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Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online

karlsnotes.com

91–100 of 230 posts

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

#91
post #30
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Will they even allow that for REAL ID now?

I got an online renewal for a REAL ID, but that was for a 4 year replacement of a 4 year card, and there was specific language about having renewed in person the previous time.

So technically yes, but an 8 year REAL ID that has to be renewed in person would be strictly better.

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

#92
post #68

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…

A major loss of productivity? I think maybe i've spent an hour at the DMV in the past 10 years. I spend maybe an hour or two each year doing my taxes. I struggle to think of a single other case where my time is consumed with dealing with any kind of bureaucracy. I'm not convinced it's a major problem.

An hour or two each year? That's a lot of wasted time. Especially if you add it all up across the country.

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

#93
post #83

It does sound great when it works. It’s awesome that Estonia succeeded. I do believe this is a really hard problem - digitising public services - to solve at scale. 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 s…

Which is why countries like Germany roll out federated decentralized login solutions – it's just a really slow process due to (among many other factors) the humongous number of stakeholders to involve.

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

#95
post #68

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…

A major loss of productivity? I think maybe i've spent an hour at the DMV in the past 10 years. I spend maybe an hour or two each year doing my taxes. I struggle to think of a single other case where my time is consumed with dealing with any kind of bureaucracy. I'm not convinced it's a major problem.

It's great when it works right?

Woe to you people off the golden path.

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

#96
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Couldn't the government (or state) simply run ad campaigns for a couple of weeks informing the public of new changes? Edit: Most changes are not rocket science, you simply need to be aware of them.

A simple ad campaign running for a few weeks hardly reaches everybody. Not even close to.

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

#97
post #8

Until 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 claim…

So much government data is temporal. Many already have strict archiving guidelines that mandate destroying certainly classes of documents after some number of years... many are single-digit. Nobody needs a copy of which city councilman voted to approve new speed bumps on Main St. 20 years ago, or your first 2 rejected applications for permits to remodel your bathroom. Most archivists are pretty aware of the problems…

There 87,576 governments in the U.S. [federal, state, county, city, township, school district, special purpose district]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_government_in_the_United...

Only a very small percent have an archivist.

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

#99
post #83

It does sound great when it works. It’s awesome that Estonia succeeded. I do believe this is a really hard problem - digitising public services - to solve at scale. 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 s…

In Spain they're trying... but not really succeeding.

> 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.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mostly an american problem, not a "government bad" problem.

I've got a driver's license in another country, and it's still up for renewal every 5 years.

Most countries treat driver's licences seriously, not like the US.

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.

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