A Conversation with Yolanda Martinez, the UN ITU's Lead on GovStack

Thought Piece #5 The UN Technology Body's lead on GovStack talks transparency, openness, and digital government success...

When it comes to multilateral Digital Government cooperation, it doesn’t come much more ambitious than GovStack. Championed by the governments of Estonia and Germany, along with the UN’s ITU and the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL), the project aims to build open-source ‘building blocks’ to support governments around the world in accelerating the development of digital services.

The project is one I am personally familiar with, having spent time working with the GovStack team on developing specifications for these building blocks earlier this year. During this time, I worked under Yolanda Martinez, the ITU’s lead on GovStack.

Before joining the ITU, Yolanda directed the development of digital government services in Mexico at a federal and city level, as well as working with the Inter-American Development Bank and the OECD in Latin America. She has since been recognized by aPolitical as one of the twenty most influential people globally working in digital government.

The topics that our interview covered – openness and transparency, transnational collaboration, interoperability and connecting the unconnected – are common themes in our newsletter. But rarely have we come across someone making such a sustained and meaningful contribution to realizing all of these themes at once.

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One of the inspirations for my chat with Yolanda Martinez was former Estonian CIO Siim Sikkut’s interview with her for his book Digital Government Excellence. He begins that discussion with the question, “how easy was the transition from city level to federal level of digital government?”. Martinez had worked at the Zapopan Digital City program before leading the national digital strategy of Mexico.

Now she is the ITU’s lead for GovStack, an ambitious project to support governments around the world in developing digital services. Through co-designing reusable specifications, testing them through sandbox pilots, and leading capacity building efforts within the digital government community, GovStack is attempting to redesign the way that digital services are developed. The aim, Martinez tells me, is to streamline service development no matter what the user country’s aims, whether it be in building digital services from scratch, procuring from the market or tweaking existing offerings.

In keeping with Sikkut’s introduction, we begin by talking about some of the similarities and differences between working on digital government at a national and multilateral level. Typical of our discussion over the next hour, Martinez’s answer waxes and wanes between the pragmatic and the philosophical.

In many ways working on GovStack feels like a natural step, she tells me, from a position in Mexico which demanded a great deal of international cooperation. As part of her role, she was her country’s representative to many international organisations, meeting other CIOs and Digital Authorities and exchanging best practice with them. GovStack, “community driven and multistakeholder”, is underpinned by that same spirit of positive-sum collaboration and a desire to absorb best practice from around the globe.

But behind this pragmatism is a philosophical ideal, a moral purpose even. Martinez concludes her interview with Sikkut by telling him that:

the right to understand what the government is telling me is one of the most important rights for a person to have. Governments have [an] obligation to make things simple for the citizens.

This tension between ideals and pragmatics is a common one in multilateral projects. After all, compromises are common and progress uncertain when so many actors with so many perspectives come to the table to collaborate. With the first iteration of the ‘GovStack Playbook’ and its accompanying building blocks now drafted, the real test for initiative will come in how its specifications stand up to the scrutiny of real world pilots.

Building Digital Government in the Commons

The issue of these competing priorities, Martinez tells me, is all a matter of perspective, and hers is a positive one. The greater the number of actors, the more opportunities there are for value-adding contributions:

If we are working on digital identity then you’re going to find participants coming from governments that deal with population registry or digital identity; you’re going to find experts from companies and NGOs

The playbook itself was developed on GitHub, an open-source platform where experts around the world are able to view and comment on documents as they are being drafted. Now that the initiative is moving into its pilot phase, the hope is that the pilot participants will fulfil some of the functions of these contributors, creating a feedback loop which allows the GovStack team to iterate on the playbook and its specifications.

Source: GovStack Working Group, GitHub

One potential conflict that might come out of such a way of working arises in the friction between a universal ideal and the specific political contexts of the pilot participants. After all, different countries have different needs and different laws, and as a result will approach both the pilot and feedback processes in different ways. It is difficult to imagine Rwanda, Ukraine and Egypt – three of the participants in the sandbox pilot – all taking the same approach to government payments, for example.

When I raise this to Martinez, her answer reveals a second lesson to be taken from GovStack. The beauty of the initiative, she tells me, is the clearly denoted chains of responsibility when it comes to service development. The pilots take place in several stages. In the discovery phase, the GovStack team works with their counterparts in the pilot countries to identify one or two use cases that might have the most impact in enabling other government services. It is easy to imagine for example how the ‘consent’ building block, which allows citizens to determine what data will be shared with their government and under what circumstances, might unlock a government’s cross-departmental data-sharing capabilities.

As the discovery phase progresses, the GovStack team then works with the pilot country to map its existing services, and the complementary user journey, before a series of co-design workshops for the new service takes place. But once this service has been designed, and moves to the testing and iteration stage, GovStack’s responsibility for the project ends. The onus on fully implementing and managing a digital service rests with the national governments instead, working “according to their own by-laws and user needs”.

Measuring Success in a Multilateral Context

I was keen to learn what success looks like when the ultimate performance indicators of a GovStack-developed service rests with the pilot governments who co-designed them. In particular, I wondered what success looks like for the various member states engaged in the project.

To some extent, the answer comes full circle to Martinez’s experiences in the Mexican government, sharing her expertise with like-minded CIOs. Capacity building is a key feature of GovStack, a third workstream unto itself. Here the focus is on supporting countries at a stage of digital development ranging from paper-based to web-3-enabled. Some of the value-adds to these governments are tangible, with more than 53 e-learning courses developed to teach users about digital service design and the functionality of building blocks.

Others less so. For countries like Estonia and Germany, the CIO Digital Leaders Forum offers a chance to share barriers and perspectives to digital transformation with their foreign counterparts at demo days, whilst the working groups themselves provide a continual exposure to different (yet still cutting-edge) approaches to digital government.

A GovStack presentation at the Tallinn Digital Summit 2022. Source: GovStack

For those countries who are still using paper-based systems, or less developed digital ones, the benefits of GovStack are even clearer. “They are given something easy to digitise, leveraging several building blocks that can enable many other services which can benefit from that”, Martinez tells me.

And what does success look like for GovStack itself? There are several practical goals. In the short-term, success looks like receiving feedback from pilot stakeholders, and being able to iterate on the missing pieces of the specification with the users themselves. In the medium term, it is to thrive in a digital ecosystem, working with other UN agencies like the UNDP and beyond in championing the development of open government services.

But in the same way that it started, the interview ends with a bolder vision. As we stop the interview recording, Martinez tells me that she hopes that in the future “nobody ever has to make a queue” for government services. “What is the point of queuing for a passport?” she asks me, when all of this can and already is being automated around the world.

There are many takeaways from our interview – the importance of working openly, setting chains of responsibility, and creating a space for actors to collaborate across borders – but this strikes a chord. I think back to my own experiences queuing for immigration services in the December snow, or scrambling around for my paper government-issued vaccination card. A life without queues? Yes, that would do just nicely.