Envisioning digital states as a future Ontario Digital Service intern
Our lives are increasingly, ubiquitously read by machines, not people, which make assumptions, analyzes our data, makes suggestions for our next purchase, next video, next swipe, next decision. When our psychology as humans meets the technology around us, which then facilitates our connections to others, which then facilitates our access to goods and services, when then facilitates our access to money, which then facilitates our opportunities, which then, which then, which then…What does this mean when it comes to the public sphere, civic engagement? Civil disobedience? Digital participatory decision-making? What is the future of community development, community memory? What does this look like moving beyond online and real-world communities to community-developed, community-integrated technologies? What are the many ways this can take form? How do we think about these legal, socio-economic, philosophical, technological shifts?
As a student in TalTech’s Technology Governance & Digital Transformation Master’s program, I’m interested in understanding, questioning, critiquing and creating from a place that questions the ways we engage with the digital, how we connect, our access points to digital space — not just your phone or laptop or gatekeepers like Google, but as a public, as a civil society; the digital as a public good, a public service. If technology becomes the intermediary between the language we read in, the friends we make, the teachers we learn from, and more, increasingly, the services and access we get — this is a space to interrogate and to shape as a public. My professors, from Carlota Perez to Wolfgang Dreschler to Eric Reinert, understand this need to question innovation and techno-economic development and have honed my eye to the underlying actors that can shape it ethically.
What does this shift look like around the world? What are the ways governance can look like as a website? As an internet of things? As a chatbot? As a digital community organization? A technological sou-sou using Bitcoin? Digital avatars as hieroglyphs rather than icons? How is open data used in these contexts? What roles, yet unexplored, can open data play in the public domain for service design, for community development, for policy? What are the dangers in this space and in what ways is history repeating itself? If machines are assisting at key decision points in our lives, what does the future of techno-economics look like? What does equal distribution of resources and wealth look like in technologically-based societies? To what extent should government develop digitally and intervene in society techno-economically?
These curiosities have shaped my experiences in Tallinn as I participated in the digital innovation culture here, three of which are burned in mind. First, the Smart-Up Baltic Sea Region Innovation Camps, funded by the European Regional Development Fund. This innovation camp travels to innovation hubs around the Baltic Sea Region and invites attendees to develop as well as propose socially engaging solutions to civic issues of participation and building inclusive smart cities. I saw topics of artificial intelligence in smart cities, participatory decision-making, and healthy aging, all come to fore through collective ideation, design thinking, and respecting the knowledge in the room to arrive at new solutions. The group I was in thought of ways to engage vulnerable, marginalized dense communities in regions outside the capital of Estonia in processes of innovation — one of our ideas focused on creating hackathons and night markets in the lounge rooms of apartment buildings in these areas.
Second, the Future of Work series at Riigikogu, the Estonian Parliament, affirmed and evaporated many of my assumptions about the topic of meaningful working life. But more importantly posed many thorny questions, to which I do not know the answers: what is the legal status of the future employee? What does mobility and work look like in the future, beyond Estonia’s famed e-residency? What impact does migration have on taxes? What is the social texture of employment friendly flexibility within the European Union? How will automation impact the ethics of meaningful work? As work is pivotal to our daily existence, these questions will shape how we grow not only as citizens but as human beings.
Third, FabCity Foundation’s hosting of the Blockchain for Distributed Design and Manufacturing Conference in TalTech’s Mektory, a business innovation space. This event interrogated the challenges of introducing blockchain into the design process of digital fabrication in local makerspaces. I volunteered and helped host the event. Key to this conversation and a repeated concern throughout, was the idea of introducing ownership in collaborative spaces — who benefits and why? When tokens, such as bitcoin on the blockchain, are introduced into common spaces which previously relied on volunteer labour and free knowledge, what are all the ways they become extractive? From whom and to whom? In what ethical ways should we transact design digitally? Here, this was a particular concern as the international FabCity network can easily usurp the knowledge of less developed countries while providing very little benefit in return. As work becomes increasingly virtual and international in nature, this is a question to explore not only in the digital creation space but within migration patterns themselves and how they manifest digitally through remittances, online international education models, international digital labour unions, digital citizenship, and more.
Relating these experiences back to my studies, every government service delivered to the public is developed through a rigorous service design process riddled with key decisions. These events, the people and communities I met as well as the ideas I engaged with are not necessarily unique to Estonia, but the solutions are specific to the people of this country. My master’s thesis recognizes that these processes are undergoing a transformative digital change which aims to allow for public oversight, accountability and transparency in the decision-making process within the Canadian context. In a recent initiative by the Government of Canada, called Open Government, current processes are shifting to a different model which aims to “increase access to government data and information to the Canadian public and the businesses community” through “open data,” “open information,” and “open dialogue”. In addition, the Canadian Digital Service was launched in 2017 to formalize civic engagement through open government into the process of digital product development. For open government to engage citizens and develop digital products which serve the public, it requires a digitally literate population. This is currently not the case. This is recognized by the Government of Canada, which invested $79 million in digital literacy for vulnerable groups in 2017. While the vision of open government is critical to accountability and transparency in a democracy, it fails to do so if majority of the public is not digitally versed. The result of my study will be a thorough analysis of the processes which comprise “open” government, the various types of blockchain-based and machine learning-based decision support systems and ways to increase digital literacy for effective civic engagement. Furthermore, it will be a resource and tool for future participatory decision-making processes in civic technology guided by my studies in Estonia, but grounded in the socio-economic and cultural context of Canada.
Now, I have the honour and opportunity to apply this knowledge as an intern within my home country, Canada at the Ontario Digital Service in my second semester of my Master’s program. This Service engages 14.19 million Ontarians by creating and shaping digital services and governance policy. I hope to learn from my future colleagues in the Service and contribute to providing better, inclusive, accessible digital services to Ontarians. As I venture through Taltech’s Technology Governance Masters program and through this internship requirement, these are the ideas I want to interrogate, prototype, test, analyze, and question. My time in Estonia, especially during the centenary anniversary of the Republic, cemented my commitment to the digital governance conversation, a citizen-first digital ethos, and delicious Estonian chocolate — ma olen tänulik! I look forward to not being perfectly correct in my answers, but rather most exploratory and positively impactful in discovering a plurality of outcomes, a plethora of approaches to the future of digital states.
*This article was adapted, by TalTech’s request, from excerpts of Lequanne’s writing for her technology consultancy digital publica; learn more here: digitalpublica.com.
