Platformland #24

Viva la dématérialisation

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- Richard

Platform news

• 🇮🇳Unified Health Interface (UHI) is a dedicated data exchange for healthcare in India. It aims to replicate what UPI did for payments. Not just creating efficiencies, but also new types of public value. Is putting the infrastructure work before the service design the better strategy for governments? Thoughts welcome in the comments.

• 🇫🇷France is implementing a digital driving licence - part of a strategy of ‘dématérialisation’ of analogue processes. Systematic digitisation of paper process feels like a better bet than service by service transformation.

• 🇸🇪Sweden’s BankId is gaining a digital ID card feature for use in person. BankID has historically been used for online authentication and signatures in services across the public and private sectors. Users can activate the ID card by photographing then scanning the NFC chip in their passport. Shows that digital identities can be backed by government, but delivered elsewhere.

• 🇺🇸Driving licences and identity cards in the US state of Georgia can now be added directly to Apple Wallet. As part of the incremental rollout, there is a dedicated lane at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport for users wishing to use it to board flights. As previously noted, Apple and the TSA's rollout could become a text-book example of starting small and delivering value early.

• 🇿🇦South Africa is also joining the long list of countries with digital licences.

• 🇮🇳The Unique Identification Authority of India is in the process of hiring a new CTO

The practice of platforms

• 🤖How Estonia is implementing proactive digital based on the code and learnings from Ukraine’s Diia app. Note: Luukas Ilves also uses the phrase “dematerialising documents”.

• 📜This is what a cross-government mandate for cross-government service design looks like. In this case, it’s for ’recovering from a [natural] disaster’.

Designing the seams

• 🤖This video shows an example of automated eligibility from e-Aid welfare payments in Ukraine. Eligibility checks are done automatically using definitive data registries accessed over the Trembita data exchange. Service design like this is possible because of the underlying infrastructure - should government be attempting ‘whole problem’ service design without it?