Digital 5

Digital 5

Photo of Francis Maude giving a speech at the London D5 summit. UK Cabinet Minister Francis Maude giving a speech in London at the 2014 D5 summit
Abbreviation	D5
Formation	9 December 2014
Type	Inter-governmental organisation
Legal status	Network
Purpose	Digital governance
Membership	Estonia, Israel, New Zealand, South Korea, United Kingdom
Main organ	Joint working group

The Digital 5, or D5, is a network of leading digital governments with the goal of strengthening the digital economy. The members are bonded by the principle of openness; they are focused on changing government's relationship with technology by adopting open standards and open-source software as well as making digital government more effective. They intend to bring in digital skills in-house and encourage short-term contracts with small and medium business suppliers. Discussions at their inaugural meetup included connectivity, teaching children to code, and open markets. The group will meet annually to showcase digital accomplishments by governments around the world.

Members

The founding members of the group are:

• Estonia
• Israel
• New Zealand
• South Korea
• United Kingdom

There are currently plans to include future members.

D5 London 2014

The first event of the D5 was held in London on 9 and 10 December 2014 with delegates from the five founding nations attending, as well as the United States, who were there as observers; the event was hosted by the UK's Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude. The UK's Culture, Communications and Creative Industries Minister Ed Vaizey and their Chief Technology Officer Liam Maxwell were also present.

Themes

The 2014 summit had three themes: Teaching children to code, open markets, and connectivity.

Teaching children to code

By teaching children to code, the D5 intends to train the newest generation of kids – the "technology generation" – to take an active role in creating IT, rather than simply consuming it. Discussion points involving this theme included looking at whether simply changing the curriculum is enough to achieve this goal, methods that may be used to give teachers the skills to teach and inspire children to code, connecting the fields of industry and education so that such a change can be achieved, and ensuring gender balance and encouraging girls to take on tech roles.

Advances made by the D5's participating countries have already been made to achieve this goal. In the UK, England became the first country in the world to mandate that coding be taught to all pupils aged 5 to 16; In Estonia, primary schools have been teaching students to code since the 1990s; In New Zealand, they have introduced a set of Digital Technology Guidelines that will allow secondary schools to teach the subject coherently – they have also invested in new graduate ICT training schools to transition tertiary students into the workforce; in Israel they have "the most rigorous computer science high school programme in the world" due to a major review of computing at school that took place in the 1990s; South Korea teaches some computer science in school and also offers an optional online course for those who are interested.

Open Markets

The focus of open markets is to open bidding on government IT contracts to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the use of digital marketplaces such as the UK Government's G-cloud. The benefit of this to the government is to reduce costs by contracting out to the company that can provide the best value for money spent. The reduced barriers provided by an open market give SMEs who may not have been previously considered for a government contract, or who have never bid on one before, a fairer and more seamless opportunity to do so. Moving away from large outsourcers requires right sizing, which in this case can be achieved by buying parts of contracts from several smaller suppliers rather than buying one large contract from a single supplier, using agile delivery, buying cloud services, and building in-house engineering and operations capability.

Like the UK's G-cloud, New Zealand is also building a government cloud programme to ease the process of government buying from SMEs. They are committed to using ‘as a service’ products to open up the market. South Korea too has already built an e-procurement system that allows SMEs the opportunity to win government contracts. Since its inception, it has saved $8 billion annually and made a reduction of 7.8 million pages of paper documents per year. Bidding time has been reduced from thirty hours to two.

Connectivity

With an increasing number of internet connected devices in each household, the D5 intends to look at what type of infrastructure is needed to maintain and expand connectivity, as well as how they can work together to share each other's experiences and to develop standards together. Citing a Cisco figure, the D5 expects over 50 billion internet connected devices to be in use around the world by 2020, with as many as dozens of each device in every household.

To meet these needs, the UK government's focus will be on Machine to Machine technology, the Internet of Things and 5G mobile networks. In March 2014, they announced they will be investing £45 million in the Internet of Things. They have set up smart cities demonstrators in Glasgow, London, Bristol and Peterborough, and their 5G Innovation Centre is the world’s first dedicated 5G testbed centre. In a speech during the summit, Cabinet Minister Francis Maude announced that the UK intends to have 97% of all citizen interactions with the state online by the end of the next parliament. In Estonia they have X-Road, a secure platform-independent Internet-based data exchange layer that provides transparent digital services with minimum costs. Through a public-private partnership, New Zealand is in the process of upgrading internet infrastructure to fibre optic cables. Korea too has made a significant investment into The Internet of Things.

Events

There were a number of events and presentations held throughout the city. The Duke of York hosted an event for the delegates at Buckingham Palace, where 100 UK digital startups showcased their products to attendees. Presenters included Crowd Emotion, Code Kingdoms, Therapy Box, Yoyo, Skyscape, Kano, and Relative Insight. Another event highlighted the D5's intention of teaching programming to children of young ages by having the BBC lead a group of 11-year-olds through a coding session in which they utilised a Doctor Who themed game to gain a basic understanding of the practice of computer programming.

D5 Charter

During the 2014 D5 summit, the five founding members signed a charter committing to share and improve upon the participant nations' practices in digital services and digital economies. In the agreement they stated that their collective goal is to "harness the potential global power of digital technology and help each Participant to become an even better digital government faster and more efficiently through sharing and learning from each other." Though they set several targets for areas that needed improving, they acknowledged that not all criteria may be met upon joining, and agreed to update the list as needed. Commitments set within the charter were non-binding and voluntary. The targets set forth were:

• User needs – public services for citizens
• Open standards – a commitment to royalty free open standards
• Open source – Government systems, tradecraft and manuals will in the future be open source and shareable between members
• Open markets – support for startups and equal competition despite company size
• Open government – transparent and open licenses and data
• Connectivity – build and maintain high quality digital infrastructure that supports the digital population
• Teach children to code – provide children with the skills needed to become the next generation of coders
• Assisted digital – support all citizens so that they can access digital services
• Commitment to share and learn – members share and work together to meet set goals

The signees of the charter were Urve Palo from Estonia's Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, Yossi Katribas from Israel's Prime Minister Office of the Government, Peter Dunne from New Zealand's Department of Internal Affairs, Chong Jong-Sup from South Korea's Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, and Francis Maude from the UK's Cabinet Office.

The charter was signed digitally on 9 December 2014 and had an effect for five years, with the ability to be terminated by any participant given three months notice.

The Future of D5

Members of the D5 will meet annually in their effort to encourage faster and more efficient digital governance. Their next meeting will take place in 2015 and will be in Estonia. In the interim, they will report publicly on progress and learning; a dedicated blog will provide links to where the various groups involved are collaborating online. The network hopes to grow to include more countries in the future. A joint working group will establish future hosts of the D5, future themes of summits held by the D5, and future countries who are eligible to join the D5.

See also

• E-democracy
• e-Estonia
• E-Governance
• E-Government
• Open data
• Open Data in the United Kingdom
• Open-source governance
• Transformational Government