
How Estonia became a leader in technology - jayant123
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/07/economist-explains-21?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/howdidestoniabecomealeaderintechnology
======
trymas
One little critique I have, is about Estonia's e-voting.

That's a total black box technology. Basically what they did is said "ok,
let's vote using internet, and we'll believe results are true". They do not
know is someone hacked them, etc. Voting data from the servers was transferred
using personal computer and flash drive of some random sysadmin. It's
horrible. In my opinion, they do e-voting for the sake of doing it and being
'first'. Though big thumbs up for e-citizenship.

IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies. 3G works almost
anywhere, 4G in cities. Internet is cheap and super fast (if you do not have
100Mbps connection - you have slow internet connection). You do your taxes,
get your doctor appointments using internet and so on, for a very long time
(since 2010 at least). All Baltic states have prominent startups, though
Estonians where first to sell startup for big bucks (Skype).

~~~
mvanvoorden
It's not black box technology, they're entire government systems are open
source.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/estonia-
publishes...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/estonia-publishes-
its-e-voting-source-code-on-github/)

~~~
patrickmn
Not sure what to think about this: [https://github.com/vvk-
ehk/evalimine/blob/098ff93f9f159c977d...](https://github.com/vvk-
ehk/evalimine/blob/098ff93f9f159c977d60584606a1dabce755f5f1/ivote-
server/hes/vote_analyzer.py)

~~~
imre
geeez, they should really start using python 3 instead, python 2 is so last
decade

------
hornbill
_Estonia’s success is not so much about ditching legacy technology as it is
about shedding “legacy thinking”_

This is the key. I think many people does not understand this or does not
approve of this. By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided
but the procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the
process remains tedious as ever.

~~~
johnchristopher
> By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided but the
> procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the process
> remains tedious as ever.

what's your point ? Ditching the process of having a government ?

~~~
Kaali
It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original
form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer. Where rethinking
the actual process might actually reduce the actual interaction that is
required from a person, to an automated system which can induce information
that would otherwise be filled manually.

In Finland when filling your tax forms online, the form comes prefilled with
numbers that are calculated from your tax info of the previous year. If there
are no changes in your salary or benefits, you can just agree to the the form
and it is done, without typing out anything.

~~~
kybernetyk
>It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original
form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer.

In Germany as a business owner I'm required to file taxes electronically. But
then in the last step I still have to print out some of forms and send them
via snail mail to the German tax office.

And don't get me started about registering a new company. It takes weeks and
you need to visit a notary. (Coincidentally last week I created a UK Ltd to
hold some intellectual property. It took 20 minutes and I paid the fee via
PayPal. And the next day everything was ready to go.)

There are really different school of thoughts when it comes to administration.
And you can't just slap an electronic form ontop of an over-regulated dinosaur
and automagically become a modern & agile institution.

~~~
mvanvoorden
This is probably because they haven't found a way yet to put a stamp on a
digital form ;)

~~~
tomjen3
Really? Scammers could do that ten years ago.

I assumed Germany was more organized than that.

------
inglor
Estonians are everywhere - that's why they're successful. Everywhere I was in
an accelerator, reporters and people from Estonia came in order to learn how
things are done - this is a long and deliberate process.

Once an Estonian journalist even wrote about our company - was fun!
[http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid-
leiut...](http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid-leiutasid-
finantsnou-andva-telefoniaplikatsiooni)

Other countries in the area (namely Finland) also do this and fly around -
we've had teams from Italy come visit us in Tel Aviv and other countries.

I can only imagine how it feels in the valley and how much visits you get.

~~~
atmosx
LOL, you got this all wrong. The government is pushing technology quite hard
on Estonians (for a variety of justified reasons) THAT's why you see many
Estonian teams floating around.

------
ivanhoe
This link from the article comments is also worth reading to get a full
picture, which seems to be not all that great:
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/meet-doteebubble-the-
myster...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/meet-doteebubble-the-mysterious-
estonian-start-up-critic-who-throws-cold-water-on-government-backed-ventures/)

~~~
dear
"In many cases, the companies that received government money were being run by
people with no experience in the field. We wrote about an incubator for gaming
startups, where none of the people running the incubator had ever worked in
the gaming industry! Then there was the incubator that received nearly 700,000
euros from the government to set up in a small town of 20,000 people to
promote creative arts startups, which as far as we can tell was just a few
women making dresses and jewelry."

------
return0
(2013).

Also, how has Estonia as a country benefited from this so far? The GDP/person
seems to be stalling , although generally growing fast since the 00s.
[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries/EE?display=graph)

------
Sami_Lehtinen
It's just like the lean startup process. In Finland and especially in Sweden,
things are talked being talked about for years or decades. We need to plan,
think, prepare, study, blah blah, whatever. You know what? Meanwhile Estonians
did it, actually several years ago. Skipping (or doing really leanly) most of
these major time and resource wasters.

~~~
ido
I've never lived/worked in either but it seems both Finland and Sweden have
really successful and huge tech industries though?

~~~
inglor
Finland was really hurt when Nokia fell - startups at scale and as a national
priority are relatively new there. They're spending a lot of money and they
have an excellent education system compared to a lot of other places but this
sort of mental shift takes time.

Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good,
working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at
founding a startup is considered a shame. Contrary to that - in Israel failure
at founding a startup is considered great because you tried and forfeited a
comfy life for a while which people will respect you for.

Finland is spending a lot of money to change that perception - there are whole
institutions that are working on it and they're doing a really good job but it
takes time.

~~~
tsiki
>Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good,
working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at
founding a startup is considered a shame.

Maybe 10-15 years ago. Now with the rise of successful startups and the
national interest towards them, working at a startup is considered good and
trendy and rather, most of the CS students avoid large companies. Even my mom
was proud and supportive when I cofounded a startup, and she's always been the
one to advocate for a good and stable job.

------
DyslexicAtheist
first time Estonia was on my radar was in 1998 on a Linux Conference in
Singapore. The number of companies present from a small country like Estonia
was astonishing. They have come a long way since and really know how to foster
entrepreneurship and the local tech community. A lot of governments (sigh
France) could learn from their hands-off approach.

------
ommunist
@trymas/ "IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies." <\- I
can only agree that they are in the forefront of using IT, not producing
anything noticeable, with rare exceptions like Skype messenger, MikroTik
routers and FlyZip algorhythm.

------
igravious
Note to editors: this is from 2013!

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flatfilefan
Leader in technology, but laggard in population dynamics? (depopulated to the
1970s level recently)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eesti_rahvaarv_1970-2009....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eesti_rahvaarv_1970-2009.png)

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EugeneOZ
Didn't read because of huge popup window.

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jkot
Estonia is basically one big city, no country side. It is easy to score high
in broadband speed etc, if no rural areas are decreasing average speed.

~~~
dullgiulio
Wrong.
[https://www.google.ee/maps/@58.6,25,7z](https://www.google.ee/maps/@58.6,25,7z)

