Signal 1: X-Road & Government data interoperability

Local and national governments around the world struggle to effectively manage data about their citizens. Collecting data, how and where to securely store it, sharing information between different agencies and government levels, keep it updated, and do all this without compromising citizens’ privacy is a challenge. Often, bureaucratic and technology barriers make data cooperation between agencies difficult and each of them end up asking citizens for the same information multiple times. This translates into replication of data, undermines its reliability, and generates low standard public services.

To solve this problem, Estonia created X-Road. A data exchange layer that coordinates information sharing between government agencies, and even private companies. Information about citizens is stored in a decentralized manner, each agency only holds the data that falls in its domain, and through X-Road they can access information from other agencies when needed. A key part of the platform is that citizens have full oversight of their data: they can see which X-Road participants store information about them, which can access it, and which have already accessed it and when.

This is years ahead of what we are used in government, and it’s exciting to think how it might expand to other countries.