I recently spoke with Raimo Reiman, head of the Estonian government’s citizen portal. Estonia is one of the most digitized nation in the world. The e-government system that they have been developing since 1997, automatically issues citizens with an ID number at birth. This in turn is used to link the newborn to his/her parents’ doctor, social security data and any other relevant online information. An Estonian identity card serves as a key to access 99 per cent of services online; one can pay taxes, vote, check medical records and more, 24 hours a day. It is estimated that the country has saved 2% of GDP via the use of digital signatures alone.
Estonia has become a start-up hot-spot
For a former Soviet republic of only 1.3 million people, Estonia’s has been an all or nothing approach. It took the plunge and invested heavily in technology soon after independence. Estonia’s constitution guarantees free internet for their citizens, not only in the cities but also in rural areas. It is the only country in the world to declare internet access a human right. As ex-managing director of Estonia’s e-Residency programme, Kaspar Korjus, puts it, “A small country like Estonia only has one natural resource and it is located between our ears’’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Estonia has become a start-up hot-spot. A new business can be opened online within two hours. Tax returns can be filed in 3 minutes. According to one estimate, the number of start-ups per 100 000 inhabitants, is 6 times higher in Estonia than the European average.
‘Without trust we can do nothing’ – Reiman
However, when Raimo Reiman talks about his role in the development of the government’s citizen portal, he talks very little of technology itself. His focus is on other very human concerns, specifically, trust and happiness. In order to build and maintain trust he says, transparency is paramount. It is to the optimization of transparency that he devotes much of his attention. Estonian citizens can log into the e-government system and see exactly who has accessed their data and for what purpose. ‘Transparency is key, because this is what builds trust. Without trust we can do nothing’, he states flatly. Decentralization is a core aspect of this drive for transparency. There is no central database and every stakeholder, be it a business or government department, chooses its own system. Inter-connectivity and integrity are therefore key.
Building trust, Reiman explains, has little to do with technical issues. It has to do with mindset and culture. ‘Changing mindsets is much more difficult and takes much more time than finding technical solutions’. In April and May of 2007, hackers believed to be linked to the Kremlin, unleashed a wave of attacks on Estonia’s government and corporate websites. At this time Reiman was working as head designer for the largest news organisation in Estonia. He remembers clearly the struggle to keep the news media’s website up and running in the face of a full scale botnet attack. ‘Bandwidth was squeezed in a way we had not seen before’, he explains. In spite of efforts to accommodate the sudden overwhelming flood of virtual overseas visitors, Estonia finally had to isolate itself from the rest of the online world, in an effort to contain the foreign attacks.
Trust in e-government is high in Estonia
The attacks had far-reaching consequences in Estonia and beyond. NATO established a cyber defense research center in Tallinn in 2008 and Estonia called on the European Union to make cyber attacks a criminal offense. ‘We all learnt from the experience’, Reiman says with characteristic understatement. However, this did not deter the small Baltic state from continuing its push toward large-scale digitization. In 2008, Estonia went ahead with its e-Health programme, which involved the digitization of 95% of data generated by hospitals and doctors. Trust in e-government is high in Estonia and is essential to its success. Nevertheless, Reimen points out that technological advancement does not always have the desired effects. Voting levels in Estonia are no higher than the European average. This, in spite of the fact that it can be done online in a matter of seconds and the portal is open for a period of 5 days.
Reiman returns to the issue of happiness. ‘Technology is a tool’, he explains, ‘we should never lose site of that fact. On its own it can not create a better, happier society.’ He and his colleagues at the e-government portal are interested in first defining what the goals should be. What makes a society happier, for instance. They can then think about how technology may be used in order to help them achieve these goals. When asked about the difficulty of assessing happiness levels, he seems unperturbed. What interests him is that conversations such as these are leading the discussion on technology, not the other way around. As head of the e-government portal of the most digitized country in the world, Raimo Reiman is refreshingly disinclined to wax lyrical about the virtues of technology. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned here.
