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Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

karlsnotes.com

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Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

#61

Post by Cthulhu_ »

myroon5 wrote: post #6

Even 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…

It's a decade over here, same for most forms of ID; there was a period where it was reduced to 5 years, but that was due to developing digital technologies, that is, chips on board the documents - they foresaw that they might be outdated or insecure in a few years, and they were right.

Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

#62

Post by rcarr »

Avamander wrote: post #41
rcarr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, considering they're on the doorstep of Russia and Belarus this is a fairly likely scenario. If their power utilities were targeted the way Ukraine's have been how many of these systems are still going to be able to run? That said if you've imposed martial law and men aren't allowed to leave the country because they've got to stay and fight then at least demand for your online passport service will have dropped b…

If things get targeted with physical attacks like that, you won't be getting a passport internet or no internet, in impacted areas. It will be the least of your concerns.

The last sentence was a bit of dark humour mate, I probably should have put a sarcasm tag on it. Probably should have said 'on the plus side' which is a bit more of a common way to start those kinds of jokes

Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

#63

Post by andrewia »

alberth wrote: post #12

Homeless / Underprivelleged? How does moving things online work for those in poor economic conditions since they might not have online access (no smart phone, etc).

In addition to public computers and physical offices, smartphones are owned by a large portion of homeless people (especially if younger) because they're quite affordable. It looks like a basic Estonian phone plan, plus financing for a budget smartphone, is only 20 EUR/month. Estonia has no free phone plan (like the "obamaphone" program in the US), but low income people can submit 200 EUR of expenses per year for essentials.

Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

#65

Post by minhazm »

jeffbee wrote: post #13
Reason077 wrote: post #11

I wonder how many years the US could save its citizens by modernizing and digitizing the IRS, DMV, etc. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

I recently discovered that the U.S. Social Security Administration has business hours ... for their website. They operate a website that is closed at night and on weekends. One is hard-pressed to imagine the level of IT dysfunction necessary to reach this point.

The Bangladesh Embassy in D.C. had a similar issue a few years ago. They had a document you needed to fill out that was just hosted on someones computer and when that person would shut their computer down each night or over the weekend the link would stop working. They've at least fixed that since then.

Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

#66

Post by rcarr »

itake wrote: post #17
vander_elst wrote: post #5

Saving 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

Quoted post unavailable.

all men are pigs so our life spans are only 20 years

joke obviously

Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

#68

Post by beorno »

Time wasted filling in forms and talking to service staff should really be tracked and associated with the business or government agency, then it's possible to actually assign a "bureaucracy/red-tape tax" based on the hours they waste for people using the service.

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.

Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

#69

Post by Avamander »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #60

Along the same lines, I found India's Aadhar system to be pretty extraordinary. If you can put your civil liberties concerns aside (and to be clear, I don't think you should), Aadhar has made govt services in India several orders of magnitude more efficient and fraud resistant. I recently sold a piece of property in India and it took literally 10 minutes to do the transaction at a local district office. You just go t…

> I recently sold a piece of property in India and it took literally 10 minutes to do the transaction at a local district office. You just go to a place and get a scan while signing a document that says you are transferring the property. That handles everything ... changing the owner in the public registry, etc.

Even that is excessive. Digital signatures (if available) do the job.

Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

#70

Post by Karrot_Kream »

ryukafalz wrote: post #27
myroon5 wrote: post #6

Even 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…

I'd go the other way; we really should require retesting for driver's license renewals. 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.

It's usually an equity issue, or championed as such by equity groups. America is so car dependent that for folks at the margins failing a driving test is the equivalent of losing your job. That's why DL renewals almost rarely require any re-testing and never require demonstrating driving skills.
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