We set an ambitious challenge at Sprint 13; transform government in just 400 working days. Today Sprint 14 marked the halfway point, and the results are terrific;

• the transformation programme has wrapped up its discovery phase
• four public betas have been used by more than 100,000 people
• in Glasgow the Student Loans team are iterating and improving their live service every day

We even saw ministers test working services – Alphas and Betas – in front of a live audience. Mike Beaven and his transformation team have published more about what they’ve done this month, and you can read more detail on the team’s blog.

The strategy is delivery – transforming government by making things, putting them in front of users, improving them and shipping them.

And we’re delivering by focusing on the things that matter: opening up the supply chain, enabling open and agile teams in departments, and putting a stop to big IT projects. We’re focusing on user needs, not government needs.

We’ll have more to share from the event over the next week, but for now a huge thanks to everyone who took part.

There are 200 days to go – let’s keep delivering amazing things.

Last December we asked for your help in selecting the standard formats for documents produced by the government. We published two challenges on the Standards Hub – challenges are problems that open standards might help to solve.

Publishing these on the Standards Hub means that we can be transparent about how we select standards and be open to ideas from the broader standards community, implementers, suppliers and users.

Thanks to you, we have received some great feedback on standard formats for documents.

As well as hearing from you through the Standards Hub, we’ve also been conducting a parallel discovery project involving internal government staff, citizens and businesses. This has helped us to learn more about how people use digital information. So, here’s an update of what we’ve learned from them so far and what will happen next as we work towards reaching a conclusion on the document format challenges.

As part of our parallel discovery project we have:

• analysed feedback on using government documents that we received through GOV.UK customer support and transformation projects
• interviewed people in government to understand what they use electronic documents for, how they work, and who they share with
• carried out a survey of 650 citizens and businesses, to ask them about their experience when using documents produced by the government

What we learnt from people inside government

Our interviews showed us that some of the things we expected to find about users’ behaviour were correct, but also added insight about things we hadn’t considered. So far, we’ve spoken to people in 10 different departments, including staff who work in IT, statistics, finance, legal and human resources teams. We learnt about some very specific user needs relating to the type of information people work with, and have been using this to help develop proposals about which standards we should use.

For example, people working on policies, guidance documents, and publications in general, tend to work with multiple documents at a time; often needing to be able to exchange documents internally and to collate feedback from different sources.

Staff working on government statistics may need to release data to the public and export the data they manipulate within specialised software into more common formats that can be used by any audience.

When it comes to accessing, collating and sharing information, unfortunately these tasks don’t always go smoothly. Occasionally people can’t open files created by colleagues or by people outside government. Sometimes the content gets corrupted and can’t be read properly. Government users are telling us that when they do encounter these problems, they are mostly due to a lack of consistency in the formats used to save or export documents. This means people have to find alternative routes to read these documents or to get the correct formatting; a cause of delays and frustration.

What we learnt from people outside government

The feedback we received from people outside government showed similar results. We received 650 responses to a survey of users who viewed, downloaded or edited government documents available online, including professional users such as business owners, lawyers and accountants.

We asked about problems with viewing, downloading, opening, reading, editing or submitting government documents. In about a third of these cases, respondents said that they had issues sometimes or often.

Where users have problems, they often cite issues with internet connectivity or not being able to read documents properly. For example, sometimes documents won’t open, or some of the text is missing or overlapping. Some of these problems are due to format incompatibility and occasionally users have had to call, email or visit government offices in order to obtain the documents they need in a format they can access.

Access to government information is made easier by an ever-growing amount being made available on web pages rather than in downloadable documents. However, some users currently need downloadable information. We need to provide formats that users can work with.

What happens next

Based on this research and the feedback we received through the Standards Hub, Stephen Kelly, who is leading this work, has now published proposals about which document format standards are being considered for use in government:

Sharing or collaborating with government documents – proposal
Viewing government document – proposal

If you want to know more about what happens next, you can read about how we select open standards. In the meantime, if you have a view on the proposals, you can give us your feedback through the Standards Hub until 26 February.

Continue the conversation with @GDSteam on Twitter and sign up for email alerts. Need more than 140 characters? Find out how to contact us.

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Lately, I have been getting a lot of questions about Healthcare.gov. People want to know why it cost between two and four times as much money to create a broken website than to build the original iPhone. It’s an excellent question. However, in my experience, understanding why a project went wrong tends to be far less valuable than understanding why a project went right. So, rather than explaining why paying anywhere between $300 million and $600 million to build the first iteration of Healthcare.gov was a bad idea, I would like to focus attention on a model for software-enabled government that works and could serve as a template for a more effective U.S. government.

Early in my career as a venture capitalist, we invested in Skype and I went on the board. One of the many interesting aspects of Skype was that it was based in Estonia, a small country with a difficult history. Over the centuries, Estonia has been invaded by many countries including Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and, most recently, the Soviet Union. Now independent but well aware of their past, the Estonian people are humble, pragmatic, and proud of their freedom, but dubious of overly optimistic forecasts. In some ways, they have the ideal culture for technology adoption: hopeful, yet appropriately skeptical.

Supported by this culture, the Estonian government has built the technology platform that everyone wishes we had here. To explain how they did it, I asked an Estonian and one of our Entrepreneurs in Residence, Sten Tamkivi, to tell the story. His response is below.

— Ben Horowitz, co-founder and partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz

***

Estonia may not show up on Americans’ radar too often. It is a tiny country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population. As a friend from India recently quipped, “What is there to govern?”

What makes this tiny country interesting in terms of governance is not just that the people can elect their parliament online or get tax overpayments back within two days of filing their returns. It is also that this level of service for citizens is not the result of the government building a few websites. Instead, Estonians started by redesigning their entire information infrastructure from the ground up with openness, privacy, security, and ‘future-proofing’ in mind.

The first building block of e-government is telling citizens apart. This sounds blatantly obvious, but alternating between referring to a person by his social security number, taxpayer number, and other identifiers doesn’t cut it. Estonia uses a simple, unique ID methodology across all systems, from paper passports to bank records to government offices and hospitals. A citizen with the personal ID code 37501011234 is a male born in the 20th century (3) in year ’75 on January 1 as the 123rd baby of that day. The number ends with a computational checksum to easily detect typos.

For these identified citizens to transact with each other, Estonia passed the Digital Signatures Act in 2000. The state standardized a national Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which binds citizen identities to their cryptographic keys, and now doesn’t care if any Tiit and Toivo (to use common Estonian names) sign a contract in electronic form with certificates or plain ink on paper. A signature is a signature in the eyes of the law.

As a quirky side effect, this foundational law also forced all decentralized government systems to become digital “by market demand.” No part of the Estonian government can turn down a citizen’s digitally signed document and demand a paper copy instead. As citizens opt for convenience, bureaucrats see a higher inflow of digital forms and are self-motivated to invest in systems that will help them manage the process. Yet a social worker in a small village can still provide the same service with no big investment by handling the small number of digitally signed email attachments the office receives.

To prevent this system from becoming obsolete in the future, the law did not lock in the technical nuances of digital signatures. In fact, implementation has been changing over time. Initially, Estonia put a microchip in the traditional ID cards issued to every citizen for identification and domestic travel inside the European Union. The chip carries two certificates: one for legal signatures and the other for authentication when using a website or service that recognizes the government’s identification system (online banking, for example). Every person over 15 is required to have an ID card, and there are now over 1.2 million active cards. That’s close to 100-percent penetration of the population.

As mobile adoption in Estonia rapidly approached the current 144 percent (the third-highest in Europe), digital signatures adapted too. Instead of carrying a smartcard reader with their computer, Estonians can now get a Mobile ID-enabled SIM card from their telecommunications operator. Without installing any additional hardware or software, they can access secure systems and affix their signatures by simply typing PIN codes on their mobile phone.

As of this writing, between ID cards and mobile phones, more than a million Estonians have authenticated 230 million times and given 140 million legally binding signatures. Besides the now-daily usage of this technology for commercial contracts and bank transactions, the most high-profile use case has been elections. Since becoming the first country in the world to allow online voting nationwide in 2005, Estonia has used the system for both parliamentary and European Parliament elections. During parliamentary elections in 2011, online voting accounted for 24 percent of all votes. (Citizens voted from 105 countries in total; I submitted my vote from California.)

To accelerate innovation, the state tendered building and securing the digital signature-certificate systems to private parties, namely a consortium led by local banks and telecoms. And that’s not where the public-private partnerships end: Public and private players can access the same data-exchange system (dubbed X-Road), enabling truly integrated e-services.

A prime example is the income-tax declarations Estonians “fill” out. Quote marks are appropriate here, because when an average Estonian opens the submission form once a year, it usually looks more like a review wizard: “next – next – next – submit.” This is because data has been moving throughout the year. When employers report employment taxes every month, their data entries are linked to people’s tax records too. Charitable donations reported by non-profits are recorded as deductions for the giver in the same fashion. Tax deductions on mortgages are registered from data interchange with commercial banks. And so forth. Not only is the income-tax rate in the country a flat 21 percent, but Estonians get tax overpayments put back on their bank accounts (digitally transferred, of course) within two days of submitting their forms.

This liquid movement of data between systems relies on a fundamental principle to protect people’s privacy: Without question, it is always the citizen who owns his or her data and retains the right to control access to that data. For example, in the case of fully digital health records and prescriptions, people can granularly assign access rights to the general practitioners and specialized doctors of their choosing. And in scenarios where they can’t legally block the state from seeing their information, as with Estonian e-policemen using real-time terminals, they at least get a record of who accessed their data and when. If an honest citizen learns that an official has been snooping on them without a valid reason, the person can file an inquiry and get the official fired.

Moving everything online does generate security risks on not just a personal level, but also a systematic and national level. Estonia, for instance, was the target of The Cyberwar of 2007, when well-coordinated botnet attacks following some political street riots targeted government, media, and financial sites and effectively cut the country off from Internet connections with the rest of the world for several hours. Since then, however, Estonia has become the home of NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves has become one of the most vocal cybersecurity advocates on the world stage.

There is also a flip-side to the fully digitized nature of the Republic of Estonia: having the bureaucratic machine of a country humming in the cloud increases the economic cost of a potential physical assault on the state. Rather than ceasing to operating in the event of an invasion, the government could boot up a backup replica of the digital state and host it in some other friendly European territory. Government officials would be quickly re-elected, important decisions made, documents issued, business and property records maintained, births and deaths registered, and even taxes filed by those citizens who still had access to the Internet.

The Estonian story is certainly special. The country achieved re-independence after 50 unfortunate years of Soviet occupation in 1991, having missed much of the technological progress made by the Western world in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. -’80s, including checkbooks and mainframe computers. Nevertheless, the country jumped right on the mid-’90s bandwagon of TCP/IP-enabled web apps. During this social reset, Estonians also decided to throw their former communist leaders overboard and elect new leadership, often ministers in their late-20s capable of disruptive thinking.

But then again, all this was 20 years ago. Estonia has by many macroeconomic and political standards become a “boring European state,” stable and predictable, if still racing to close the gap with Old Europe from its time behind the Iron Curtain. Still, Estonia is a start-up country—not just by life stage, but by mindset.

And this is what United States, along with many other countries struggling to get the Internet, could learn from Estonia: the mindset. The willingness to get the key infrastructure right and continuously re-invent it. Before you build a health-insurance site, you need to look at what key components must exist for such a service to function optimally: signatures, transactions, legal frameworks, and the like.

Ultimately, the states that create these kinds of environments will be best positioned to attract the world’s increasingly mobile citizens.