Blockchain Voting, the UAE's Happiness Formula, and the UK's OSINT Dilemma
Edition #14 The UAE and Finland have both made moves to measure GovTech success differently, while the Netherlands has finally launched its long-promised algorithm regulator.
Last week, we focused on Digital IDs, a key building block for digital government services. We looked at Digital ID advances in Indonesia, as well as covering Police Reforms in Norway and the Greek government’s exponential growth in digital government transactions.
This week, we look a little more closely at how to measure success in GovTech. The number of interactions between government and user, as per this article from the Greek government last week, is just one dimension of the multifaceted question of what makes a strong digital government. Another is a country’s place on global indices, such as the UN E-Government Development Index or the World Bank’s Digital Adoption Index. When putting together our newsletter, we often come across countries celebrating climbing several places on a particular dimension of these rankings.
But Tanya Filer cautions of using these indices as the be all and end all of success in digital government. Measures of digitalization are, as Aaron Maniam describes, ‘often patchy and poor’, rewarding having a service rather than having a good service. With this in mind, this week’s edition looks at how countries are measuring GovTech success differently. In the UAE, a country with a Minister of State for Happiness and Wellbeing, it is perhaps fitting that success is measuring according to a “Happiness Meter”, whilst Finland has taken to measuring its public services against the world’s first innovation barometer.
Our main stories this week:
Optimizing customer happiness with public services in the UAE
The London Datastore turns 13, so here are 13+ data services important to Londoners
Blockchain voting: decentralized, transparent elections?
Don’t forget to check out our GovTech news in brief, the theory behind the practice and upcoming GovTech events.
Optimizing Customer Happiness with Public Services - Digital UAE
Since 2016, when the country appointed a Minister of State for Happiness and Wellbeing, the UAE has been pursuing government strategies in accordance with a Customer Happiness Formula. This philosophy has seeped into government innovation, particularly the 2020 Charter for Future Services.
After a 2016 study showed that the UAE citizens’ happiness was partly driven by community inclusiveness, the Customer Happiness Factory was launched to increase public engagement in decision making. The lab aims to focus on developing minimum viable prototypes through a number of co-creation workshops, training, and 1-1 coaching sessions between citizens and officials.
Services are also designed according to a Customer Happiness Guide, with employees undertaking training sessions that include a course on ’Customer Happiness for Service Centres Managers’.
The government’s Happiness Meter is a feedback and assessment system working across 550 e-services and 38 federal government entities, measuring citizen feedback in real-time and monitoring systems such as queue tracking.
Our Take: In the case of something like the Happiness Meter, perhaps the innovation is less the metric of happiness (which in this instance appears not too dissimilar from customer satisfaction), but the various channels through which feedback is gathered. A government paper looks at how happiness is tracked across service center devices; websites; headcount cameras; call center integrations; and queue systems.
The London Datastore turns 13 so here are 13+ data services important to Londoners (plus, what’s next for 2023…) - Theo Blackwell, Medium
To mark the 13th anniversary of London’s central data platform, the city’s Chief Digital Officer has outlined 13 data-enabled services currently used in the city’s management.
Transport for London was seen as a pioneer when it first made its data sets open. Today, the London Datastore has around 2,000 open and non-open shareable datasets.
These datasets have enabled everything from Covid tracking to asset registry, crime data to monitoring air quality.
The work of Transport for London alone - whose open data on tube, buses and other transport provided the foundations for apps such as Citymapper - has brought over £130m of added value to UK’s capital city.
Blockchain Voting: Decentralized, Transparent Elections? - Tim Haarseim, Democracy Technologies
With countries around the world investing millions of dollars into related research, Tim Haarseim looks at some of the challenges and opportunities of blockchain-based eVoting.
Blockchain-based voting was piloted as early as 2018 in US federal elections - being used to target absentee voters in West Virginia, Denver, Oregon and Utah - with the same application also trialed by the Phillipines in 2021.
The immutability of information on the blockchain and its distributed nature make it ideal for online voting, but current solutions have significant security issues.
Market-leader Voatz, for example, who recently celebrated their 100th election, has been notably secretive about the details of their software. When researchers from MIT reverse-engineered the app, they found that malicious agents could gain private information or even change ballots before they were committed on the blockchain.
Our Take: While an interesting concept - as with blockchain-based aid delivery – it is not immediately clear how governments will solve the issues of security or scalability in the near future. Estonia, who is the only country to fully adopt eVoting, does not use blockchain solutions to do so. Countries looking to make the shift to digital voting in the short to medium-term might be more inclined to follow Tallinn’s example.
GovTech News in Brief
[In Greek] Pierrakakis to ET: Car documents and degrees on the mobile phone - Gogo Katseli, Eleftheros Typos tis Kyriaki
Following on from our main story last week, the Greek Digital Minister talks about his team’s plans for the months ahead, including collaboration with the health service and digital ID wallets.
[In German] Why there is a problem with digital administration - Bernd Oswald, BR24
From disjointed governance, poor end-to-end UX design and lackluster digital infrastructure, Oswald unpacks the reasons behind Germany’s failure to provide online access to all administrative services by the end of 2022.
Biowaste audits in Skopje - UNDP
The UNDP-led program to manage biowaste in North Macedonia’s capital with the help of data and dashboards indicates the potential for big data to facilitate sustainability outcomes at a city level.
The Innovation Barometer: measuring innovation in Finland - Matti Kuivalainen, OPSI
Finland’s first public sector innovation barometer in Central Government revealed that 93% of government organizations innovated during 2020-21. Matti Kuivalainen, a Finnish Civil servant, breaks down the results.
[In Dutch] Algorithm supervisor launched - Digital Government Netherlands
Following the scandal over a flawed AI that made decisions about childcare benefit eligibility, the Dutch government has given the go-ahead for the overarching and cross-domain supervision of algorithms.
Our Take: It will be interesting to see how the results of algorithmic supervision will be fed back not just to an AI’s learning patterns, but a department’s practice as a whole. Biased data sets may also reveal a bias in those processes that produced them, and it is important that departments react to the root causes of these flaws.
Unleashing Open Source Intelligence for UK National Security - Daniel Korski, TechUK
Korski discusses how the standardization of Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) support structures can support the UK’s national security architecture, following successes of OSINT intelligence at a civic and government level.
The EU’s AI Act is barrelling towards AI standards that do not exist - Hadrien Pouget, Lawfare
The EU AI Act seeks to balance innovation with ethics and safety. But in a real-world context, Pouget argues, finding the right technical nuances within regulation is proving just too difficult to meet the context of emerging and rapidly changing technologies.
Our Take: While regulation must work in tandem with the technical evolution of AI, the fluidity and rapid evolution of such technologies makes well-targeted regulation difficult. Vague legislation referring to “standards” can be flexible enough to encompass the breadth of AI technology functions, but this simply shifts responsibility for actual rule-making to Standards Development Organizations.
3 ways Singapore is trialling AI in education - Ming En Liew, GovInsider
Ben Leong, Director of Singapore’s AI Center for Educational Technologies, delves into three projects in Singapore that will see AI playing an increasingly larger role in education.
The Theory Behind the Practice
Emergence of “AI Localism” is getting bigger, bolder, and badder says AI Ethics and AI law - Lance Eliot, Forbes
AI-related practical and ethical considerations differ between populations and locations. Eliot looks at what happens when these considerations are geared towards the most local of levels.
Our take: The discourse around AI localism is growing, adding a new dimension to the call for human-centric socio-technical systems. This requires transparency and engagement at a community level, which can build a new social contract for AI implementation. Governments should assess AI procurement principles to ensure that public good is at the heart of government AI usage, and use AI to drive public value (not to stay ‘in vogue’).
Why digital public infrastructure can be a gamechanger for children - Chris Larsson et al., World Economic Forum
This guest blog from UNICEF explores how digital public infrastructure can help some of the poorest children in the world, especially in connection with their access to health and education.
Transforming Governance: behind the success of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure - Suraksha P, Economic Times
Non-profit entrepreneurs have been crucial to the scaling of India’s digital public infrastructure, with one little-known not-for-profit making an impact many times over.
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