For some weird and unexplainable reason, people normally expect better services from private companies than from their own governments. This is not the case for our citizens in Estonia. https://qz.com/1535549/living-on-the-blockchain-is-a-game-changer-for-estonian-citizens/
@yogthos I met a lot of officials from Estonia when I worked on implementation of electronic signature in Poland. There are many factors to their success, but the main is -- they have 1.5m citizens. Doing a project for 1.5m citizens is hundreds of times easier than doing it for 40 or 80m citizens. The latter is possible, but requires much higher skills.
@kravietz sure, but a country of 80 million obviously has more resources than a country of 1.5 million as well. And the cost of scaling is not linearly correlated with the population increase for obvious reasons.
@yogthos A surprising fact about public sector is that the cost is indeed non-linear, but it's negatively correlated to the population size ;) Reasons explained in the other comments.
@kravietz [citation needed]
@yogthos did you? ;)
@kravietz I'm saying that cost of technology doesn't rise linearly with the number of users. This is not a controversial statement for anybody working in tech sector. If that was the case no tech companies could ever scale.
You're saying that something fundamental changes with tech being developed in public sector, and I don't see that happening myself.
I used to work in the private sector and now I'm working in the public one. The bureaucracy and efficiency are very much comparable.
And here's a whole paragraph on Estonia from that article:
"As for the general architecture of the QES, Estonia is a notable exception from the negative trend. In Estonia, the government implemented a reasonably complete and consistent product (DigiDoc), which started from clearly defined objectives, an open technical specification, software packages and an internet portal"
And they indeed did that - a whole consistent and usable product.
