PD Newsletter #7: Denmark 1st in UN e-Government rankings, on PDFs, the state of the Web and health care records

Welcome to the Public Digital newsletter. I'm @egawen on Twitter. Current status: keenly awaiting rain ☀️.

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Great Danes! 🐕 Denmark reach the top of the UN e-Government rankings

The biannual UN e-Government rankings were published last week. This year, Denmark moves from 9th to first, Australia and South Korea stand steady and the UK drops to 4th.

The top 5 governments are as follows:

🇩🇰(1) Denmark
🇦🇺(2) Australia
🇰🇷(3) South Korea
🇬🇧(4) United Kingdom
🇸🇪(5) Sweden

Where Denmark has excelled this year is in the Online Services Index aspect (which makes up 1 of 3 equally weighted indices), where it gained the top spot. The UK has dropped back a little, particularly on Human Capital and Infrastructure. A well timed announcement of an extra £45 million investment in rural broadband was released yesterday.

For the uninitiated, I've dropped a brief introduction to the e-Government rankings at the bottom of this newsletter.

Hello from the other side

This month in healthcare records.

Australia is having a bumpy ride implementing it’s digital health record scheme and facing a backlash from users. Issues include a lack of privacy options and consent. Various parts of government have been contradicting each other's statements, which is muddying the waters. Diginomica has a good write up.

Meanwhile, Singapore offers a lesson: hackers have stolen records of 1.5 million Singaporean patients, including the Prime Minister. It is non-medical data which has been accessed. PM Lee's calm reaction, and the swift response, have been positive. Read a BBC article on the incident, or this Bloomberg piece on the impact on the health tech industry (spoiler: not much).

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast: Internet-era ways of working at the Wellcome collection

Tom Scott offers a rare insight into how to translate principles into action: from roadmaps, budgets to infrastructure and deployments. Plus a useful description at the end of why they fund teams, not projects.

All set in the context of organisation principles, which encourage a delivery culture that is focused on the needs of users, and encourages an open, learning culture.

[Tom Scott of Wellcome, on Medium]

5 other interesting things

1
Tim Berners-Lee thinks that the Web has failed instead of serving humanity. He describes the centralisation of the Web as 'a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human", and sets out what he's doing to help save it. On Vanity Fair.

2
After you've read that cautionary tale, try this one. How Zimbabwe has signed up with Chinese company CloudWalk technology to provide a mass facial recognition program. On ForeignPolicy.com

3
"We don't want a world of engineers, we want a world where all people and professions have technical intuition". 🙏Alix of the Engine Room writes on technical intuition for everyone. On Medium.

4
The Co-op's design manual has evolved into a design system. Thankfully for us, they design in the open.
On the Co-op digital blog.

5
Why you should stop publishing things as PDFs. Yes, I mean you. A helpful, detailed and practical explanation. On the GDS blog.

News from Public Digital

On the PD blog: A 3 month note to July 2018, covering where we've been working, our new office, and growing the team.

On Tom's blog: An interview Tom did for magazine Offscreen, setting out his journey from Wired to the BBC, to 'Fax Your MP' and GDS. On corporate hacking, user need and lots more.

Thanks to Sean Boots for this photo of the book on tour, outside the Canadian Parliament. Follow him on Twitter if you're interested to hear what the Canadian Digital Service is up to.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery is available to buy in print and on kindle 🤖, direct from the publisher, from Amazon, or Book Depository.

A brief introduction to the UN e-Government survey

The United Nations eGovernment Survey is conducted every two years, with the first published in 2001.

What makes it unique is it's breadth and inclusivity: 193 countries were analysed in the 2018 research, and the Index aims to include and give helpful assessments to countries from the most developed to the least.

For some context to that, 53 of the countries don't offer any transactional services online, with many countries also having minimal infrastructure to support digital services. Something to keep in mind when looking at the top ranked countries and thinking 'how is that right?'

The survey methodology evolves every iteration, and is undertaken by a group of experts, researchers and contributors from other organisations,

This year, the survey included 3 Indexes:

(1) The e-Government Development Index (EGDI) measures effectiveness across education, health, labour, employment, finance, social welfare and the environment.

It's a composite index based on three equally weighted indices:

Online Service Index (OSI) using data collected from an independent questionnaire that assesses national online presence. The exact methodology is a closely guarded secret, as the UN wants to encourage countries to look at outcomes for their context, rather than trying to game the rankings.
Telecommunications Infrastructure Index (TII) using data from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Includes internet users, telephone, mobile, and broadband subscriptions.
Human Capital Index (HCI) using data from UNESCO. Includes literacy rates and schooling.

(2) The e-Participation index (EPI) is a supplementary index to the EGDI, extending the survey to assess e-participation. It is a qualitative assessment based on the availability and relevance of participatory services available on government websites.

(3) A pilot Local Online Service Index (LOSI) has been created and included for the first time in 2018, in acknowledgment that many import public services are delivered at local level. The pilot study includes 40 cities worldwide. Moscow interestingly comes out on top.