Digicampus Hackathon

For our complex 21st century society to function well, citizens, governments and the private sector must exchange data. Our government and societal structures were established in the 20th century, way before the arrival of new technologies for data exchange. We challenge you to facilitate with your solution those parties that are in the business of (co-)creating new government services. Help them to overcome the obstacles relating to data usage and sharing between citizens, governments and the private sector. Identify barriers, research data activities and find ways to go over, under, or cut right through. Create new governance models or systems that facilitate data use and the sharing and creation of new public services. For example, set up new data collaboration frameworks that involve all stakeholders, so citizens can get the benefits to which they are entitled. Create ways for citizens to prototype new products using the same data any governmental organization can access.

Although your prototype will have very concrete applications, we challenge you to refer to a larger context. How is your prototype the first step towards a government-driven data DAO, a proper privacy-preserving framework for citizens or organizations to test the potential impact of unlocking their data, or something completely outside of current structures and systems? Using your prototypes and vision, we enable policy makers to change the rules and make your vision a reality.

Governments are increasingly expecting citizens to be self-reliant on topics such as finance, health or employment. There are rules and regulations to wade through and choices to make, some of which have enormous (financial) impact in the nearby or distant future. The risk due to errors is almost entirely for the citizen or the entrepreneur. From research we know that the “do-ability” of people can vary throughout their lives. Due to insights such as this, we see more and more governments flipping the service delivery model from “pull” to “push”, delivering services proactively. From Estonia to Taiwan policy makers are looking into ways to proactively aid citizens during important life events, especially citizens that are (temporarily or permanently) not able to be self-reliant.

Proactivity is about moving the initiative from the citizen to the government and can be implemented in several ways. Proactivity is not always desirable or possible, however. A well-known example of a proactive service is the pre-completed tax return from the Tax Authorities. Fully proactive services have implemented proactiveness to the level where with consent, but without request from the citizen, services are automatically delivered to citizens. Fully proactive services are scarce in the Netherlands and it is currently unclear how best to develop them. We challenge you to develop this services or facilitate them.