Ideas about things in public digitisation that could be, and personal guesses why they aren’t.

What if… I knew if the Digital Post message require my attention?

Today, at work, I received a notification on my phone. I got Digital Post.

Digital Post are messages from danish public authorities and I am required by law to read it. Not reading and responding to messages can cost me money, my security clearance or worse.

The notification told me the message was from Copenhagen University. I was not expecting this message and opened the inbox. The sender was ‘Copenhagen University’ and the subject was ‘Personal message from Copenhagen University’. The message was a link to a 15 min online survey from a research project.

What if the notification have read ‘Invitation to participate in a study about pedestrians and cyclists’?

Part of the design of Danish Digital Post is an elaborate message model. The sender submits one file with structured metadata about the document that is being send. The metadata includes dedicated structures to hold text notifications by SMS or mobil and emails. The original design brief included machine-readable actions like ‘pay amount’, ‘provide information’, ‘take decision’ and due dates.

Why could I not infer from the notifications if any immediate action was required?

When designing the current version of Digital Post we considered three models:

Do less. The EU regulation on electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) was just out. The idea was to require citizens and business to register a trusted electronic delivery service and require authorities to send message to that service.

The public authorities were not ready to give away control of the user interface due to complications in the phone support when providing phone support.

Do more. The 400th anniversary for the royal mail services was approaching. The idea was to provide a public owned digital mail services free to citizens, business and authorities.

The Agency for Digitisation was not interested in the burden of deciding when business and citizens abused the free service.

Compromise. Digital Post had been implemented by a private service provider for the past decade. The danish government wanted to comply to european procurement regulation and let the market provide a cheaper solution. The idea was to keep the messages under government control, provide a user interface to allow access (and ensure efficient phone support) but allow alternative client to show messages.

I could not infer if the notification if the message from Copenhagen University require action, because the service provider of Digital Post does not takes on the burden of actively control the use of the features in the message model.

15 May 2025, madsh, more like this