Share this post on Social Media: Estonia’s former Chief Data Officer offered a concrete account of moving government beyond AI strategies and pilots toward measurable public value — with humans kept firmly in the loop. Ott Velsberg has watched the ground shift beneath his feet. When he joined Estonia’s government in 2018 as Chief Data […]
Share this post on Social Media: Every conference generates its own vocabulary. This is the one that Congress speakers reached for, again and again, when the old words weren’t quite enough. Three days of sessions in Madrid produced a lot of new language – not jargon for its own sake, but a genuine attempt by […]
Share this post on Social Media: A Second Stage panel cut through the hype around “city brains” to a harder truth – the hardest part is not the technology, but getting a city’s departments to share, trust, and coordinate. “City brain” is the kind of phrase that promises more than it explains. The panel that […]
Share this post on Social Media: A Main Stage panel argued that the failure of government AI is rarely about the model – it is about people, process, data, and the discipline to scale responsibly. Every government can run a pilot. Far fewer can turn one into a service that millions of people rely on. […]
Share this post on Social Media: Three days in Madrid produced a lot of ideas. A handful of them were said so well, they deserve to travel further than the room they were said in. Some conference lines are forgettable the moment the next speaker starts talking. Others land differently – sharp enough to write […]
Share this post on Social Media: In one of the Congress’s most extraordinary sessions, Valeriya Ionan described how a country at war turned crisis into the fastest digital transformation the world has seen, and why resilience cannot be improvised. The premise of the keynote was almost counterintuitive: that breakthrough innovation comes less from abundance than […]
Share this post on Social Media: At GovTech 4 Impact World Congress, Madrid City Council pulled back the curtain on digital transformation in action, showcasing eight projects that are helping the city tackle housing, civic participation, loneliness, employment, urban planning, and mobility. Together, they revealed a simple but powerful principle: if innovation doesn’t improve everyday […]
Share this post on Social Media: Governments aren’t struggling to innovate. They’re struggling to scale. It came up in the session on AI in public services. It came up in the panel on legacy modernization. It came up, most bluntly, in a session about smart cities that spent an hour asking why so many good […]
Share this post on Social Media: At GovTech 4 Impact World Congress, leaders from government, international organizations, and digital identity programs around the world explored a question that is becoming increasingly urgent: how do we build digital identity systems that citizens trust, understand, and actually want to use? For years, digital identity has been discussed largely through the […]
Share this post on Social Media: A Main Stage panel argued that modernising government means redesigning operating models, evidence pathways, and institutional habits, not just replacing the software underneath. The title of the session promised a conversation about legacy systems. What the panel actually delivered was a quiet redefinition of the word “legacy” itself. The real legacy holding governments back, the […]