tested to fulfill its functional role, and more importantly, that it wouldn’t do things it is not supposed to do.”

The way forward, she added, is to have resilient risk management processes and active international and cross-agency cooperation which value exchange of best practices.

Dr. Martin Mölder and Dr. Mihkel Solvak, both from Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, delivered their separate studies in the second half of the seminar.

Dr. Mölder gave a brief overview of the political landscape. He revealed that political parties are moving toward lesser differences that have been empirically derived from the parties’ respective manifestos. He also showed that the voters’ preferences in the past elections have stabilized, which means that a voter is most likely to vote again for a party that bears the same ideology in the next election.

And lastly, Dr. Solvak focused on the reliability of i-voting and his study on the perception of people towards different ways of casting the votes. The study revealed that Estonians have an overwhelming trust to i-voting and it is continuously rising.

The Tallying

Trust towards i-voting depends heavily on the reliability of the election, particularly on the processes from front to back end of i-voting.

Cybersecurity expert Liisa Past, who moderated the tallying of i-votes on the last day of the elections, emphasized that voters must have the confidence that their votes are tallied as intended, which goes the same for paper voting.

I-voting tallying mimics the double envelope scheme used on postal voting. The digital outer envelope is digitally signed using the secure e-ID card. And before the vote is counted, the system anonymizes the ballot by removing this digital outer envelope.

Votes are then counted by a computer with the bare minimum capability to ensure that the result is not exposed to any computational alteration. The computer has no internal storage and has no internet or network connection, only a DVD drive and a smart card reader for reading and storing the result, the RAM disk is used as its processor. As the computer is turned off at the end of the process, all information disappears.

During the tallying, experts recorded zero invalid votes cast over the internet, which serves as a confirmation that the system only did what it was designed to do. In addition, 5.8% of the i-voters validated their votes which affirmed that the candidates they selected were indeed the same as what was transmitted to the system and displayed in their mobile devices.

The Result

After a seven-day window for i-voters, from an expanse of 145 countries, the results can never be more reflective of the trust the voters put into the electronic means of Estonian election.

The 2019 Parliamentary Elections yielded 247,232 votes electronically out of a total 565,028 votes. This is a 40% increase from the previous election that tallied 186,034 i-votes.

It also means that in this elections, according to the initial reports, 43.75% of all voteswere cast online, a new record for i-voting. For comparison, the 2017 local elections posted 31.7% i-voting share while the 2015 parliamentary elections tallied 30.5% of ballots from i-votes, very different from 2005 record of 1.9% i-voting turnout. A detailed statistics between 2005 to 2017 can be found at the State Electoral Office website.

If we consider the rising trendline, backed by cost-effectiveness, end-to-end verifiability, and the high rate of trust towards i-voting, this year could be the last time we are going to see paper voting as the dominant method of casting a ballot. The upcoming European Parliament elections in May can definitely set the tone on which method of voting will be preferred in the future elections.

Resource: e-estonia

Estonia, Slovenia and Lithuania lead new EBRD Knowledge Economy Index

• EBRD launches a new index which tracks innovation and related infrastructure
• Serbia, Belarus and Georgia made most progress between 2011 and 2018.
• EBRD regions strong on skills but weak on institutions

Estonia, Slovenia and Lithuania are the standout performers in a new Knowledge Economy (KE) Index launched by the EBRD. The Index measures the performance of the 38 economies where the Bank invests, alongside the economies of eight frontier innovators, including the USA, Germany and Japan.

The new data on how individual countries are progressing in their development of the skills, technology and infrastructure needed to deliver innovative economies will provide important guidance to both policymakers and investors.

Mattia Romani, EBRD Managing Director, Economics, Policy & Governance, said: „This is an important initiative which will help our countries identify their strengths and weaknesses in innovation. Such an impartial analysis is a prerequisite for developing policy guidance and targeting our investment.“

He added: „There are no one-size-fits-all policies to promote the knowledge economy. Rather, countries should adopt reforms that take into account the stage of their knowledge-economy development.“

The Index is part of the EBRD’s new approach to measure countries’ progress according to six qualities of a sustainable market economy: competitive, resilient, green, integrated, well-coverned and inclusive.It  has four pillars with 38 indicators:

1. Institutions for innovation, including economic openness, business environment and good governance
2. General skills and specialised skills for innovation
3. Inputs and outputs of the innovation system and the linkages within the system
4. Information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure, including ICT availability and sophistication.

Scoring countries from the theoretically least advanced (1) to the theoretically most advanced (10) results in Estonia achieving 6.82, followed by Slovenia with 6.65 and Lithuania with 6.03. These countries are not too far from OECD comparators (7.36). In contrast, Egypt, West Bank and Gaza and Turkmenistan produced the lowest scores with results around 3.

Download the PDF File

Knowledge Economy (KE) Index 

Resourse: The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development