Ah … Estonia already does that!

Ah … Estonia already does that!

Go on … admit it, your government services are “Fake Digital” … there isn’t really properly citizen/company IDs that can be trusted, there isn’t electronic tendering for contracts, there isn’t really ways to properly engage with citizens in a digital form, and your digital health record is stored away on a GP’s file system.

We have been pushing and probing and trying to address major issues, and we continually ask questions:

• Why can’t I vote/cast an opinion in an electronic way on civic issues (or in an election)?
• Why do babies still have a paper-based health record (Red Book) and I still take a piece of paper to the registry office to register a birth?
• Why can’t we have an open and transparent trust infrastructure for government contracts and procurement, and which is free of paper work and wet signatures, and which implements smart contracts that are fit-for-purpose in the 21st Century?
• Where can I debate serious issues and make my concerns to councils/governments/health boards/etc, that doesn’t involve me going to committee meetings on wet Wednesday evenings in a damp and smelly community hall, and then wait for months on the minutes of the meetings?

And the answer is often …

“Well … I dunno … but they do it in Estonia”

So from a world-leader, and innovator, the UK is being dragged back based on its legacy in the way it has done things in the past and a lack of true leadership from the top. While our politicians debate political unions, our drive for fundamentally changing our approaches is being lost along the way, with us still tinkering around the edges (“let’s do a small bit of innovation with the public sector, and let’s hope that it sticks and changes something!”).

We lack even the most basic of building blocks in building anything at scale, and we’re scrambling around looking for the pieces of the jigsaw and just hope that we’ll make them fit … and we will be like … Estonia. Unless there’s radical changes, we will move backwards, especially in these next two years while our political leaders argue amongst themselves on breaking our economic ties and then try to rebuild.

Why can’t we have truly major challenges and targets? Why doesn’t government lead from the front, and force our industry to change (and thus provide a level playing field for our innovative SMEs)? If we have a time of disruption in the next few years, then let’s go for it, and give our small businesses and our visionaries a chance to breath and show that they can change our economy to one that is fit for the 21st Century.

So “Big challenges” which truly support innovation at scale

Recently I proposed a couple of things that I thing that we really focus UK businesses, and provide an opportunity for SMEs to lead:

• Smart contacts by 2020 for ALL government procurement. Why does government tell the industry that you’re moving to smart contracts by 2020? Every part of the tendering and supply process will be enacted through a true trust framework which is open (but protects when necessary). No wet signatures … full crypto enabled for trusted signatures … and provide funding for academia/SMEs to build it and support for SMEs to integrate. Make open source and provide open APIs for SMEs, and allow licencing for civic good. Create a drive for innovation that allows our SMEs to lead on a world-stage, and gives them a fair chance in working with the public sector.
• Electronic voting for the next election. If the UK/Scottish Governments really want to drive innovation … why not set up innovation challenge partnerships with academia/SMEs for electronic voting in a future election (or at least for citizen engagement)? The underspends in parts of our public sector would probably pay for it, and we could look to create a role-model of a trustworthy system, and where our citizens would have a say in how they were governed. For a modern data-driven economy, to still be voting with a pencil and a bit of paper in the Cloud era is not a place that we can stay. It would also create a platform for government services, too, and which could engage with citizens. Large companies would NOT be able to bid for any part of the challenge. Plans, source code and demonstrators would then be open for everyone to review and make comment on. All the software would be open source and free to use for projects which benefited social change and citizen engagement. The maths and crypto have all been worked out .. let’s just to it!
• A parent-owned health record for every child born in the UK. If the government really did want more citizen ownership, then why not start at the beginning and to it properly. When a child is born, the state celebrates with an electronic record for the parents. This is the start of a complete health record, that can be shared with primary and secondary care, but will be a history of our immunisations, your illnesses, and how your progressed. Again SMEs would build, and no large companies would be allowed to be part of its creation. In fact, Sitekit have already produced this, and had to go to London to get large-scale adoption. Why Scotland didn’t support and adopt this is beyond my understanding of health and well-being?

No-one has yet told me why these can’t be done … and the answer is often … well Estonia does it.

Good for Estonia … you have your citizen’s at your heart, and engagement them, and you want to build a strong economy too.

We need direction and investment

Is the UK just limping along without any great vision of what it wants to be? I have watched government research projects pass by with great intents, and then have little impact, but end up with a … “Web site for citizens”. If that is disrupting, then we have lost our way.

You should never lose your ability to ask questions, and continue to ask them if you don’t get an answer.

What happened to Connecting For Health?

What changes has DALLAS (Delivering Assisted Living At Scale) Living It Up made in Scotland? Where did the “scale” go?

What about GIRFEC (Get It Right For Every Child) and the Named Person Act, who benefits from that and how does it work? Surely it was a chance to engage citizens, but it has been mired with a lack of transparency … if a child is reported by a teacher for sucking their thumb, the state needs to define the risks involved, and tell parents. But who knows how it will work? An opportunity for the first truly citizen focused infrastructure, at scale, has been missed with a complete lack of transparency.

Can we move into the 21st Century?

I think politicians need to realise that this is the “21st Century” … the Information Age … and it has been for the past 17 years, and that as long as I still sign my name on a piece of paper, and mark an “X” on a ballet paper, and get letters from government/council saying “Dear Occupier”, we are NOT in the 21st Century, and we will continue to fall-back as other countries move faster to take advantages of this new Age. Many politicians think that Industry 4.0 does really exist, and that it might just go away, and we can go back to a much calmer time.

I have a t-shirt which says “In Crypto we trust” … and that is going to be our focus in the next few years.

I hate to say it … and I’ll probably be accused of generalising … but large companies often … want a status quo … but that doesn’t work in this new world. The Cloud has changed everything, and a single innovator in Edinburgh can have the computing resources of a company like IBM at their fingertips.

Every time I hear of EU debates with the UK, I despair, and see us falling back even more, and of the waste of time and energy, when we should be building a new economy and which integrates with the rest of the world, and allows for data to flow without friction.

Conclusions

Go #Estonia, as long as you can do things, we have a small glimmer of hope against those who want to keep things the same. In the UK, I think, we are drifting, and we need true leadership and visionary people. We are innovating around the edges, and doing little bits of innovation, and hoping that something will magically transform our public services, and allow SMEs to compete equally with large companies.

Personally, I think that only #London has the guts to stand up for its citizens and businesses at the current time, and has the innovation infrastructure to cope. The Cyber Security Innovation Centre gives a perfect example of how London wants to innovate out the risks it faces within the finance industry, but it’s only one example. It doesn’t want to wait for the cracks to appear, it wants to grab the world and wrestle it. The way it has adopted the e-Red for every baby born in London addresses one of my questions, but what about the rest?

So what?

Get enterprise Visas back on the agenda, get students off the immigration figures, and try and keep all the PhD and postgraduates that we have attracted to the UK — and attract more! And get governments on track to fully support innovation and change, and stop just innovating around the edges.

The UK will then be a magnet for those with amazing (and crazy) ideas!