Platformland #17

Platform news

• 🌍 The MOSIP identity project has started open-sourcing its code. It would be great to see a human rights review of the code along the lines of fellow digitalHKS fellow Beatrice Martini's work on internet protocols.
• 🇬🇧 Local adoption of centrally operated platforms continues in the UK. GOV.UK Verify, the federated identity verification platform is being trialled by local government in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. And GOV.UK Notify has been used by (the wonderfully named) Dacorum Borough Council to save residents £22k in court fines.
• 🇺🇸 A proposed new law in California could limit cities's ability to use data from scooter and bicycle companies. Another reminder that platforms open up new areas of political contest.
• 🇺🇸 In what it has been suggested is the result of a software bug, people have been arrested after hire cars were erroneously reported stolen to the police. Shows the risk of automating high-stakes processes.
• 🇫🇴 The Faroe Islands have signed a partnership agreement with the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (the international organisation set up to maintain X-Road). 
• 🇺🇸 18F have published a case study on the US Web Design System, which estimates that each project that uses the centrally maintained component saves $100,000. It's excellent to see numbers against things like this. 
• 🇹🇴 The World Bank is funding a digital ID system in Tonga. The money will also support changes to data protection and privacy regulations.
• 🇮🇳 Aadhaar may have gained the potential for another left-inner-join, this time the identity numbers will be included in a database of pregnant women in the state of Karnataka. (NB: it's not 100% clear if the number is stored directly or if some sort of domain-specific token is used or if the data is discarded once matched.)

🇬🇧 The UK Health Secretary has been using decidedly 'government as a platform' style language to talk about digital healthcare: "when it comes to the NHS's technical architecture we need to move from a jenga world to a lego world" It's also similar to the language used to describe India's proposal for a National Health Stack.