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The train of public service digitisation has left the platform long ago in Denmark. Nevertheless, vulnerable citizens are, to a great extent, left waiting to jump on this modern way of interacting with the public sector and important private institutions like banks and housing landlords. Using the IMPULSE solution, the Danish case study in the City of Aarhus explores new ways to hand a group of left-behind citizens the ticket to the digital society.

A short summary of the meeting organised by CyberEthics Lab. in the context of the IMPULSE project, where policy-makers from all around Europe discussed the pros and cons of the introduction of a system of electronic identity based on disruptive technologies and on the self sovereign identity approach.

EU citizens only need to take a selfie and capture an image of their government-issued identification (identity card, passport, driver’s license, etc.) to verify their identities online and access public services. If the system finds a match between the selfie and the person on the identity document, the user is verified and can access the service. Pretty simple, huh? But what is behind all this process? If you are wondering about the technology behind it, read on.

The consideration of relevant existing standards for the development of the projects’ solutions and the transfer of the projects’ results into standardisation by contributing to ongoing standardisation activities or by developing new standards offers a big opportunity for R&I projects such as IMPULSE. This post informs about the analysed standardisation landscape.

With the purpose of continuing to improve, Gijón – together with 16 European organisations in the framework of the IMPULSE project – will test the incorporation of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence technologies for the identification of its citizens in public services in a safe, simple, universal, integrated way, with privacy at the core.

“Modernising public administrations and services through digital means is crucial to reducing administrative burden on the private sector and on citizens in general by making their interactions with public authorities faster, more convenient and less costly, as well as by increasing the efficiency and the quality of the services provided to citizens and businesses” (European Digital Innovation Hubs in Digital Europe Programme).

Bulgaria is seriously lagging behind with the introduction of e-identity and, accordingly, in the creation of effective e-government. Although, there is already a good volume of gained experience at EU level, Bulgaria still needs to improve its e-governance system, increase security and build public confidence in e-services.

Implementing new electronic identity (eID) solutions for the public sector is a tough endeavour.  Public officers, technical teams, and researchers need to work together in order to solve several fundamental concerns of end users. Co-creation is a suitable approach to design solutions that respond better to those concerns, but it is far from being a “silver bullet”: There are further challenges that should be addressed to make a sustainable impact in the long term.

Electronic Identity (eID) solutions in the public sector have often suffered from low adoption, in turn retarding the development of e-government. An important question is whether SSI-style eID solutions can help to break this cycle.

Implementing truly self-sovereign identities calls for strenuous efforts to unravel the technological, administrative and managerial lock-ins across the assortment of agencies and operations already in the online services sector.