Estonia Sharing Its Finnish-Made E-Government Solution With Finland

paavo512 writes "For the last decade or so, Estonia has developed a national electronic data exchange layer called X-Road. Is is based on national electronic ID cards and allows creation of common electronic services like founding a company, declaring taxes or e-voting. Every day, over 800,000 enquiries are made via X-Road (the population of Estonia is 1.3M). According to the PM of Estonia, the solution is saving 2% of national GDP annually. The Estonian ID card technology was originally imported from Finland; however, it appears Finns have for 10 years failed to come up with any significant e-services making use of them. So it is now agreed that Estonian X-Road solution will be expanding to Finland as well."

Re:how does this work on

[fatphil]

I'm not a big user (e.g. I sign my company's annual reports once a year), but I know other poeple who use it a lot more, and I've never known the ID card infrastructure to be down. That's one of the benefits of a small country - we'll never have to cope with a third of a billion people wanting to use a system.

The biggest issue I had was java/driver/OS incompatibilities which mean that I can only use the card and card-reader on my g/f's x86_64 machine, not my POWER machine, nor my x86 laptop (all running linux). Anyone with delusions that java actually actually runs everywhere at this juncture should be taken outside and put out of my misery.

Re:It's no wonder...

[jones_supa]

Angry Birds.