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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

#201

Post by baybal2 »

minhazm wrote: post #65
jeffbee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#202

Post by argulane »

skeletal88 wrote: post #125
sdfhbdf wrote: 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…

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…

Enabling ID card login for any random website usually only requires adding few config lines to your app revrese proxy. I wrote about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33639317

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

#203

Post by argulane »

0x138d5 wrote: post #76

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!

X-Tee, the protocol that allows information sharing between goverment systems, is also a horrible pice of XML and SOAP with some crypto sprinkled on it.

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

#204

Post by InitialLastName »

kristianheljas wrote: post #73
giantg2 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems odd they don't want an up to date photo.

They do, you need to submit at-most 6 month old photo while renewing. Or go to the office to take one. Either way, you also still need to go get the document from the office as it is only handed over by person (but you can pre-book a time slot!). Passport is a bit more complicated, since it requires fingerprints as well.

I don't know what to tell you, I renewed my 2-year-old REAL ID with no new photo in NJ remotely, no appointment or updated photo necessary.

I did have to go to an appointment to convert my previous ID into a REAL ID, so maybe that's what you mean.

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

#205

Post by nashashmi »

piva00 wrote: post #198
nashashmi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then we should have licenses for bicyclists too! The reason we have licenses (aka controls on who can drive cars) is to curb dangerous and irresponsible driving, mark drivers for driving egregiously, and remove people or not allow drivers on the road when they don't have the motor skills to navigate a vehicle on the road. Knowing the rules is secondary, if not tertiary. Otherwise bicyclists should also have licenses…

Rules apply to them but they aren't driving a 2-3 ton hunk of metal that's basically a murder machine. Their danger to other road users is much, much lower than from anything self-propelled just due to physics. Here in Sweden it doesn't matter how much right of way you have, if you are driving a car you're responsible for the safety of others in the road, even more if they're a pedestrian or cyclist. It's not excuse…

The US has the same laws. Jaywalking is hard to prove. The bigger the vehicle, the more responsible it is, eg truck trailers are responsible even if the car crashes into them. Cars Always yield to pedestrians. Cars and Peds always yield to bikes. Bikes have to yield to no one unless they are driving on sidewalk. Then they should not be riding.

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

#206

Post by gumby »

chrisseaton wrote: post #154
gumby wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only for the federal government, and as far as I can tell only for "regular people" forms. I.e. if you fill out an NSF proposal or want to drill an oil well or fill out Form D for a stock sale the forms don't seem to include any estimates. I know the time required to fill out an NSF proposal is "how long is a piece of string" but parts of it (some of the financial portions) are as boilerplate as an IRS tax form.

I don't get what's 'in it' for people to have overly complicated forms. Like they have to store all the data and in some cases manually input it (like customs forms.) What's the benefit? Ideally people would have a single universal identifier and then I'd never need to put my date of birth or tax number on another form again.

Most likely theory is that they actually want to use the data (or once did, and nobody deletes it because they think somebody else must need it).

In the more general case of data collection I believe people collect data simply because they can. I strongly believe that the PII collected by advertisers and others is mostly never used. A liability they take on with no benefit.

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

#207

Post by joshspankit »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #82
beorno wrote: 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…

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.

Based on experience I’d say that focusing on the wrong staff-metrics is worse than under-staffing.

For example marking employees by how quickly they “process” someone (aka Handle Time) actually incentivizes employees to not listen, to tell people the wrong information, and to push them to be somebody else’s problem. The customer who might have taken 10min now takes 5 here, 10 there, 20 over there, 20 min of a supervisor’s time, and countless minutes taking up space in the various lines waiting to be told something else.

If a system runs like that it almost doesn’t matter how much staff they have because all those staff feel overworked and overskilled.

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

#208

Post by LinkLink »

andix wrote: post #192
skeletal88 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why? Why would having every government department, hospital, doctors/dentists office keep your data separately, probably in some unsecured excel file or whatever? When we have one registry for everything, they can keep it secure by having some proper security guys design and audit it, we can see who has accessed my data and when, etc. If a hospital would keep your health records in their own system th…

Because I don’t want them to connect all the data without my consent. I don’t want single government employees to have access to all my data at once.

hahahahaahahahahahahhaahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

10 years ago people would have called you paranoid now you're already too late

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

#209

Post by viburnum »

andix wrote: post #192
skeletal88 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why? Why would having every government department, hospital, doctors/dentists office keep your data separately, probably in some unsecured excel file or whatever? When we have one registry for everything, they can keep it secure by having some proper security guys design and audit it, we can see who has accessed my data and when, etc. If a hospital would keep your health records in their own system th…

Because I don’t want them to connect all the data without my consent. I don’t want single government employees to have access to all my data at once.

Can't find the source now but I read somewhere that in Estonia anytime somebody accesses your info you get notified who it was.

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

#210

Post by Gud »

tablespoon wrote: post #190
Gud wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devils advocate - sometimes the system itself is not just broken, it’s completely wrong! Where I’m from(Sweden) I can’t imagine going to the DMV even for just a second. So asking for better staffing at the service counters at the DMV sounds silly to me

> To play devils advocate - sometimes the system itself is not just broken, it’s completely wrong! Where I’m from(Sweden) I can’t imagine going to the DMV even for just a second. So asking for better staffing at the service counters at the DMV sounds silly to me Do you not have driving tests in Sweden? Does Sweden allow residents to submit any random picture of their choice for their drivers license? As an American,…

Yes we do! Now that I think about it, the main difference seem to be that in the US, you show up at (appointed?) date and stand in a queue to wait forever while in Sweden we show up at an appointed time.
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