Science and Industry

In previous text, I discussed mainly on Jyrki Kasvi’s presentation of information society. In this part, I will look closer on group works done. I participated to a group that had a topic of stimulating the dialogue between citizens and administration.

One interesting aspect presented there was change in citizenship: unlike most political scientist discuss{{Usually when this discussion starts, people do mean the conventional participation. This doesn’t mean that the actual participation}}, there might be active and strong civic society coming up and engaging in discussion with politicians and administration. Actually, these new communication tools make taking contacts easier. Actually, some of the recent Finnish social movements like Porkkanamafia and the demonstration against Lex Nokia use these new media to get citizens involved.

Secondly, many representatives from administration agreed that data does exist in the system, but the problem is more what to do with it and how to use it. Actually, administration people said that they don’t want to ask abstract question as they tend to get tricky. The want to keep it simple for all of us to participate – and I fully see why.

Thirdly, they also think opening their data storages here. Not part of administration but still publicly owned, YLE, has been doing this kind of work previously. Some of the participants demonstrated how they already know use provide their data for public use. I of course spoke about open APIs and how important they are to broader the developer base. Let’s hope someone listened…

It’s two days after elections in Finland and it been brought up to media that somewhat 200 votes has been “lost” in our electronic voting pilot (somwhat 12 000 votes casted) that has been promised to be secure in every way. Actually I’m not surprised of this for some reason.

So, about the background of the problem: every voter who wanted to participate into this pilot had their ballot in electronic form, something similar to credit card. One should put this card to selection machine; then one needs to select the candidate with numerical input and press ok to confirm this choice. Many people have missed the part of pressing ok, causing the electronic card be blanco.

This is just design of the workflow in the application, not even related to user interface. You can verify a good solution while visiting your ATM. At least here Finland it first gives out your card and after that your money — guess why in that order?

So, what has been the reaction? Our ministery of justice stated

Osoittautui, että järjestelmä ei ole ollut se ongelma, vaan sittenkin ihminen. (source: Helsingin Sanomat)

Which can be freely translated: “It became clear that the system was not the problem, but it was human after all.” Remind me of the HAL 9000 and famous “It can only be attributable to human error.” So what goes here wrong?

The users needs are not understood and this causes poor experience and in this case failure of the system, even thought it might technically be reliable it really don’t matter. What matters is that the user is not lost; what ever hack there’s in the engine — but always assume that user can do things differently.

This topic has been in the line for some time and now it’s actually the time to say something of it. First, a bit of background: the World Bank works in several topics, one of them being e-governance services. I got mail form colleague that I might be intrested to join the session in July and they had real good topics that time.

The question is that what is the next step of governmental services in this forward going society. Actually this is the first thing that usually gets me worried: sometimes we push some values and assumptions so much that we don’t stop to think enough if they are needed by the users. In our case the user, citizen, needs some things but…  I’ve experienced some e-governance works in Finland that were done — actually rather well — but still haven’t flight so well. But during the online discussion I got the image that e-governance services are (thought to) provide transparency in the governance and this transparency is something that’s needed. As I don’t know the local environment of developing countries, I just need to believe.

But then to actual content of the session, which I think is relevant to most developed countries also. Mr. Randeep Sudan spoke many wise words about data interoperability and ability to mash data up. Clear, these services are getting more and more popular in internet services so they should enter the governmental services also. Actually, ability to mash up governance data sounds like a good place to have new innovative services.

As I have my background, I like the mentions of contextual as being one of those things that may allow new ways to interact between citizens and government. What if instead of pulling information of decisions you would get them pushed towards you? Or how could mashing things up with contextual data modify your daily interaction with society? I see hge potential but also huge risks here — and I actually might start working with these kind of questions if Tekes provides some funding for a project. Mr. Sudan also notified how important the mobile services are; this is rather clear as for developing countries — mobile device is de facto internet device.

Mr. Anthony Williams continues with the theme of data interoperability. He used interesting term “broadcast model of politics” — governments should be able to share the information as well as they could and this would generate transparency. This would also help with the changing technical environments, as governmental organizations usually aren’t in the cutting edge of ICT. But then there’s some down sides also: what about privacy? How should we position the privacy against freedom of information? And more — what kind of solution do we need to secure everyones private information. For the latter, we see that even big countries like the Great Britain has a some room for improvement — so is there any way to do this right in the first place?

As always, a bit more questions arise:

• Digital dive and the solutions for that?
• Who develops and maintains these services?
• And how to take care, using Mr. Williams terms: the end result is “gitizen centric goverment” and not just a bunch of services no-one uses?