On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 8:48 PM, Tom Steinberg<[email protected]> wrote: > As always, very grateful for anyone to take a rummage and share their > findings with the 400-odd other people on this list!
I'm sure I'll spend more time later looking at some of these but I know a little about some of the Estonian ones. (I'm a little surprised that the Finnish Tax Return site is listed rather than the Estonian one, and will need to investigate more about that at some point: I don't have exact figures, but AIUI over 90% of the population in Estonia filed their most recent tax return online) The Company Registration portal is well known here as being highly efficient: you can set up a new company online in about 15 minutes using it (as long as you're using the boilerplate company formation documents. If you want to submit your own it will take longer). Until recently, however, that was only if you were legally resident in Estonia, as it was only with an Estonian digital signature card that you could authenticate yourself (any document signed using this has equal force of law to a manual signature.) But recently they expanded this to allow anyone from other countries to also do this if those countries have compatible systems or ID cards. Originally this was only Belgium, Portugal, and Lithuania, which was technically and philosophically interesting, but of little practical use as very few residents of any of those are involved in company formation in Estonia! However late last year this was also extended to Finns, which is much more significant. AFAIK this was the first project where an EU state accepted the validity of ID cards from another member state, other than as a travel document. I can't find much about this in English, but http://www.tallinn.ee/eng/ettevotjale/g6095/uudised?id=23864 is fairly decent. ---- The other very interesting one is Osale.ee (Osalusveeb = "Web-based Participation), aka TOM ("Täna Otsustan Mina" = "I decided today"). This is a site which not only lists the existing legislation, but allows users to propose new laws, or changes to existing laws, or comment on drafts of proposed laws ("Free our bills" style). Then other users can comment on or vote for these proposals (similar to a petition, but with a properly authenticated digital signature, so much fewer Donald Ducks). Each ministry is then required to properly engage with any proposal that receives enough votes and lay the proposal before Parliament. One of the most successful campaigns run using this was for the re-introduction of Summer Time, not because people particularly wanted it, per se, but because it was too confusing for Tallinn to be on a different time zone to Helsinki, particularly for doing business. More recently the "Everyone Has The Right to an e-State" proposal that laid out the 10 principles of good e-governance obtained close to 20,000 signatures (out of a population of under 1.5 million people). As I suspect people here may be interested in them, the 10 principles are[1]: 1. Everyone has the right to choose the way in which they interact with public services [mail, telephone, internet, email] 2. [something that I can't quite understand, but seems to concern being able to identified by your ID card if that's what you want, but minimising the number of places where such identification is required] 3. Everyone has the right to obtain information on public services with minimal effort [i.e. web sites must be up to date, all procedures correctly described, and all application forms should have electronic versions] 4. Everyone has the right to apply for public services simply and conveniently, with complex technical minutae or unreasonable requirements [this one includes disability access provisions etc.] 5. Everyone has the right to obtain information concerning state administration [i.e. if you're in the middle of an application process you have to be able to track the progress against deadlines etc by telephone, email, or web] 6. Everyone has the right to know what personal data has been collected about them, to have it collected and used only for specified purposes within the extent of the legislation, and to correct any inaccurate or misleading data. [This includes being able to also know exactly who has had access to any of your data.] 7. Everyone has the right to know how their personal information is protected by the authorities. Authorities shall ensure that all processing of personal data is secure and reliable, and for no longer a period than required. All databases containing personal data must log all search queries and the logs must be systematically analysed. 8. Everyone has the right to monitor the service quality of all public services and provide feedback on them. [i.e. all government bodies must actively solicit feedback, perform continuous monitoring, and publish the results] 9. Everyone has the right to receive information directly from the authority to their official contact address [I don't quite understand this one. Everyone in Estonia has a state issued email address, so it seems to be talking about that, but then it also goes on to mention being able to subscribe to news feeds, narrow all searches by zip code or personal preferences, etc. I think it basically means that authorities must provide as much information as possible on their activities but structured in the ways that people actually want, rather than how the authority itself wants to do it] 10. Everyone has the right to participate in society as a whole, and the decisions that affect him. State and local government must support involvement in decision-making, provide timely information and create an environment for people to express their opinions. Tony [1] There are also detailed evaluation criteria, if anyone wants to dig deeper, but I can only find all this Estonian, and it's behind a self-signed SSL cert that causes Google Translate lots of difficulties, but I'll dig up more detail on request. _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
