Stockholm meets x-road

On Monday 22 May, some 40 IT managers and others interested in digitization gathered in Stockholm City Hall to learn more about the Estonian national platform x-road, a digital portal that covers virtually all contact areas a citizen may need - from healthcare and doctor contacts to tax returns and car registers. How has Estonia managed to become so successful at digital social good, and what can we in Sweden learn and perhaps emulate?

Estonian Ambassador Merle Pajula started by explaining why Estonia built the digital platform with the citizen in mind, and how it also cut all ties with Russia and changed its legislation. The basic principle of x-road is that all government data about you as a citizen should be available through the platform - you don't have to give your consent for the sharing or use of information about you to each individual government agency separately - while you yourself own the rights over your data and can choose yourself that a certain type of information about yourself should not be available and public.

Külle Tärnov from Tehnopol then gave us an overview of how the platform is structured and what services are offered digitally to Estonian citizens.

Participants asked many difficult questions, most of which Külle was able to answer in detail, and were keen to follow up the seminar with a more practical workshop in the fall. Two areas are of particular interest: the technology itself and policy and legislative issues. We hope to be able to come back with further exchanges of knowledge and experience related to this!