Unveiling The Future of E-government

Unveiling The Future of E-government

Meet GLASS - Supporting Freedom of Movement

Fundamentally, I believe in a borderless society and frictionless trade. And I believe we need to break down the barriers that falsely divide us.

Unfortunately, many of our existing methods of interacting with government services are still based on print-based approaches. For example, recently, I had to register for a new GP, I had to fill in a piece of paper which asked me about many things that the healthcare system should know about me. Although it was promised by the Scottish Government a few years ago, I still have no real online place where I can gather the documents I might need to move to another country. But that is all changing with our GLASS wallet.

GLASS is a Horizon 2020 project funded by the European Union to create a new paradigm for sharing or transfer of personal information with the citizen in control. GLASS started in January 2021 and will complete its funded phase on December 2023.

The GLASS project

And, so we are so pleased to be involved with the GLASS project, which has built a new citizen wallet to be used for e-Government applications:

And our vision is around a citizen-focused digital wallet and which integrates with government services. For this, we have created a Hyperleder infrastructure and a digital wallet with dApps which can download governance applications:

Overall, it is a collaboration between a range of companies and universities across the EU:

The focus is to prove a digital-by-default approach for citizens where they can interact with government services and gather the proofs they require to move to another country for a short time or to take up a job. This will further support freedom of movement in the EU and in harmonising government services across the EU:

Overall, we have built this using state-of-the-art approaches including using privacy methods at every point, and where citizens can link their identity to Hyperledger:

With the research project, we have built three main demonstrators: moving to another member state, making a short-term visit, and getting a job abroad:

Alice finds a job in Portugal

Starting from Greece, Alice finds a vacant job position in Portugal. She applies for the job, and thankfully she gets hired. Unfortunately, in Portugal, she has to deal with a series of bureaucratic processes in order to issue the obligatory ID card and social security number, open a bank account etc.; for each of these processes, she needs to provide a proof of ID as well as a pile of documentation (from Greece) stamped and authenticated by both Portugal (MoJ) and Greek Authorities (MoDG).

To obtain a Portuguese Residence title, rent an apartment and open a bank account, she needs to present at least a validated ID documentation, a birth certificate, a nationality certification validated by a Greek Authority and proof that she works in Portugal. Obtaining these documents manually is certainly a time-consuming effort.

The MoDG will issue the document with the validated data, and Alice will give the permission to forward it to MoJ. On the other hand, if this type of documentation has been previously issued, MoJ can obtain it directly from Alice through her Wallet, which stores all the necessary information. After this transaction is completed, Alice can access and securely share her Portuguese social security number through her Wallet.

Here is a demonstration of the GLASS wallet for this:

Conclusions

I repeat, GLASS supports the freedom of movement across the EU and which focuses on citizen privacy and control. Here are more details:

We are now ready to demonstrate GLASS at conferences, so just get in contact with us, and we can do live demos.