Governments Should Be General Managers, Not Engineers
Last October, a coalition of the Toronto, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, to come up with a $50 million design for a dozen acres on the waterfront’s far eastern end.¹ This mega-scale collaboration between the public and private sector is nothing new historically, as Amazon is continuing since 2017 the search for its soul-mate. Walking down the streets of New York, a new yorker runs into several artifacts of such collaboration, from citibikes to wifi kiosks.
The origin of this trend is that the public and private sectors each have what the other wants. The public sector can bend the red-taping, while the private sector can lend its expertise for deploying and maintaining an online platform. The public sector can save cost by leveraging the private sector’s mature platform, while the private sector can collect valuable, and probably sensitive, data.
But can we trust private enterprise in all our data? Estonian government still maintains the fundamental functionalities of the e-government. Not only is e-Estonia project an important part of the digital society, but it also serves citizens by fetching and pushing sensitive data, from the tax return to identity. Therefore, the collaboration of two sectors must concurrently plan for the data governance.
¹ Scola, Nancy, et al. “Google Is Building a City of the Future in Toronto. Would Anyone Want to Live There?” POLITICO Magazine, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/29/google-city-technology-toronto-canada-218841.
² e-Estonia, “e-Identity.” e-Estonia, e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/.
