How much progress did Bulgaria make in e-governance and transparency in two years.

1. Electronic Governance
Bozhidar Bozhanov
Steps in the Right Direction?

2. About me
• E-government adviser to the deputy prime
minister Rumyana Bachvarova
• Software engineer
• @bozhobg
• http://techblog.bozho.net
• http://blog.bozho.net

3. What is e-governance?
• The government not bothering you with its
stuff
• ...and making it easy to request stuff
• ...and optimizing its workflows
• ...and making itself transparent and
predictable

4. Example: certificates
• Citizens are delivering paper.
• I know my marital status and my address
• Certificates must die
• And be replaced by real-time queries

5. Source: Disney

6. What are we doing?
• Electronic governance
• Electronic identification
• Open data
• E-voting*

7. Status quo (2 yrs ago)
• Administrations = silos
• Almost no integration, few web services
• Sometimes - overnight replication
• Poor quality software
• No unified way to identify citizens
• Digitized paper processes
• Little understanding of “data”
• No coordination

8. EGov - step 1

9. Laws and programming
• Structured
• (semi-)formalized language
• if, for-each
• diffs
• Turns out: programmers are good at law-
making :)

10. Electronic governance act
• New state agency for electronic
governance
• Horizontal control and coordination
• Public register for all projects
• Integrate everything
• Open source everything
• Open data everywhere
(also, gov.bg)

12. Mandatory integration
• Data obtained from primary registers
• How?
• Web services
• No ESB
• Checking legal grounds for access
• Audit log, notify citizen for access

13. Open source
• Every piece of code written as part of a
government-procured project must be open
source
• From day one
• On GitHub (+ state-owned repo)
• OSI/FSF licenses only
• => higher quality, reuse, security, lower cost
• Practical challenges

14. Experts program
• A-la freelance experts to be hired by the
state agency
• IT conscription :)
• not too high a salary; lots of bureaucracy
• ...but a chance for impact
• flexible
• 18F-like
• Also: “State system operator”

15. Ordinance
• Web services
• Audit trail (unmodifiable)
• Privacy (no one can simply “read”)
• Usability (mobile, optimized processes)
• Security
• Technical specification template

16. EGov roadmap
• A.k.a. What are we building till 2018/2020
• Rebuilding/upgrading all major registers
• A “Register-as-a-service”
• E-ID
• Government cloud
• E-services
• E-voting

17. Electronic identification
• Introduced a new law
• and its ordinance
• what is “electronic identity”?
• Key enabler
• Mandatory for all systems
• De-facto Single Sign On for gov services
• Used to request all services
• QES still continues to exist
• Privacy-preserving

18. Multiple eID options
• Smart card (national ID card* / separate)
• HSM
• Split key (HSM+mobile)
• Hardware-backed keystore (mobile)
• Lower LoA (Level of assurance)

19. Open data
• Opendata.government.bg
• 1300+ datasets (Few of which of very high quality)
• Commercial register, procurement register
• Built tools: XLS-to-CSV, auto-uploader
• Rising in: OKFN, EU28
• Step 1: Make it legally required
• Step 2: Every system must publish open data
• Data literacy

20. Electronic voting
• The law is already in place
• Requires: open source, verifiability, eID
authentication, technically-guaranteed secrecy,
audits
• E-voting pilot projects to be prioritized by
Council of ministers next week
• Project proposal is underway
• => 2018 pilots, May 2019 - binding election

21. What’s left
• ...everything
• 30 project proposals to be submitted by
21.12.2016
• 2017 - the “implementation year”
• oversight, control

22. Our approach
• Agile
• Multi-tasking
• Identifying motivated actors
• DIY
• “Failure is only temporary”

23. What’s in it for us?
• Obviously not:
• the money
• the technical complexity
• The challenge
• The impact – not only local
• The diversity of tasks
• The opportunities for out-of-the-box thinking

25. Conclusion
• High level overview AND implementation
details matter
• Making sure it works long term
• Legal groundwork
• Setting up standards, processes and templates
• Making everything open
• Civil society
• Hopefully - steps in the right direction

26. Get updates / contribute
• facebook.com/egovbg
• discuss.government.bg
• github.com/government.bg
• Message me :)

27. Questions?