Exclusive: Estonia wants to build government systems with other countries
By Joshua Chambers Charlene Chin
International partnership proposed on a new open source land registry project.
The Estonian government plans to build a new electronic land registry in partnership with other countries to share the solution, its Ministry of Justice has told Govinsider.
“Instead of building it alone, we are hoping to do it together with interested partners from other countries, so that everyone could reuse the results and the software later on”, the Ministry states in a project description passed to GovInsider.
The project will explore how to build “a transnationally adjustable land register solution, which would be based on open-source software, and developed in a way that it could be adopted by various EU Member States and other countries”, it continued.
The government is applying for EU funding for the project, and estimates the budget at €4.5 million. It welcomes international universities, private and public sector players interested in developing software solutions to apply.
Project partners will have access to all the project documentation, the open-source software, and insight on how to build a government ICT project, it stated.
In return, the government expects its partners to share information on national best practices, user expectations on land and property registers, test the pilot run with national data and provide feedback, and share the project results to other land administrations in the country.
The project is scheduled to run for 33 months, starting this September and ending in May 2020.The first project budget has been set as an estimate and is likely to change, according to Kätlin Kattai from the Centre of Registers and Information Systems in the Ministry of Justice (pictured).
The Estonian Government has already formed software sharing partnerships with some nations. For example, its e-tax system, digital prescription system and x-road data-sharing system is already shared with the Finland government.