ESTONIA
Digital Technology in action "Hack the crisis"
time monitoring of numerous indicators, including the number of confirmed cases (at the national level and by county), the number of tests carried out, as well as the number of deaths. The dashboard, which also exists as an application, has been developed on the Estonian government’s open data platform.
Since the late 1990s, Estonia has been developing initiatives and increasing investment in order to transform its public services and make them digitally accessible to every citizen. In 2016, Wired, the American magazine specialized in new technologies, described Estonia as "the world's most digitally advanced society".
2. The Suve chatbot for responding to citizens' questions
Its purpose was simple: each participant was invited to share an idea with the community that dealt with one of the issues brought up by the epidemic. The best ideas were to be selected by a jury of experts from the public and private sectors. Five winners would receive €5,000 to help them set up their project. The event was supported by several investment funds that could eventually commit additional funds to a project. In less than 48 hours, there were almost 1,000 participants. Around 30 projects were submitted. Since then, around 50 other countries have organised their own hackathons, some of them working directly with the Estonian organizers using the same name, "Hack the crisis". Four initiatives developed during the event have already been implemented in the country. 1. An interactive dashboard to monitor the statistical evolution of the epidemic A website called KoroonaKaart with an interactive map and a dashboard was launched. It allows any user to follow the evolution of the epidemic. Easy to consult and continuously updated, it offers real64 - Citizenship Navigation
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Within hours of the country's declaration of an emergency, the Estonian government announced a major hackathon called "Hack the crisis", to be held entirely online. The event took place March 13-15 and was organized by Accelerate Estonia, an innovation platform launched by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and Garage48, an Estonian start-up specializing in hackathons.
The chatbot, developed at the request of the government, answers the most frequently asked questions about the epidemic, in Estonian and in English.
This artificial intelligence service ensures that the information shared by the automatic responses is updated instantaneously and eliminates the need for users to perform searches. From a budgetary standpoint, the chatbot costs less than the multiple call centers that would need to be set up across different departments. Upon its development, the same chatbot was embedded on many websites: on the government’s site, the emergency page, and the Estonian information site for foreign investors, for example. It allows users to ask questions at any stage of their search and get a comprehensive answer without having to go to another site. Another advantage is that the number of questions that the chatbot can answer is constantly increasing. Unanswered questions - with a priority placed on the most frequently asked are forwarded to the eeBot team, which works directly with the government's communication department. Each developer has been invited to participate in the improvement of the tool thanks to a website that displays its main technical features.
3. An online questionnaire for the medical self-assessment of users The Ministry of Social Affairs has created an online questionnaire allowing anyone to make a preliminary assessment of their own medical situation and receive specific advice on the steps to take. By answering this questionnaire, individuals can also choose to share their information with the government, allowing for improvement of their data and thus for better monitoring of the evolution of the epidemic. 4. The COVID-help platform to organize volunteer care-giving The Estonian start-up Zelos, a volunteer team management platform created in 2019, has developed a platform called COVID-help, which connects elderly people in need of special assistance with a volunteer. From a technological point of view, Zelos operates according to the classic Software-as-a-Service (Saas) business model entirely hosted in a cloud. In less than forty-eight hours, the Zelos teams connected the IT system (backend) of their service to a dashboard designed by Trello, a famous online management tool. They then designed an API (Application Programming Interface) which lets each government website or application (frontend) incorporate this service into theirs. The system developed by Zelos manages the inventory of the requests filed either online or via a specifically-created call center, and organizes the work of the volunteers. An elderly person in need of someone to run errands can thus find a neighbor able to do so. More than 2,000 volunteers throughout Estonia have registered on this platform. The examples presented here are just a sample of the many digital initiatives launched in recent weeks. In just a few days, the Estonian government also made it possible for every employee to obtain a digital medical certificate so as not to overwhelm doctors’ offices or emergency services. Similarly, a platform has been set up to enable companies hardest hit by the economic crisis to put their employees to work at other companies in need of workers.
