[deleted]
Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
121–130 of 230 posts
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#122It felt like this was really low, but according to the most fun wolfram alpha query I've made in a while that's 5.68 hours per person!
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=hours+in+860+years+%2F+...
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with the same amount of work or service provided, under-staffing absolutely consumes and destroys peoples productivity. What an awful waste it is to take the morning off work to go somewhere like the DMV, wait forever in line and see half the service counters empty. Sure, the government saved on some staff salary but society lost more in productivity.
I bet you USAA's Insurance run DMV would be a lot more efficient and have good customer service, but hey, we don't want any Ayn Rands around here
I worked for a private company contracted to provide a portion of a public service and later got employed by the the government agency.
- 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 Our servers were out of date and we were running out of date OSes and software.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.
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For each hundred million people, your 1-2 hours pear year is 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 hours per year.
Okay, but increasing state and federal government staffing levels by a few percent to try to save that time would cost more than 100,000,000 hours per year.
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#125It 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…
The success of our Estonian digitalized government services is possible because we have:
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.
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#126Even 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…
>Obviously, Americans filing tax information the government already knows every year is another canonical example
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?
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#127BS. 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.
5.4h more like 10+ h as older and younger population is not doing anything that require spending times in public que, and it is very impressive not waiting extra 6-10h per year + twice that for transporting to and out of the government buildings.
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#128Time 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…
> Time wasted filling in forms and talking to service staff should really be tracked and associated with the business or government agency
Isn't there a US law on this? The Paperwork Reduction Act?
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#129It 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 oth…
España es un desastre. Yo me he ido. Y va a ser difícil que vuelva. Vaya cómo está el tema... de pena todo.
Re: Estonia saved its citizens 820 years by moving public services online
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
For each hundred million people, your 1-2 hours pear year is 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 hours per year.
Okay, but increasing state and federal government staffing levels by a few percent to try to save that time would cost more than 100,000,000 hours per year.
If you want to speed it up with staff, if. The point of the article is that you don't have to waste nearly as much human time at all, if you have a working electronic identity and goverment services.