Bhutan's Digital Identity Bill; Germany's Digital Rights Tool; and building semantic interoperability in Norway
Edition #23 Norway's digital agency finds that sharing metadata holds the key to a connected information ecosystem, while data leaks in Bangladesh highlight the dangers of centralized databases...
Last edition, we were thinking about how governments can develop digital services for businesses, looking at Portugal’s new Empresas Online 2.0 platform and Nepal’s slow-moving bureaucracy.
This edition, our focus is on citizen hackathons. Over the past few years, there has been a global movement towards broadening policymaking approaches, as exhibited by the rise of policy labs. Alongside this, governments in places such as Poland and Taiwan have also begun digital civic hackathons, with the latter’s G0V movement also holding global events in London and Toronto. This week, Singapore’s Open Government Products joined suit, producing technical solutions for waste management and adult unemployment.
Our main stories this week:
Shared metadata – a door opener for comprehensive information
Digital Rights Check: Understanding and preventing human rights violations
The Future of Learning: Delivering Tech-Enabled Quality Education for Britain
Don’t forget to check out our GovTech news in brief, the theory behind the practice, and upcoming GovTech events.
Shared metadata - a door opener for comprehensive information - Anne Karete Nowers Hvidsten, Astri Synnove Verdal, Digdir
Norway’s Digital Agency outlines their approach to effectively linking together the public sector information ecosystem.
When looking for public sector information online, citizens are often faced with a wealth of fragmented - and sometimes inauthentic - content.
Digdir has put together an interdisciplinary team to tackle this challenge, primarily through promoting common metadata between public actors.
Metadata - or the data about data - tells a user about the information on a particular page. By “tagging” information in a common way between websites (e.g. by target audience; type of information; or applicable geography), government actors can prevent data silos and build semantic interoperability.
Our Take: Building semantic interoperability will prove crucial to unlocking the benefits of Generative AI, as interweave wrote in an article last week. But, as the authors note, these efforts rely on “good partners” across government committed to correctly categorizing and tagging this content.
Digital Rights Check: Understanding and preventing human rights violations - Digital.Global
The German and Danish governments have collaborated on producing a human rights check for digitalization projects.
Digitalization can level the playing field, raise standards of living and increase faith in democratic institutions. But equally it can enable mass surveillance, violate the right to privacy, and incite violence.
To mitigate the risks of digitalization, the Digital Rights Check is a web-based tool to help those working on development projects assess the human rights impacts of their prospective solutions.
Users of the tool complete a 30 minute online assessment, before receiving a consolidated overview of recommendations on safeguarding their projects from human rights abuses.
The Future of Learning: Delivering Tech-Enabled Quality Education for Britain - Kirsty Innes, Alexander Iosad, James Scales, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
The Tony Blair Institute has released a paper making a series of recommendations on how the UK government could better embrace technology to personalize education for each child.
Principal among them is the idea of introducing a digital learner ID for pupils which would contain all their educational information, giving students (and their parents) useful insights into their education journey.
This collected data, the paper argues, would provide the foundations for maximizing the impact of new tools such as AI learning. Much of this data is already collected by schools, but there is a lack of interoperability between datasets and it can take up to 15 school days for a parent to get access to their child’s record.
Elsewhere, the paper advises the government to create a new independent body to manage digital learner IDs; and use the data to reduce teachers’ workloads and upgrade the Ofsted school inspection system.
GovTech News in Brief
Bangladesh Government Website leaks citizens personal data - Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch
A Bangladeshi government website has leaked the personal information of citizens, including their full names, phone numbers, email addresses and national ID numbers.
Our Take: This story demonstrates one of the dark sides of digital government, and such incidents undermine the trust that GovTech otherwise builds. With ever stricter security requirements (see the news about the Netherlands’ new digital government law) and a decreased dependence on centralized government databases, hopefully these incidents will become less common going forward.
National Assembly adopts the National Identity Bill of Bhutan - The Bhutan Live
Bhutan’s parliament has unanimously adopted the country’s National Digital Identity Bill, paving the way for a rollout of what the country claims is the world’s first self-sovereign national digital ID.
Our Take: In our upcoming interview with the Head of GovTech Bhutan, we discuss the digital ID in some detail. The premise of self-sovereign ID is an exciting one. But in a country where scarcely more than 50% of people have access to the internet, it remains to be seen whether this rollout can be successful at scale.
UK Government launches Local Authority Data Explorer - Mark Say, UK Authority
The newly established Data Center includes indicators ranging from waste management to adult social care, allowing users to compare local councils and detect those authorities at risk of potential failure.
Our Take: Also in UK local government news this week, the Chief Digital Officer of London talks about how he is preparing the city for future innovation.
Open Government Products crowdsources solutions to public challenges with first-ever citizen hackathon - Yeo Zong Hao, GovInsider
OPG, a division of GovTech Singapore, last week ran a citizen hackathon to crowdsource ideas for product development. Solutions included a Google Maps for recycling bins; an AI tool for school counsellors to gather case notes; and a chatbot to support the elderly with building a resume.
AI “could shrink UK civil service by two-thirds” says former UK government HR chief - Jack Aldane, Global Government Forum
The UK Civil Service’s former head of HR has told a parliamentary select committee that AI could reduce the size of the organization to 150,000 civil servants by 2040, down from today’s figure of 488,400.
Thailand’s soldiers embrace digital identity - Digital Government Development Agency Thailand
The Thai army’s identity cards have been digitalized, allowing them access to claim welfare and army-related benefits through their mobile phone.
Digital diplomacy: EU Council sets out priority actions for stronger EU action in global digital affairs - European Council
The EU Council has called for stronger and more coherent EU policy and action on global digital affairs, stressing that members must act in a “Team Europe” approach in multilateral fora and incorporate digital diplomacy into the EU’s Global Gateway.
Netherlands New Digital Government Act comes into force - Dutch Digital Government Agency
The Dutch Digital Government Act (Wdo) entered into force last week, bringing with it new thresholds for secure government websites and accessibility regulations.
Our Take: The Netherlands has been a leader in digital accessibility for a while now - it was only a matter of time before this got enshrined in law. More surprising is learning that security standards such as HTTPS were not already mandatory for government websites.
Elsewhere this week in Dutch news, 14 innovators were granted a share of the country’s government innovation budget for programs ranging from a platform providing information about the circular economy to a digital twin of the municipality of Alkmaar.
Preparing for an AI-driven future: The Government of India’s free AI for all course - Anirudh Dinesh, The Gov Lab
Anirudh Dinesh explores how India’s free self-paced “AI for All” course is fulfilling the national vision of a population prepared for an AI-driven economy.
The Theory Behind the Practice
David Eaves on the promise and pitfalls of digital government - David Eaves, The Economist
UCL professor David Eaves outlines the geopolitical significance of digital government. With the exit of Visa and Mastercard from Russia leading some countries to conclude that they need alternative domestic infrastructure to protect them from foreign actors, Digital Public Infrastructure is increasingly becoming a matter of security as well as efficiency.
Deploying responsible AI in cross-governmental collaboration - Shainaz Firfiray, aPolitical
Shainaz Firfiray explores how governments ought to deal with the well-documented risks and drawbacks of AI.
Can AI build itself? How the public sector can start building AI today- without a team of data scientists - Thomas Chalk, PUBLIC
With the technical barriers to developing AI in-house beyond the reach of most governments, PUBLIC advocates for low-code/no-code solutions to give them a headstart in AI implementation.
Upcoming GovTech Events
Show the Thing No. 3 - Taiwan - Public Digital
Public Digital’s next online event will focus on T-Road, a Taiwanese platform that allows for safer, streamlined cross-departmental data sharing.