Estonia, the Digital Republic

Government services are easily accessible in Estonia in part because everything is online. A digital signature carries the same weight as a physical signature, and data is shared between offices allowing forms such as tax returns to be pre-filled for citizens. The country leapfrogged the rest of the world, investing in digital literacy and infrastructure in an effort to serve its small, spread-out population.

Nightshade is a new tool designed to fight against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without permission. Nightshade “poisons” the training data to essentially confuse the AI model and prevent it from copying an artist’s work. The purpose of Nightshade is to return the power to artists to protect their intellectual property and prevent large AI companies like Google and Meta from taking advantage of them.

Low-income people often miss out on court dates because they cannot afford to miss work or leave their children. Michigan and Ohio courts have incorporated the Matterhorn “online adjudication system” to handle simple cases so individuals can participate through the Internet. The system also offers the advantage of having “less bias” than in-person trials, because the race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status of the individual is protected online.

Unprecedented challenges are frequently popping up with the onset of climate change, so governments too have to adjust their processes and strategies. Some new procurement tools used by several different cities include requests for ideas, competitions, and performance contracts. This article looks at two places using these new and publicly accessible procurement tools—Prince Georges County, MD, and Norfolk, VA—to see how it impacts their success.

In France, a digital transformation is taking place. To lay the groundwork, the country passed the Digital Republic Act in 2016, which mandated local and central government to publish documents and public data, a significant step toward transparency and open data. Government taskforce Etalab, which has attracted top tech talent, built on that foundation by launching data.gouv.fr, a portal that hosts over 40,000 public datasets, and other organizations have coordinated collaborative open data projects between cities.

Making government more transparent is one strategy that countries are using to counteract rising xenophobia and populism. More than 85 national and subnational governments have committed to publishing spending data, protecting whistleblowers, and more as members of the Open Government Partnership.

Governments around the world are exploring whether blockchain technologies can improve public administration. In theory, blockchain could improve accountability and trust in government. In practice, pilot projects are hitting roadblocks and may take more time to implement and scale than some might hope.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the small outpost of Estonia has reinvented itself as the world’s digital pioneer. Everything from paying taxes to establishing companies is done online and takes minutes. Lawmakers even sign legislation using digital signatures, not fountain pens.

Jennifer Pahlka founded Code for America, an organization that provides human-centered design tech solutions to government services. Now they have a growing list of requests from cities all over the US, a network of 44,000 volunteers nationwide who create "civic-hacking" solutions, and an over $10 million yearly budget.

RiverAware, an app that uses real-time data from a national network of gauges, has helped citizens, first responders, floodplain managers, scientists, and recreational users such as paddlers and anglers access river-flow data, informing or alerting communities as to when it's time to evacuate or seek higher ground. The data is aggregated from more than 13,000 stream-gauging stations around the country maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Weather Service.