Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
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Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#2[deleted]
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#3Pretty basic article but Estonia is a fascinating place, especially for e-government. There was a great longform New Yorker article on it a few years back https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/estonia-the-di...
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#4The e-citizenship stuff is super cool too
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#5Saving 820 years is great, but it would be nice to define it better. From the article I not sure if they mean 820 man years in total or man years per year or something else. It would be useful to know how much energy was spent to achieve this e.g. of they spent 8000 man years to achieve this it would change the perspective.
Edit: grammar
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#6Even without changing processes, hundreds of years of time could be saved by reducing the frequency we have to interact with government at all
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
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#7Did they somehow figure out online voting or are they courting disaster here?
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#8Until there's a solar flare and instead it's just cost them 1640 years. Or a catastrophic computer virus. Or any number of black swan disaster scenarios.
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.
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#9Even without changing processes, hundreds of years of time could be saved by reducing the frequency we have to interact with government at all 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. T…
Renewing online sure takes a lot of the burden out of the regular renewals.
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...
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#10Even without changing processes, hundreds of years of time could be saved by reducing the frequency we have to interact with government at all 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. T…
That's mostly an american problem, not a "government bad" problem.