161–170 of 230 posts
BS. 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.
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…
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 enab…
It's important to point out that a key part of this is having personal privacy protection (eg GDPR) that prevents private companies from abusing this identifier for their own nefarious purposes. Without private protections, such an identity number becomes a vulnerability for individuals. Like in the United States as it stands, it's a feature that giving out your social security number might result in a huge headache, otherwise every retailer would demand it for their consumer surveillance ("loyalty") programs etc.
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).
Article didn’t mention the best part: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once-only_principle Basically the government isn’t allowed to ask you for any information more than once. They already know!
For the US if you automate public services you are going to eliminate Federal, State, and Local bureaucratic jobs as well as the support roles to interface to these services. For example if you automated taxing, you would eliminate IRS employees as well as accountants and software services such as Turbo Tax. In the US we don't have universal healthcare, universal free education, etc. so you be eliminating millions of jobs without a safety net. Automation would have terrible economic repercussions. The extreme level of graft and incompetence would mean the actual automated services would not be very good and would be horrifically expensive to produce and maintain.
I will take my number and wait on line.
I'm in Canada and all I can think of is how my Mom, uncles, other older relatives do not have a computer. They have no interest in anything on a computer and have never touched one. You could put one in front of them powered on, logged in, web browser open, and they'd have no clue how to operate it to enter info. We had a hurricane here and Mom applied to the Red Cross for disaster relief. She got a PIN for her onlin…
Nowadays most people read (in my country, UK), though completing forms can have high literacy/intelligence demands. Some lack computer skills but almost everyone (in my country) has some access to computers in free local government libraries and in other local community centres. It's not terribly convenient, granted.
So should we avoid offering services that need literacy to access, or just those that require computer literacy? I'd argue neither, but people should have long transition periods (multiple years) when a system is moving to access only via computer and government should ensure all communities have ongoing access to computers where that's reasonable.
Earlier 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
Where I live that's exactly what we have. We have a number of privately owned tag agencies that handle most requests which don't require an in-person visit to the DMV (like a new photo id).
This is fast and takes far less time than visiting the DMV. The various DMVs are bloated beasts with too-large budgets, yet they can't seem to staff people at all their windows.
…later…
“Hello sir, you’ve just started a new job. In order for that to happen I’m going to need copies of your passport, driver’s licence, medicare card, citizenship certificate, and one recent bank statement showing your full name and address.” [Actual experience of mine, recently. Australia.]
“Sure! Here they are, which random web portal that I’ve never heard of would you like me to upload them to?”
hiiele? On a serious note, while the eID/digital gov system is great and all it does have some jankiness. The address search system everyone uses has been a PITA for a while and the tax system still keels over for a day or so when the possibility of submitting returns opens. Then we had the case of one dude scraping several hundred thousand ID card pictures [0]. Also the broadband part is so-so. Estonian internet is…
> hiiele? I live bits that give rare insights into other cultures. The description of the appropriate reddit page google-translates to "let's meet at the fire". Is that correct?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But if the lowest bidder has some kind of penalty to pay if average queueing time goes over 15 minutes or random members of the public rate the service provided below 3/5 stars, then they'll do a much better job.