The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
***
>> LIUCIJA SABULYTE: Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining this session and choosing to spend this morning creatively on the societal problems. My name is Liucija and I'm from Innovation Agency in Lithuania. This is organized for you all by us, together with Norwegian Agency for Public and Financial Management. So today we are going to explore how technologies can help us understand public and societal challenges better.
At this time, we took a different role from what we usually do. So usually we think of technologies as a solution to the problem. And this time we try to explore how technological perspective can enrich the understanding of problem solving. And for those of you working on societal challenges you probably know that understanding a problem well is the key part of solving it.
So I want to start by inviting a few representatives of Lithuania and also Norway to give welcoming speeches. And then we will move to more interactive session and invite you all to share your thoughts and insights.
So firstly, I would like to invite to the stage, Lina Viltrakiene Ambassador for Technical and Digital Diplomacy. Lina, the floor is yours.
>> LINA VILTRAKIENE: Thank you very much Liucija. Good morning, everyone. It's my great pleasure indeed to welcome you to this session on tech driven solutions to societal challenges.
No doubt complex challenges in today's world require innovative and out-of-the-box thinking and solutions.
Particularly, the public sector needs to improve efficiency, enhance services, foster transparency. For this to happen, it is crucial to adopt new technologies and processes and to equip employees with skills.
I am glad to open this session.
There will be a possibility to learn from the experiences of two countries and in particular, from experience of Lithuania. As in recent years, my country, Lithuania has emerged as a European leader in digital governance.
Let me share a few rankings. We rank 6 in the European commission 2024 e-government benchmark.
We are eighth in the World Bank's GovTech Maturity Index, reflecting our strong public sector digital transformation. And we are 10th in the OECD, our data index, recognising our leadership in open useful and reusable data.
At the heart of this transformation, it is GovTech Lab Lithuania. It's a team in the Innovation Agency Lithuania that connects government institutions with startups and innovators to co-create solutions.
GovTech Lab has proved to be an indispensable point of contact when public sector organisations are eager to innovate.
Through GovTech challenges, over 100 real world public sector challenges were solved.
For example, in one city in Lithuania, Siauliai, a startup developed an urban monitoring tool that helps the city assess and manage public maintenance work more effectively.
Our communication regulatory authority partnered with a startup to build an AI tool for detecting illegal online content.
And it scanned over 288,000 websites, flagged violations and even led to criminal investigations.
In education, a collaboration between a school and a tech company produced a student achievement tracking tool that saves teachers time and helps tailor inventions.
These are not just pilot projects. They are scalable, impactful solutions that improve lives and saves time and also build trust in government.
It's important to say that 70% of our institutions continue using or scaling the solutions after the programme ends.
What sets Lithuania apart?
Is the culture of experimentation and collaboration. We have a vibrant GovTech ecosystem. A host international conferences. And also help other countries launch their own GovTech Labs.
And I'm happy to say that we have in our delegation people who can share all this experience from Innovation Agency, but also a companies that really work, cooperate closely with other countries to build their GovTech Labs.
And today I am also pleased to invite you to save the date for our Annual GovTech Leader Conference being held on 23 of October in Vilnius. This topic is GovTech dilemmas and indeed digital governance is a battleground when nations must balance sovereignty and cybersecurity on one hand, and interoperability and open innovation on the other.
The rise of AI-driven disinformation, cyber warfare and global decoupling deepens these dilemmas.
So in this conference there will be an opportunity to explore how governments can navigate these challenges, ensuring resilience, national security and public trust.
Let's innovate not just for efficiency, but for equity, resilience and trust. And let's see GovTech not as a niche but as a powerful engine for societal progress.
So I wish you to have a very fruitful and inspiring workshop. Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> LIUCIJA SABULYTE: Thank you, Lina so much for sharing about Lithuania and the achievements in the digital and GovTech space. I think these achievements wouldn't be possible without openness and ability to cooperate.
And speaking about cooperation, actually, we met this workshop partners, DFO during Lithuania's public sector representatives visit in Norway, where the DFO was open and shared their process in procurement. And we are really grateful for that. And I think it helps us to strengthen as a whole.
So with that, I really want to invite Dag Strømsnes, Procurement Officer to give his welcoming speech.
>> DAG STRØMSNES: Good morning, everyone. And thanks a lot for the invitation to participate on this important event. I'm very happy on behalf of Norway to give welcoming remark from the Agency for Public and Financial Management.
I think that the programme description is very good. Talking about rapid advancement of technology, rising public expectations for effective services. And ever-expanding pool of data. Government around the world are pressured to tackle complex societal issues with innovative solutions.
This is a huge challenge, and I think all countries in the western world are struggling with this challenge. We see this in the OCD community that we are facing these challenges in different ways.
From my point of view it's important to emphasize how the procurement function are approaching this challenge.
The key point, from my point of view is how do we open our challenges to the market. How do public sector authorities approach the market to get the best results of the suppliers?
It's a huge challenge. And we need to focus that we are going to get the results from a huge variety of suppliers, from the startups and the very, very small suppliers to the huge tech companies.
Some keywords about how to work with the startups. I think we have seen from our practice, we have a project called start off that we got European unique price for two years ago.
But approaching the startups represents some key challenges for the public sector. There's a lack of time and resources. We see there's a lack of innovation, knowledge and competence. And we also see there's a lack of leadership involvement in how to we are going to approach these markets.
I think if we are going to work with these startups that are often small and don't have a lot of resources you need to make it simple, predictable and fast.
I think that is really, really important for these types of suppliers.
I think our experience is that both the public sector that are going to buy these solutions and the startups need to have help and support throughout their procurement process.
I think it's important to create a good framework for trust and cooperation. And also need to develop a sort of respect for each other. I think a public sector buy-in and they have a very different approach. The grinder doesn't know if he has a salary in two months, the public sector buy-in knows a permanent contract in an agency. And these two approaches are going to lead to a corporation we really need to work hard to establish.
It's important to know that the effects take time, the processes take time. We don't see the results right away. You need to be patient.
I think this procurement process that is documented both by us in startup and GovTech Lab in Lithuania shows that.
But I think it's also important to keep in mind that we could get much more innovation from the huge suppliers, like Germany, IBM, Accenture and these types of companies.
I think it's important to keep in mind the public sector buyer does not have the solution in its head. I think we also need to open the process for the experiences that the big suppliers has made, maybe in other parts of the world. I think it's very important just to focus on your need and use the creativity from the supplier to develop the good solutions.
So then we need to market something, we need to be aware of our needs and we need to formulate that in a way that the suppliers could transfer this into some good systems.
And it's really important to take the big companies experiences into account and open the procurement process to that. So we need to include all the potential good ideas in the market in a good way.
The third challenge I would like to mention is that the problem we actually are facing are not following the bureaucratic structure. In Norway we have 90 ministries and I think the projects that fits into one ministry is well taken care of. But if there are more cross-governmental challenges, we need to cooperate, we maybe need to cooperate with local governments. You need to cooperate with the municipalities, you need to cooperate with the private sector and maybe cooperate with NGO's.
Our bureaucratic structures are not made and we are struggling to make the good corporation in this important mission. It's important to understand and learn from these experiences. And we need to work across the world to learn what is working and what is not working that well.
But my key point is that we need to be creative in the way we are approaching the market.
I really hope that this workshop can inspire to see the opportunities in using technologies in new ways and establish a good cooperation with the market. We will not succeed unless we are facing these challenge.
I wish you a great workshop. Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> LIUCIJA SABULYTE: Thank you, for sharing your thoughts. Cooperation moving through silos and building mutual trust is key to making impacts for digital transformation and building strong economies through the power of GovTech.
Now we are going to move to more interactive part of the workshop. People who are joining on Zoom can also scan the code and work together with us.
This part is going to be moderated by my colleague Dovile with the help of our DFO colleagues Magne and Matthias.
>> DOVILE GAIZAUSKIENE: Hello, I hope you can hear me? Yes, I see people are nodding. Super excited to be here to see you all in our workshop.
Now I will introduce briefly what will happen. But at first you need to group yourselves because it will be some group work. How it will happen...
You need to look for
paper sheets like this.
It might be even behind you. So now it's time to very, very quickly find this paper sheets. Leave your computers behind. Leave all your belongings behind.
Sheets like this. We have some more material. We are expecting to see six-seven groups.
Just turn your chairs around. And just make some round tables for now. I see that it's happening. Good. And for those who are online, we really want you to scan the code and you will find this working material in Miro board. Now I see the groups are there. Okay.
So what is happening now? We will have a very short workshop. It will be a little bit rushed. But it's good to be rushed in the morning. It will be like training for your brains, preparation for the entire day.
It will consist of three steps. Please follow instructions which I will be giving to you. There are not so many. It must be, we hope it will be very intuitive. It will be group work. Some individual work, and group work again.
Basic rules for this session are cooperation. Cooperation requires listening to each other. So we want you to listen to each other. At some point you will have to take off headphones in order to be able to communicate. But then I will show you signs, so you can hear me again. And you will have to put the headphones.
I really encourage you to think there are no wrong answers and no wrong questions here, because it's really a cooperation session, really, really short. But that's the approach we want you to have. And you also see some post-it notes or small colourful paper sheets. Please make sure you write one idea on one post-it. Now is not the time to be sustainable. Later we will be grouping these ideas, so it's good to have one idea, one concept and one post-it note separately. That's basically the rules. Let's move.
We will have three steps.
First of all, you will have to familiarize with public sector challenge. And the challenges are printed out on these paper sheets. My colleagues will help you if you cannot find.
And we pointed the challenge, you cannot choose, we already chose for you. You will have now ten minutes to read the challenge and talk a little bit about it, what you know.
The main question for you while reading is to understand where is the real problem? Okay? You will have ten minutes to read the challenge and discuss a little bit in the group how you understand, and maybe exchange ideas how you see, where is the real challenge.
The time starts now.
>> DOVILE GAIZAUSKIENE: On the tables, technology cards. You see these cards? Now it's time to pick three cards for each participant. Randomly.
On this card you will see technology and the example how it was used by the public sector institution.
Can you share cards already? Start reading through. And what will happen now, so you have to read the text about the technology.
And produce three, at least three ideas stemming from the technologies that you randomly picked. Which would show the possible solution of the challenge you were discussing.
Familiarize with technology and think of how it could be used for solution of the challenge that you were discussing in the group.
This has to be done individually. So not too much sharing on this part, sorry. But we really want you to think individually, a little bit. From the technological perspective. Okay?
So at least three different ideas, it doesn't have to be real solution, more like an idea of how this technology could be used to tackle this challenge.
Time starts now. Ten minutes again. Like I said, we will be rushed.
>> DOVILE GAIZAUSKIENE: All right we already have see discussions happening. You have moved about the room. Now it's time to read from the examples and discuss in the group what you actually produced.
I saw, now it's time to discuss actually. Try to merge ideas. Try to discuss why some technologies maybe couldn't be used and so on. You will have ten minutes for this discussion. And after that we will want you to actually give us reflections of how you feel after this exercise. So the last ten minutes to share in the group the ideas you produced. The insights you got. And the most important question here is to discuss how your perception of maybe challenge itself changed.
Ten more minutes and then we will be very much pleased to hear from you.
>> DOVILE GAIZAUSKIENE: Again thank you very much for these discussions which are happening. Now it's time to move to the reflection session. Our time is running out, running very fast. And now we would like to hear from you. We have three questions for the discussion. And we really encourage you to get the microphone, Magne can bring to you. And try to answer what have we learned from this exercise. Maybe you would like to reflect. Maybe you can reflect on certain technologies which you discussed maybe more deeply. And maybe, I heard, in some groups you discussed some nuances. Maybe you built some arguments why not to use technologies. It would be great to hear from you now.
Who wants to, just raise your hands and we will bring a microphone for you to be heard.
Who wants to be first?
Just sharing what was happening at your table and reflecting what you have learned from this.
>> So we were the first group, we had the first challenge, which was focus on the exclusion of marginalized voices in digital service co-creation. And I believe one thing to absorb is first we saw it as a very, very complicated challenge. There was a lot of statistics in data overall marginalization of people is a multifaceted issue, whether rural, low income or digitally not fully able person.
So the key challenge that we saw is how do we include more voices of people who are not as active in digital spaces. For example in policies and institutional feedback loops. So that is the focus of the challenge. I believe at the beginning we didn't see how the technology would contribute significantly to solving this challenge.
For example, my case it was process mining, quantum computing or agentic AI.
After discussing with colleagues, it's a multifaceted issue. Maybe we need to see how technology like quantum computing or process mining could help employees to deal with their issues more that don't require human interaction so they have more time to engage with their constituents. And then perhaps agentic AI could help with proactive public services where the government could reach out to you, and basically identify you are entitled to public services, whether a renewal of your passport or social benefits or some other aspects.
Maybe colleagues would like to contribute?
>> Okay, thank you very much.
So basically the topic of inclusion of the marginalized voice, taking those individuals that are not opportune to access to digital platforms. And you know, part of the conversations had evolved. In different locations, people find it difficult to access those digital platforms. And part of the solutions we looked at is trying to, you know, look for (?) take digital solutions to people. To persons that cannot read or write, but they can speak. How do you get these people involved. People that can speak fluently, can speak general with everybody speaking, how can you get those people involved. Building solutions that are tailored to what people are used to is something.
I know even machine learning is improved by those kind of systems.
And you know, improving machine learning and solutions, how do you bring in professionals, that actually, knowledge in terms of giving you ideas, giving you professional input solutions.
So for example, you are trying to build a mental health solution for people to have a mental problem. How do you bring in mental health professionals to actually give you solutions, or give you tips on how to tailor the decision making in terms of the solution you are building for people.
So those kind of solutions. Thank you.
>> DOVILE GAIZAUSKIENE: Thank you very much, this group for being first and for your comments.
It's very nice to hear you wouldn't jump to technological solution but look into context more. This is what we also preach in GovTech Lab. Maybe we have more comments. There's still time for a few more ideas or comments. Please. Okay.
>> So we had a challenge with people with disabilities making payments. And we had several approaches to that. So I think the first one is getting the data, what is happening and what was the percentage of payments, digital payments, that would be from banking, from governmental services.
That would lead to machine learning algorithms bringing insights to the trends and what are often the mistakes people have and problems they might face while paying. Then identify the risks and that would hopefully lead us to the solutions. One of which was use of agentic AI and tailoring the data into the algorithm into the model of AI that would have a personalized solution, based on the condition of the person on his use cases to pay safely, to pay reliably and meet his budget. Because the conditions are very, very different across people.
And one of the things as well we had the medical component, let's say (?) that would bring more medical data, is the stress elevated because of the heart rate being elevated. Because the situation is very stressful, the person is anxious for some reason. And that would bring more components to the solution.
And then, as well there's other things. Let's say in the digital space it could be the Metaverse. If it's completely online we could have more control, let's say if it's online to do the payments of some digital transactions.
And some people are very visual, let's say. Maybe not so into social interactions but very visual, so Metaverse can help online. Or it could be augmented reality in real life. Let's say they would have certain visual guidances to help them to connect with people more safely.
So that is one of the solutions. The nuance we found as well that the person has very limited ability to decide what to spend, how much do things cost, and who has the say on that? Is it the government, his bank, his medical professionals. So that's an ethical thing that needs to be decided. I think it's a very thin line what is right or wrong in this.
>> DOVILE GAIZAUSKIENE: (Off microphone)
>> DOVILE GAIZAUSKIENE: Thank you, everyone for joining this session. Please meet us -- okay, please meet us. Come to our stand where we are this day and these upcoming days and discuss with us more. Thank you very much for your participation.
[ Applause ]