Uzbekistan's digital villages, Singapore's AI-powered parliament, and Iceland's unlikely presidential candidates
Edition #75 The UN FAO has helped to digitally transform parts of rural Uzbekistan, while governments around the globe are grappling with how to digitally enhance parliamentary proceedings...
In our previous roundup, our attention was on Digital Public Infrastructure. We looked at the contrasting paths forward advocated by the G7 and G20, as well as the role that DPI is playing across the Indian subcontinent.
This week, DPI is again on the agenda, off the back of the Citizen Stack conference organized by India at UNHQ in New York. But our main theme this edition is thinking about the role of technology in parliamentary proceedings. We often think about digital democracy in terms of iVoting, or public consultations, but digitalizing parliamentary proceedings gives citizens important insights into how their countries are run. This week, the UK’s Parliament announced a new digital strategy, while Singapore launched an LLM-powered search tool for its own parliamentary proceedings.
Our main stories this week:
How the UN FAO digitalized Uzbekistan’s rural villages
AI-powered search engine makes Singapore Parliament debates more accessible
How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland?
As a reminder, we have recently begun to expand our digital government coverage away from just Substack and onto Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram. For original content, audience engagement, and roundups of all our pieces, feel free to follow us over on those channels. Also check out our sister newsletter, interweave.africa.
How the UN FAO digitalized Uzbekistan’s rural villages - FAO
The UN FAO’s Digital Villages initiative is shaping 1,000 villages across the world into digital hubs, including Novkent and Yuksalish in Uzbekistan.
The program aims to give traditional farmers access to technology, including digital sensors to control the temperature, humidity, light and soil moisture of their farms.
As well as improving crop returns, the initiative reduces the labour intensity of farming, allowing farmers to invest instead in education and otherwise improving their quality of life.
Alongside the farming program, FAO is also offering coding camps and arranging hackathons to encourage young people in the villages to develop agritech solutions for themselves.
Our Take: The Digital Villages initiative is predicated on the idea of “living labs”, collaborative and iterative workshops between farmers, experts and innovators to discuss challenges that the villagers face. Bottom-up co-creation and prototyping has proved central to the UN’s digital work, as with the UNDP’s Accelerator Labs, one of the cornerstones of its mature approach to user-centered design.
AI-powered search engine makes Singapore parliament debates more accessible - Goh Yan Han, Straits Times
Singapore has launched an AI-powered search engine that lets citizens comb through decades of parliamentary records to understand the country’s governance processes more clearly.
Singapore’s existing Hansard record of debates in parliament is fully keyword-based, meaning that a user’s search would often return irrelevant debates higher on the page than relevant ones.
Pair Search, the new tool, has seen much better results, with 84% of all users finding the information they needed within the first 10 results shown to them.
The tool runs on a combination of advanced keyword matching and contextual search that understands a user’s intent, and is able to both give them snippets of results and sort search results by relevance instead of chronological order (a new functionality compared to Hansard).
How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? - Anna Anderson, UX Collective
For the first time in Icelandic history, the endorsement process for running for President has been digitized, but it is not without its hitches.
The change is partly designed to give full transparency to the nation regarding who is trying to run for president - 82 people to date for the upcoming election.
However, of those 82, at least 11 of them accidentally registered, and were not aware they were collecting endorsements for their candidacy.
The site is ultimately a failure of UX Design - with generic buttons, overwhelming information, and a lack of visual hierarchy - leading several Icelandic citizens to have quite the surprise!
GovTech News in Brief
India shares its digital revolution story at UN - Citizen Stack
In a two-day event at UNHQ in New York, India shared its approach to Aadhaar and digital public infrastructure with other member states.
Our Take: Digital Public Infrastructure is big news at the UN at the moment. Over the past couple of weeks, the UNDP has also opened up for public comment a key interim report on DPI.
Digitalization in Norway - no “prestige”, but no less meaningful - Yong Shu Chiang, GovInsider
Dirk Stuart Lammering, Director of Innovation at Norway’s National Digitalization Agency, explains how “prestige-less” leadership has helped the Norwegian government become a global frontrunner in digitalization.
Ukraine unveils AI-generated foreign ministry spokesperson - Agence France-Presse, The Guardian
Modeled on a real Ukrainian singer, the government has developed an AI spokesperson to deliver (human-written) statements, accompanied by QR codes linking them to text versions on the ministry’s website to avoid fakes.
Our Take: Among other things, the AI will comment on consular services, currently controversial in Kyiv. Last week the government suspended consular services for men of fighting age living abroad, forcing them to return home and potentially face being drafted. While digital government streamlines services for citizens, the removal of this optionality can have adverse consequences.
UK Parliament Information and Digital Strategy, 2024-27 - UK Parliament
The UK Parliament’s new digital strategy brings together information, data and digital for the first time, focusing on modernizing ways of working and outdated technology, while making provisions to keep the two Houses of Parliament cyber secure.
Our Take: Also in UK news this week, four projects have been shortlisted for the 2024 Civil Service Data Challenge, including Policy Summarisation with Gen AI and an NHS Geospatial Planning Tool.
Judith Collins outlines her digital government vision: one app to rule them all - Rob O’Neill, Reseller
New Zealand’s Minister for digitizing government has announced a broad vision for her new portfolio, including learning from Australia with a unified government app and platform for government services.
Our Take: This week, the New Zealand Transit Agency also launched a trial phase of an app to host the country’s mobile driver’s licenses, which may well form the basis of any unified platform for drivers to access government services.
Ho Chi Minh City’s digital economy ambitions - Samaya Dharmaraj, OpenGovAsia
Ho Chi Minh City has laid out a new comprehensive plan to transform into a smart city, including a digital transformation program, a data governance strategy, and R&D for AI applications spanning the next decade.
Google will now show labels in Play Store to denote official government apps - Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch
After months of testing, Google is rolling out labels in its Play Store to signify official government apps in more than 14 countries, an initiative designed to prevent the proliferation of fraudulent apps.
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