E-Citizenship and E-Population

Statisticians are working a lot on structuring realty in order to count the right things. But reality is not at all stable, changes are going on all the time and statistics have to decide which changes have to be followed.

So population Statsticians had to adapt to new family models, had to recognize that ‘male’ and ‘female’ is not sufficient and now a new type of people is popping up: e-Citizens.

Estonian e-residency

‘The Republic of Estonia will be the first country to offer e-residency. People from all over the world will have an opportunity to get a digital identity provided by the Estonian government – in order to get secure access to world-leading digital services from wherever you might be.’ From: ‘Become an Estonian E-Resident’

‘An e-resident can use and enjoy the same great digital services that allow Estonians to do anything and everything digitally–sign all documents,launch and
manage companies, do the banking, encrypt files, etc.’

Digital Society – Digital Population?

With a simple ID-Card you become an E-Estonian and a member of the digital society. And who will count this new kind of population?

http://e-estonia.com/

New research project on access to statistics

Stockholm University, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, is starting a new research project on Citizen-centric access to statistics. Project manager is Professor Bo Sundgren, former advisor to the Director General of Statistics Sweden.

The project will investigate the possibilities to define an easy-to-use, powerful, and flexible standard interface for communication of statistical data and metadata between the dissemina­tion databases of statistics producers (statistical agencies) and citizen-centric applications, developed by entrepreneurs or by citizens themselves.

Read more at project blog and web site …..

PC-Axis and Gapminder?

See http://www.pc-axis.scb.se
PC-Axis and PX-Web are software used in several countries for dissemination of official statistics. PC-Axis is a windows browser and PX-Web is for the Web and both are based on the PC-Axis file format. The PC-Axis file format is very meta data rich and should be a nice way to forward statistics into the Gapminder/Google/Trendalyzer. Most of the data are in time series. A lot of data is available in this format from many National Statistical Offices over the world. Some countries in Europe: Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, United Nations Economic Commission for Europe etc. Links to these websites are available in the link above.
The PC-Axis file format is an open format in plain ascii and should be very easy to utilize as input for Trendalyzer. Perhaps this is something for Google to check.
Lars Nordback,  mailto:lars.nordback@scb.se