Platformland #27

Reasoned deliberation

Sep 16, 2023

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- Richard

Platform news

🌍 The open Identity Exchange is trying to standardise datatypes held against a digital identity. It is at least refreshingly honest about competing standards e.g. for name and address it says: “Too many standards”. It has excluded things like right to work and visas.
🇬🇧 GOV.UK One Login will support in-person verification for people unable to verify their identity wholly online.
🇯🇵 Japan’s MyNumber digital identity system is having some issues with linking to health insurance records. There has been a recent call by some academics to reset the whole programme by creating a new digital team along the lines of the one setup to reset Obamacare.
🇮🇳The DigiLocker digital wallet is getting Google Files support for accessing Indian government credentials stored. (Includes GIF of how it works).
🌎 Google and MOSIP have joined the Linux Foundation’s Open Digital Wallet
🇦🇺Australia has legislated to end the need for paper based signatures. Rules around digital signatures and video witnessing introduced during COVID have been made permanent.
🌏 The G20 has backed the idea of digital public infrastructure

Software is politics

📈 US government agencies are struggling to adapt to the consumption-based pricing of cloud providers thanks to an act from 1884
that prevents them from spending more money than has been appropriated by Congress. The result is they have to guess in advance.
🇪🇺 The EU has designated Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft as ‘gatekeepers’ under the Digital Markets Act. Meaning they will have to start/stop doing these things (it includes not tracking “users outside of the gatekeepers' core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising, without effective consent having been granted“).

🏚️ Changes to the Land Registry in England and Wales are taking up to 2 years. There are also delays in Scotland. Many of the changes to the database for England and Wales are still instigated by paper form.
🪪 The High Court in the state of Telangana has reiterated that people cannot be denied their rights just because they don’t have an Aadhaar digital identity.

Evolving notification and payment platforms

GOV.UK Pay have published a strategy. It’s full of good stuff, but got me thinking about what the true long-term strategy of government platforms like this should be (given an appropriate political mandate and funding obvs). For me the value is the new classes of product/feature that scales make possible. For payments that’s about having a single view of all money in and out of government and the equivalent to something like Amazon’s account balance (why can’t you pay for a licence things directly out of your tax bill?). For notifications, the long-term strategy should be to pivot into something user facing that has a complete(ish) view of communications with government along the lines of the Universal Credit Journal?

User-space vs government space: where do services live as they get smarter?

Let’s assume that, overtime, government websites/apps start to take on some of the affordances of digital assistants (make recommendations, fill in forms, explain complexity). Where will it feel like they ‘live’ (for lack of a better term)? Will it be ‘the government’ telling, setting tasks, sharing what decisions? Or something closer to a user that asks, requesting next steps and explaining outcomes?

Long reads/watches

Computational Law and Digital Trade: Envisioning the Legal-Technical Convergence

A good discussion on the state of computational law / law as code in the context of international trade. I like the quote from Craig Atkinson that defines it as “more easily understood by humans and automated by computer systems“ as it aspires to being more legible and more useful.

It makes an interesting point about the role of user reviews of government services on things like app stores and how they can help meet the rule of law principle “that public institutions sponsor and facilitate reasoned deliberation and participation in public affairs.”

The call for design to do the hard work of explaining the law, not just getting a proximate outcome for users. “It is about helping people understand the situation that they are in, what rules apply to them, what the consequences of these rules will be, and what kind of behaviour to take in response to these rules. This type of communication design is a legal design challenge.“