GovTech Dynamics: Navigating Innovation and Challenges in Public Services. – TOPIC 02 Sub 01 2024

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18 June 2024 | 15:00 - 15:45 EEST | Auditorium | Video recording | Transcript
Consolidated programme 2024 overview

Proposals: #26 #47 (see list of proposals)

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Session teaser

Governments are increasingly exploring strategies to foster and expedite the adoption of innovative technologies within their public sectors as a response to high expectations from the citizens and businesses. This session would provide an excellent opportunity to exchange best practices and insights (basing on Lithuanian and other countries’ example), gaining a deeper understanding of the specific factors that drive these initiatives forward, along with the unifying principles that underpin them.

Session description

The ability of governments to ensure public well-being and deliver efficient services is directly tied to their capacity to innovate and adapt in a highly dynamic environment. This environment is defined by factors such as the increasing accessibility of technology to the population, rising citizen expectations towards public services, a growing amount of accessible data, and the rising complexity and interconnectedness of public issues (such as challenges tied to climate change, security, and inequality). In this context, governments turn to GovTech, which refers to the use of various digital tools, platforms, and innovations to enhance government processes, engage citizens, and address societal challenges. GovTech is based on a whole-of-government approach to public sector modernization, promoting simplicity, efficiency, and transparency with the citizen at the center of reforms.

However, implementing all these ambitious changes solely within the public sector is not easy. Thus, an increasing number of governments are exploring practical ways to encourage experimentation and co-creation between the public and private sectors. GovTech, as an open innovation framework, serves as a method for public sector institutions to openly seek digital solutions to their challenges through cooperation with startups, innovative companies, academia, and NGOs.

Over the last 20 years, Lithuania has made significant progress in developing digital solutions in the public sector, as reflected by the country’s position in international global indexes. Lithuania ranks 8th in the GovTech Maturity Index by the World Bank, 14th in the Digital Government Maturity Index by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and 7th in the European Commission’s E-Government Benchmark. Lithuania has compelling success stories to share, such as Lithuania’s GovTech Lab, which not only enables public institutions to pilot innovative digital tools and approaches but also fosters a significant shift in public institutions, making them more open to experimentation and collaboration. Additionally, Lithuanian companies and experts are sharing their knowledge and experience in the field of GovTech with the broader international community in various regions of the world.

This session would delve into the practical aspects of GovTech, exploring the benefits and opportunities it brings to countries, as well as the potential challenges that must be addressed in order to fully realize these benefits—from proper data management to ensuring that no one is left behind by these new digital possibilities.

Format

Panel discussion

Further reading

People

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Programme Committee member(s)

  • Inga Rimkevičienė
  • Riccardo Nanni

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Focal Point

  • Ieva Zilioniene, NRD Companies

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Key Participants

  • Diana Seredokaitė, Director of Digital Agenda Department in the Ministry of Economy and Innovation of the Republic of Lithuania
    Diana boasts over 20 years of managerial experience, demonstrating a proven track record in project leadership, IT governance and management. Her proficiency extends to ICT governance, project management, public services digitalization, business change management, and IS implementation. Notably, Diana has successfully overseen projects across diverse regions, including the Baltic States, Uzbekistan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Ghana.
  • Dalius Kazlauskas, CTO of Vilnius City, Smart City and Digitization Expert
    Dalius Kazlauskas is the Chief Technology Officer of Vilnius City, recognized for demonstrating that public sector teams can operate with the efficiency of startups. He currently leads efforts in addressing artificial intelligence challenges, utilizing data for decision-making, and unifying municipal enterprises to achieve tangible results. A pioneer of open data in Lithuania, Dalius is dedicated to showcasing its practical benefits. He is also actively involved in volunteering and mentoring within GovTech and transparency organizations, and with teams guiding innovation direction for the city, promoting and encouraging experience sharing in the public sector.
  • Dovilė Gaužauskienė, Innovation Expert at GovTech Lab Lithuania
    Dovilė Gaižauskienė is a participatory design expert, recognized for extensive knowledge on co-creation processes. Dovilė focuses her efforts on co-creation of more human centric solutions in the public sector, bringing empathy to policy making and implementation. Dovilė is a co-founder of Performative Design association and member of Lithuanian Design Council. Dovilė worked as a strategic designer at Policy Lab at Government strategic analysis center STRATA, and currently, she’s a part of GovTech Lab Lithuania, working with implementation of Public Challenge series, GovTech Innovation Academy and Sandbox for public sector testing AI solutions.

Moderator

  • Ieva Žilionienė, Consulting Lead at NRD Companies
    Ieva Žilionienė is an expert in state digitalization policy and strategy with extensive experience in national and global GovTech trends. She has worked for the Lithuanian Government's Information Society Development Committee, overseeing Lithuania's information society and e-governance strategies and managing EU structural funds for public ICT. As the Director of Strategy and later Deputy Director General at Lithuania's Communications Regulation Authority, she coordinated the regulation of electronic communications, postal services, and digital trust services. Now, she leads the consulting branch of NRD Companies, an international group specializing in developing digital solutions for governments worldwide. Ieva has contributed to various international groups and initiatives and is Lithuania ‘s national expert and member of the Board of Directors for the World Summit Awards, promoting UN Sustainable Development Goals through digital innovations.

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Reporter

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  • relate to the particular session and to European Internet governance policy
  • are forward looking and propose goals and activities that can be initiated after EuroDIG (recommendations)
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Messages

Digital transformation in Public Administrations (PAs) comes with the need of stronger digital skills, which may come with mandatory training for civil servants. Challenges include digital skill gaps, data analysis capabilities, and regulatory barriers, requiring a shift towards enabling innovation. Cities and other PAs can innovate in collaboration with academia and the private sector with such projects as the GovTech Lab. These labs test new policies and technologies, fostering innovation through skill development and co-creation. Design thinking and user experience should prioritize simplicity and functionality. Cities can use open data dashboards to be more transparent to citizens by allowing them to easily visualize data about their living environment. Future challenges include digital identification, AI regulations, and ensuring technology accessibility for all, including senior citizens. Practical strategies and public co-creation are necessary for meaningful change.

Video record

https://youtu.be/z9LfHDFhQxY

Transcript

Disclaimer: This is not an official record of the session. The DiploAI system automatically generates these resources from the audiovisual recording. Resources are presented in their original format, as provided by the AI (e.g. including any spelling mistakes). The accuracy of these resources cannot be guaranteed.

Transcripts and more session details were provided by the Geneva Internet Platform


Moderator: while talking Bernadette with me like this, you know, imaginary clock. She said, I’m running out of time. But sometimes while listening, you forget about your time, because we really had, I don’t know, fantastic time to hear these both inspirational speeches. And I’m sure, like no doubts, we will work as a fuel to our panelists, because now we are jumping into our first subtopic, GovTech Dynamics, Navigating Innovation and Challenges in Public Services. And I want to invite our moderator from Lithuania,Ieva Žilionienė, Consulting Lead in NRD Companies.Ieva, please, the floor is yours, and invite your panelists.

Leva Zilioniene: Do you hear me? Yes, thank you. So, hi, hello, everyone. It’s a big pleasure to be here, and to moderate the panel on a topic which I strongly believe in, and work a lot with it. During my 20 years of expertise in working in public sector in institutions responsible for Lithuanian digitalization, and now working all over the world as Consulting Lead of international company, I really have a lot of great examples. But in this panel, you as well will hear stories from here, from Lithuania, from one of European Union countries, which has lots of experience accumulated during the last 20 years, and not just from here. So, I am honored to invite my panelists. So, first of all, Diana Seredokaitė, Director of Digital Agenda Department in the Ministry of Economy and Innovations of Republic of Lithuania, a person who has 20 years of experience in implementing the most complex digital transformation projects in public sector, and not just in Lithuania. but as well in other Baltic states and such countries as Uzbekistan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Ghana. Thank you so much for being with us today.Dalius Kazlauskas, Chief Technology Officer of Vilnius City, of the beautiful capital of Lithuania, where you all are our beloved guests. So, Dalyus is a person who really knows a lot of things about artificial intelligence, about open data, about how to make digital, very advanced technologies work and make the lives of people better. And, last but not least, of course, Dovilė Gaužauskienė, Innovation Expert at GovTech Lab, Lithuania, a participatory design expert who knows a lot about magic words, which I love, co-creation, and knows how this magic word works in practice. So, she is a co-founder of the Performative Design Association and a member of the Lithuanian Design Council and part of the GovTech Lab, Lithuania team. So, it’s great to have you here and we have a couple of mics, we will be sharing them. So, today, we have this time to talk a bit about, I’d say, strategies as well as practices of GovTech. We heard these inspirational speeches about what things are important and I think it’s really good to see how these things come into practical examples, which we have from different angles. Because that’s true that governments have lots of pressure to be more and more efficient and the pressure comes from many things. The issues which governments have to deal with are very complex. The expectations from citizens are higher and higher and to deal with that, technology seems a good instrument, but, of course, it’s not. if applied smartly, I’d say. So, here we talk about GovTech, which can be seen as the most advanced name, I’d say, for the face of digital government that we use today a lot. Of course, thinking about government as a whole, thinking about government which has citizen at its center. I would like to ask to start, Diana, because we talk a lot about GovTech, but here in Europe and maybe in Lithuania, what are the most important trends that you could share with us?

Diana Seredokaite: First of all, in digital agenda of Lithuania, we have main topics such as digital transformation in the public sector, cybersecurity, open data, promotion of digital innovations, and, of course, the main topic is development of digital skills. When we are talking about digital transformation, first of all, at the center of this transformation, we see people. It should be very important to change mindset of person who participates in digital innovations initiatives, that digital is not itself implementation of just new system, and sometimes we believe that this implementation helps to solve all problems which we face around, but as we’re here in this room today, the main challenge is to change the habits, how we work, our mindset, that first of all, we should think about problems and challenges which we want to solve, and then we should think about technologies. which can help us to do these tasks. And, of course, it is very important to ensure that all our citizens are involved in these processes, because they are at the center of this change. We can develop different services, but if we have very complicated services, we can just spend our money for digitalization, but people cannot use these services. So, we should think first of all about user-centricity, about services security, and, of course, about digital skills development for citizens, and, of course, for public servants, which are participating in digital transformation initiatives.

Leva Zilioniene: So, thank you. And, yes, of course, the simplicity, the user-centricity, putting person or man or woman in the center of anything, thinking about a person who will come and use it, and not from your perspective. It seems quite like simple things, which usually are not, and Dovilė , no question to you. So, in political agenda, it’s clear, right? I think all the countries here in Europe, and I think if we took a strategy from any country, we will find very, very similar words. But how to put these words into practice, how to make them work? Thank you very much. Hello, everyone, first of all. It’s a very good question, and I really like this word practical, I would say, and maybe I will stop a little bit here, because for me practical is really related to how. Yeah as you said already. So I think first of all if you want to have your agenda, political agenda work, you should focus on how you build it. And my first example which I could provide, it’s not from GovTech laboratory experience, but it’s from policy lab experience which I have. So we had this participatory process, I think it’s the biggest participatory process recent in Lithuania, when we were creating Lithuania 2050 agenda. So it’s long-term strategy of course, and what’s interesting that we started this process from actually organizing meetings with citizens in Lithuania. It’s related to your project, we also started from traveling to various parts of Lithuania to so-called expeditions to Lithuania 2050 and we talked about how we imagine. And it’s also very important, I think the second important word here is imagination, because when we talk about digital state, about digital transformation, we really have to acknowledge that it’s different state, it’s different type of living in general, so we really need to reimagine things. And yeah, and some other examples coming to how to make agendas into reality, I think it’s by assigning teams, by creating safe spaces, spaces for experimentation and GovTech lab, which I’m representing now, and policy lab in government strategic analysis center where I worked. They are both good examples of how to work, because we work in different way. We are team with skills to actually moderate processes of co-creation and we come, as it was said also, we come at the design stage when we are searching for challenge and we moderate the knowledge transfer from citizens, from stakeholders to decision-makers. So it has to be moderated, in a sense, and I think it’s really successful, these examples, to have teams assigned for such a task. I think Dalius will agree with me, because it’s really important to have skills.

Dovile Gauzauskiene: It requires certain knowledge of how to do this. So if you want to co-create, or if you want to have participatory processes, which are needed to make agendas into reality, you have to have skills and assign teams, and of course build general knowledge about how it’s done.

Leva Zilioniene: So it’s not something very, very simple, or which can be taken for granted, that you just ask and somebody will just do it, or change. So I think it’s a long way. So besides technology, we are usually dealing with human perspective here. But I think we will come back to this, because co-creation and GovTech Lab experience is really very interesting and unique, I think. But now I have a question to Dallas, because we are really proud when we talk about this huge progress that Lithuania made during the last 20 years, when we say that we are number eight on the GovTech index, maturity index of the World Bank, that we are number seven in the European Union by our well-developed government, et cetera. But then it comes to everyday life of people. Usually they are not so much preoccupied, for better or for worse, with the things that happen at national level, but they are very much interested in what happens next to them, and usually these things are under, let’s say, the roof of the municipality. So what is the approach and the practical examples from your work as CTO, from your team’s work making digital solutions? to work for a better life of people and guests, of course, of Vilnius.

Dalius Kazlauskas: Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Dalius . I’m a city CTO. For the last 10 years, I’ve been working in between three very different parts, like startups, private sector and the government. And from practical parts, for me, it’s like all these regulations, new trends is not so much important, because our main investors are citizens who pay taxes. And we feel like some responsibility to build and test our ideas and what we want to build for our city. And first, maybe I want to start from our approach and mindset, what we have, or at least what they want to have in the future. Usually, we try to work with design thinking, ideology, like customer user experience research. We’re working with focus groups to analyze what really citizens need, because sometimes I can see in general in the Euro Union, there is a lot of money. Government likes to create some big products or projects where you can find thousands of different functions. But if you talk with citizens in some workshops, you can find out just we need just five main, some little things. And these five little things, we solve them usually like challenges. Example, open data. Everyone talking for the last 10 years in Europe about open data. But really examples hard to find. What we did, we stopped to gather all data and we start to collect just main data. And from that data, we build some technologies and dashboards where citizens can use and make some decisions. Example, if you have kids and you want to buy a flat and some real estate agent will tell you, oh, you know, it’s a really nice place, there’s no pollution, it’s really quiet in the evening. But if you check our data, not like social media, but real data, what we created, these dashboards, what is easy to use for citizens, journalists. and politician you will see specific area is a high pollution in the evening from 9 in the evening till 12 in the evening is like very loud for this reason is our way to build something practical and as well another part is to teach and coach citizens to use that. This is I think really hard because we can create and at the moment we can compete with startups and prove not once with our products, we attend in different events around the world and we can build something really high level but just yeah we need to teach more and somehow attract them to use these tools but now everyone a little bit like too hyped to use like artificial intelligence tools and we’re working on as well on that to make like everything really practical and easy to use. Yeah like two days ago we launched a participation platform for citizens can vote for specific budget and choose what in them area is very nice and we cut a lot of bureaucracy to do that for citizens with a couple clicks we can just start and use that it’s just a couple examples.

Leva Zilioniene: Yeah you know as they say that the last best experience which we ever had became like the lowest expectation for our future experience so it’s like a very risky business the better you perform the higher are the expectations but maybe that’s the beauty of the work that you can do. But coming back to the national level of course we have lots of good examples of things that as well work maybe they are not so noticeable in our everyday life maybe we don’t even think about them and that’s the best thing because some things in the government in the state can happen even without our involvement need to ask need to request automatically and that’s I think are the best digital services. So Diana question to you again so what is needed to have this magical combination that makes this digital Is the project in the public sector a real success?

Diana Seredokaite: Good question. But I think there is no single recipe to ensure the success of projects. It depends on the maturity of organizations and, of course, overall on the country’s experience. I think that it is very important to have a clear vision and strategy. Just start with an end in mind. Because it is really important to have a clear vision. And, of course, to ensure this vision can be supported by citizens. And, of course, it is necessary to have also legislative and regulatory support. If we think that a project can be successful just by creating one or two systems, it is not a deal. It does not work. We have a different experience in organizations when we have the best systems implemented based on the best technologies. But all this digitalization, all processes remain old, paper-based processes. And sometimes it is impossible just to use the systems as they are unfriendly for users and cannot be supported by legislations. Another one, it is very important on country level to support experimentation and innovation capabilities. And a good example was mentioned here. It is our GovTech. lab initiative and our organizations in Lithuania can open challenge for our private organizations and to create some test labs, testing solutions for challenge resolutions.

Leva Zilioniene: I think it’s a perfect transition because precisely to do it, to bring innovation into public sector just by public institutions alone, by writing detailed specifications, going through long, long, long public procurement process and then implementing something which might be not even a success because maybe the initial presumptions of the people in the institution were not correct. So sometimes, let’s say, and maybe even quite a lot of times, it can be not as successful as expected. That’s why countries experiment with GovTech labs as open innovation frameworks. And Dovile, Lithuania, was one of the first European Union countries which established such a framework and it’s already more than five years of history, of lots of experimentation. So what are the main maybe insights and lessons learned so far?

Dovile Gauzauskiene: There are many lessons learned, but yeah, maybe I will start from main achievements. We are very happy, as you already said, and thanks Diana for this introduction, we were established five years ago and now the main achievement is that we do what we preach, I would say. So as we started, it was a smaller team, but it started already with this aim of ecosystemic change. So many efforts, it was not only about challenges which are solved with the help of our laboratory, but also working on establishing community of practitioners, community of GovTech lab Ambassadors, I would say, because I know that there are people who name themselves as this. So now we have this system of ecosystemic change tools, I would say. So one of this is a challenge series, as Diana already introduced a little bit. It’s a structured experimentation program where public sector institutions come with their challenges and we challenge them after some time, if these challenges are right challenges. And in this series, they also meet startups and they are doing this procurement process, which is quite complicated. And how do you can procure something that you don’t know if it exists, because we are really focusing on new solutions. So we help there as well. And we also go with these organizations to demo and so on, so on. And it’s a really good program, I would say, and we are happy to have more and more applicants. But we also have new initiatives which are needed for sustaining our results. And we have established GovTech Innovation Academy recently. We already had implemented this for two years. And it helps organizations to build skills. And we talked here as well about changing mindset, that we are really focusing on changing mindset of public sector representatives. And that’s the tool we are also running in our laboratory. And we also do some other things, like new initiative also is about experimentation with digital artificial intelligence solutions. And we have established this test version of Sandbox. So we are having some stable things, stable things that work, and that are really good and useful tools. But we also have this experimentation. and experimental ideas we are implementing. So I think it’s, we are stable, but still with some spark, I would say. That’s the biggest issue.

Leva Zilioniene: Yeah, and I think that’s the beauty of it, that still when, while you can be creative, you never get old. And this goes for people, this goes for organizations and initiatives and projects and platforms too. And Dallus, a question to you, Mr. Ambassador. It was very nice introduction. So yes, I know that Vilnius municipality and many different organization underneath its umbrella are real active participants of GovTech Challenge series. So from this practical experience, really what is needed to make this co-creation, this beautiful world to work in practice?

Dalius Kazlauskas: Okay, first startup sandbox in general Lithuania was in a Vilnius municipality created, I think eight years ago. And we tested and helped some startups to became like first users of them. And then it happens with GovTech movement for us is a big change because it’s not just about technology, what colleagues already mentioned, this is about changing our mindset. And in government is really hard to do some experimentation because we have some expression. If you work, you do mistakes and in government, like no one likes that, no any politician. They punished you if you do that. And GovTech is good environment to do this experimentations and learn new skills. And this is not just about government, but this is platform where you can join startups, public sector and private sector. Because sometimes startups as well, we are weak and we don’t know how to cooperate with public sector is like no real connection because I meet startups every two or three weeks from different countries around the world. And sometimes we have good product, but we don’t understand how public sector works. In this platforms. What we have in Lithuania from GovTech, it helps to like connect. And this is experimentation, I think, and not to be scared to do mistakes and to learn how to do some changes with a really small amount of money, because sometimes you can build something big and with really, really small investment. This is, I think, the main point for us and I just want to advertise that if you have something in your country or you have a startup, just try to join these communities and just sell your product, learn new skills.

Leva Zilioniene: Yeah, because I think that’s one of the biggest issues that stops any experiment, any innovation that if you are afraid to do a mistake and to be punished. So having these safe spaces for experimentation, that’s great. Of course, sometimes it can be said, OK, but we want to see some big products and big successes, but big things can start from small steps. But as anything, technology has this good potential to make lives better. But as well, they have their perils and GovTech technologies and public sector in general are not an exception. So Diana, let’s say from this policymakers and regulators perspective, which are these biggest issues that we face today talking about GovTech?

Diana Seredokaite: Yes, probably the main issue, it is a lack of digital skills. It is very crucial to focus on development of digital skills and, of course, investing significant funds in formal education and in trainings and also undertaking upskilling and re-skilling initiatives for those who are active today in the labor market. So, also, we need mandatory digital training for public servants, as our servants can use just simple tools, but when we are talking about data analysis and about taking decisions based on data, it is still a lack of analytical skills. Of course, another very important critical issue, I think it is legislative and regulatory ecosystem. We have a lot of different legislation initiatives on the EU level. It is AI Act, it is data-related acts, and so on, but we should talk about implementation on the national level, and all of these regulations require us to establish new regulators to provide for them new functions, and it is, of course, very difficult for a small country, and of course, we should think that, first of all, we should focus just that this legislation should help us to move faster, but we should deal with issues that with regulatory initiatives, in most cases, works as blockers. So it is very important to… to change mindset of our politicians and regulators and to create a regulatory and legislative ecosystem which can enforce digital transformation and remove all blockers. And of course, with respect of fundamental human rights, values and protection of privacy.

Leva Zilioniene: And jumping now into, let’s say, technological perspective from your daily work, what are these issues or barriers that really should be taken into account when talking about GovTech?

Dalius Kazlauskas: Okay, first, not just GovTech, but in general technologies, different type of regulations, I’m practical guy and we as a municipality, we have in general about 300 companies and organizations and 30,000 coworkers, it’s like big corporation. And any type of regulation, what is related with technologies, from Euro Union, from a national level, it stops our innovations because from one side, we improve and we decrease bureaucracy. Example, some process and robotizations products where you can, before was some specific service. Example, where you can register where you live, yeah? Before was takes like 10 or 15 days because person who work with the service need to log into different platforms. We created a robotization and it’s now done by two or five minutes and customer can receive a service not in 10, 15 days, but in two or five minutes. But because we have always some regulations, it’s hard to move this type of products, yeah? For this reason, politicians need to concentrate like in practical things and we need to talk more with people who work in this practical environment. It’s the one part. The second part is about money. If you want to innovate and you want to get money from Euro Union, it stays too long. And if you prepare documents for one year, you are already with idea and innovation is already old. For this reason, it’s a really big challenge, all these regulations and Euro-Union control way. Now we have Artificial Intelligence Act, as well as some regulations, and we need to think because we have plans how to change our city and improve our service, but when you have some regulation, you need to spend money on the lawyers, on some people who understand these regulations, to find out, to fit in a really narrow gap, to not fail, from a low part.

Leva Zilioniene: But before turning to Dovile, I will ask the audience, maybe you have some feedback to share with us?

Audience: Thank you. Thanks a lot for the presentation. I really particularly appreciated your experience at the government level, making innovation, fostering innovation. I’m Riccardo Nanni from the Bruno Kessler Foundation, and as a researcher, I also work a lot with public administrations in implementing data-driven projects. So my experience resonates a lot with yours. As you were talking, especially you, Dalius, I was checking your city’s open data portal, and I was wondering, I think you did a great job at creating a very user-friendly open data portal, but can you please share experiences of actionable projects that were created by private actors, research centres, citizens, for example, that actually put open data into use? Because sometimes what I see in a lot of cities is that they release the best open data and nobody uses them, or release open data and they call it open data and it’s basically unusable because there’s no actual updated information. And I don’t know if you also had this kind of obstacles in your experience. Thank you.

Dalius Kazlauskas: OK, good question. This portal, what you checked, was created because before we had data only for professionals, this raw data. If you’re a programmer, you can use that. But it doesn’t work in real life. For this reason, we created this portal and we split in different parts. One part was only for professionals and companies. Another part is API. We already, many years, have this tradition. If you build platform, you build APIs. Because why we need that? If you have some tender or some signing contract with private sector, they can check what is inside of your platforms and how are you connecting them. In this way, you can save a lot of money as a government. And third part in this portal was created dashboards and different type information. What is already done from open data for citizens, specific data, for journalists, and for politicians. And if you go more deep, you will find more specific projects like kpi.villanous.lt is as well created from open data, how we’re managing different parts, like schools, health care, different types of things in our organization. And everything is open. And for citizens and for politicians. Many years ago, I remember happens when someone creating files in Excel, something for politicians, something for journalists. But now we have everything in one place. This is like main different mindset what we have with data. I hope I answered your question.

Leva Zilioniene: Maybe any more questions, insights, reflections here? Maybe remotely? OK, so Dovilė. Let’s proceed. to you with the question, because you had a chance, I think, to see very different stories, and you as well know, I guess, from practical side, what are the issues that sometimes can stop the best ideas from realization?

Dovile Gauzauskiene: There are a few, I would say, but I wouldn’t say that it’s stopping, but probably these are just unused opportunities for now. So from our experience, I would say that we are working in this safe environment, we are creating. So organizations come to our program, they meet the startups, and we moderate this process, and it’s quite successful, and we come up with a solution for a challenge, and then the barrier becomes to scale the product, because product, so it’s experimental thing, and you cannot just go to the market directly. So I think this is somehow, later on, becomes like a bad experience for creators and for organizations. So we are now really thinking of how to change that, how to actually enable this scaling up of ideas, maybe to add some more time to our program, so add some funding, and so on, so on. So we are really exploring the area of how we can be helpful for startups, for example, to scale up their ideas. And the other barrier, I would say, is actually sustaining this good experience in the organization, in this team, because when our projects are over, I’m not sure that they have opportunity to showcase their skills we gained. So I think now we are also thinking on building this community of practice and really strengthening it, so that people can share their knowledge and really get inspired from each other. I would say these are barriers for innovation. Of course, financial things and so on, but these are stemming from our experience, I think, the main things.

Leva Zilioniene: Yes, and I truly believe that, because I remember when I first time heard about GovTech Lab and first challenge series, it was the first one. I was working in public sector then with Communications Regulatory Authority. I went to see demo days. There were just two challenges, but I thought, okay, next iteration we have to be there, and we were there with two challenges. So now it’s like a trend for institution to be on challenge series. If you’re not there, something is wrong with you. So it’s like part of the image. I’d say it’s the real impact of the GovTech Lab, which is bringing to the public sector of the country, changing the mindset, which is the most difficult thing to change, because as it was mentioned, I think, and repeating through our sharing, it is that you can put technology, and usually it’s the easiest part. You can even change the process. It’s more difficult, but it’s doable, but the most difficult thing to change is the mindset. And if you don’t have any questions now, I don’t think so. Because we have five minutes. So, yeah, if you don’t have any questions here, I think it’s a good time to go already to the end, to closing our discussion. And I would be really grateful if you can reflect on the nearest, I’d say, challenges, which the country, with our public sector, has to be preparing to take from the technological perspective, and how are we ready to do that?

Diana Seredokaite: I think the main challenge is related to the changes in personal identification, it is implementation of a digital wallet and another one is to prepare and implement all initiatives related with artificial intelligence regulations. It is related also with changes in our institutional structure and regulators environment and of course it requires especially when we are talking about a wallet, it is huge changes in our mindset how we protect personal data and in our legacy systems which are really very wide used for public services.

Dovile Gauzauskiene: I would probably agree about artificial intelligence and I would say that this will be a challenge and I think the best way to tackle a challenge is actually to play with technology so I think we are trying to get ready for that as I said previously with establishing this sandbox where we will explore with other organizations what changes are needed and what artificial intelligence brings to us. I think this is probably one of the main issues at the moment.

Dalius Kazlauskas: At the moment I’m working on Open Vilnius, a new technology strategy for the city and we want to be with part really practical and useful in every day and as well, we are working already on them different types of artificial intelligent products and we are looking how to Put them on a market because we use now in a city just for our own but this monetization as a We are looking in some our companies like under startups because if you have something useful Before we share for free with different cities and we call console different countries But now we are planning. I think to go in this monetization level and sell what is working really well

Dovile Gauzauskiene: Moment one more challenge now at the moment and because I looked at at your atta. Yes, and I remember this about Mistrust to government and I think that’s also the challenge which is which is looming which is looming When we are speaking above us and I think we need to do something about that, so I think also strengthening skills of public sector Organizations to co-create to engage with public. I think that’s that’s really needed and that’s that’s a really huge challenge and It’s also it is also related to digital technologies and their uptake as well in the public So I think it’s it’s really it’s a really huge challenge, which

Dalius Kazlauskas: I think I will add to my true as well because for us and like specially for me for last couple years like was main point to attract more Senior citizens to use our tools for this reason We rebuild and reshape our technologies because after call it the senior citizens. We like became like really Friendly with technologies and we want to use that and be changing most of technologies What is available for these citizens for people like who like not so friendly with technologies? And this is one of movement what I am pushing our teams in different companies and organization

Leva Zilioniene: So, yeah, I think there were quite a lot of ideas shared thank you so much for that Thank you for being with us and have a great afternoon full of more discussions.

Moderator: And coffee break first.

Leva Zilioniene: And coffee break first.

Moderator: See you after 15 minutes, okay, guys? Thank you.

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