E-government best practices

As you may probably know, previously we have written about the possibility to develop a single global E-Government system. Briefly, we are of the opinion that unified global E-gov system is an inevitable future.

Like we mentioned in the article, there are a lot of obstacles on the way to create such an E-gov system. In the first place it is the fact that countries are unable to agree on such a complex issue. In addition, still not all the countries have achieved a necessary level of digitization. 

So, in today’s article we are going to talk about the possibility to create such a global E-Government system, but on a smaller scale, for the needs of confronting coronavirus threat. Due to the fact that coronavirus threat is mоre vital today in comparison with any other benefits of global digital transformation, let’s imagine how such a system should look like. 

What are the goals of such system’s creation:

  1. Collect and aggregate ALL the information regarding COVID-19 as a disease.
  2. Combine the efforts of all the states that are included. 
  3. Combine the efforts of specialists, scientists, doctors, chemists etc. providing them with access to aggregated data from all over the world. 

Let’s take a more detailed focus on the last paragraph. Aggregated data from all over the world on the COVID disease is what we consider as a main value of the proposed system. Obviously, amount of data on the coronavirus is already so huge that it is impossible to store and process using analogue means, that is, paper notes and archives. 

What’s more, exactly data from all over the world, from all the countries affected by the virus, is of great value. Access to this aggregated data makes possible:

  • for everyone – to know more about the disease and preventive measures.
  • for doctors – to treat patients better, in a more effective way, understanding how treatment is carried out in other countries.
  • for government authorities – to organize quarantine better, understanding what measures were taken all over the world and what are the results of these measures. 
  • for scientists – to perform vaccine development in a more effective way, interacting with the colleagues worldwide. 

software for vaccine development

Surely, it is not enough just to drop all the information in a storage and publish a website. The information should be organized, systematized. At least all the clinical records must be analyzed. At the moment of writing this article there were 874 607 cases registered worldwide, according to the information of Worldometers. Automated analysis of all of them seems to be a constructive step on the way of understanding the disease.   

software and coronavirus

In general, the idea of a successful implementation of this system is simple: the more information it has – the better results involved parties can achieve in the fight against the virus. 

In case such a platfrom is developed and launched, this will mean that humanity has transferred to data-driven approach fighting the coronavirus. Here is one more article where we wrote about benefits of the data-driven approach for large companies, however, the idea is the same: the result of any task in today’s world depends on how efficiently we work with data.

Role of the World Health Organization 

In opinion of the authors of the article, coronavirus pandemic is a forced digitization of the world. The pandemic and the quarantine already shows us the necessity to build such an economy that makes possible for anyone to do anything from anywhere by means of online services. We mean that today it is a problem for many people to work remotely, even though there is already many of those who has worked remotely for many years. Anyway, demand in online services has grown significantly after COVID-19 strike, no matter how developed these services are. Maybe we will continue discussing this in our future articles, now let’s go back to our initial subject. 

So, what is the goal of the humanity now? – To stop the coronavirus pandemic. To develop a vaccine. To defeat the disease. 

Today the WHO – World Health Organisation – carries out the process of data aggregation, and shares the data with national health agencies in different countries. 

Writing this article we checked the website of the World Health Organization. Obviously, this organization is expected to be at the forefront in the fighting the virus, and before writing this article we checked their website aiming to find something about using any special software in their daily work. We thought it was an obvious thing that such an organisation as WHO actively uses some special software. However, we didn’t manage to find any mentioning that WHO has developed and launched some software dedicated to COVID-19 threat. 

We will be happy if we are mistaken. Please let us know if you have information about such a software used by the WHO. Possibly, they use some software tools and just don’t talk about it very much. 

The only information we could found is that there were several cases when technological companies provided scientists with access to quantum computers as well as agreed to unite efforts in the virus research. Aggregated news are here.

Fighting the fake news as a part of fighting the coronavirus

Coronavirus strike has triggered a speculations’ and fake news’ wave. As far as we remember, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, talked about destructive character of fake news in socials about a year ago and announced development of dedicated algorithms inside Facebook dedicated to fake news tracking here and here

As far as we see, the problem of fake news still exists. We are sure that existence of the E-Government information system dedicated to coronavirus threat could really benefit to solution of the fake news problem. The solution, in our opinion, is quite simple, providing that the described information system is operating, of course: every news or post published in socials or internet media should be fact-checked and verified with the data contained in the system. After this the post or the article should not be approved or declined, it should be published with a mark or something like a report, a “verdict” that the information in the post is relevant/not relevant to the data contained in the global system dedicated to coronavirus diseaseSurely, to make this happen, such a system has to be recognized as standard, etalon system. 

In our opinion, the only way to solve the problem of fake news, and not only about COVID-19, is not banning, approving or declining this or that news that someone considers as a fake. The solution is in automated fact-checking algorithms that mark the posts according to the relevance with the real state of things. And real state of things should be aggregated as a data sets in global information system(s). So, provide users with all the information possible, and let them decide how to perceive this or that news, consider it as a fake or not.

Conclusion

It goes without saying that today’s situation is as serious as it has never been. Almost 2 billion people stay on quarantine. Possibly, today’s situation could be a good environment to create and test the E-gov system we described above. There is no cure for all diseases nowadays, so it is silly to think the humanity will not face any more pandemics in the future. 

And in case countries cannot unite to create an E-Government information system to eliminate paper economy worldwide, let them unite with the aim to develop a single global information system dedicated to coronavirus disease. 

No doubts the United Nations World Health Organisation must be a developer and a promoter of such a system

As always, how we get out of the crisis depends only on us. Today’s epidemy provides the humanity with the good chance to improve its information systems, having brought us a real case to solve. 

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