As a digital marketer with his own agency, Mykhailo Fedorov had a dream. He wanted to take over the digital side of a presidential campaign one day.
That dream came true earlier than he expected when Volodymyr Zelensky, then just a comedy actor, asked him to run his digital campaign in the upcoming presidential race.
The campaign was a success, and Zelensky was sworn in as Ukraine’s sixth president in May.
Fedorov stayed close to him but was given a different task: taking charge of Ukraine’s electronic government initiative.
This tech-savvy 28-year-old from the southeastern city of Zaporizhia now aims to make it possible for Ukrainians to vote, run a business, and receive public services online.
Elected to parliament from Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, Fedorov was appointed deputy prime minister and minister of digital transformation on Aug. 29 during the new parliament’s first session.
After only four years in business and less than a year in politics, he has become a central figure in Ukraine’s tech sphere: he decides what laws and budget resources Ukraine needs to develop e-government. More importantly, he will design a brand new ministry responsible for information technology.
And Fedorov is confident that he will succeed. He believes that digitalization can become Ukraine’s national idea and unite Ukrainians, while also — through transparency — helping rid the country of corruption and simplify the dialogue between citizens and the state.
“Eventually, people will stop noticing the government. They’ll be using it like they use Uber or Booking.com — only when they need it,” he told the Kyiv Post in an interview earlier this month. “Government will become a service.”
Grand strategy
Fedorov and his 10-person team say they have been “very busy” since Zelensky took office: They have been working on a digital roadmap for the country.
According to Fedorov, the most laborious task so far has been understanding the legacy their predecessors left them. A basic audit revealed that, for 28 years of Ukrainian independence, government officials had not “managed to agree on a mutual strategy” and thus acted incoherently, he says.
“They seem to have always argued with each other, they showed selfish ambitions instead of teamwork.”
Nobody tracked progress in the IT sphere, knew how many online registries actually functioned, or even knew the budget for Ukraine’s digitalization, he says. As a result, electronic services appeared chaotically and people did not use them.
From now on, everything will be different, the techie claims. Calling himself a “visionary,” Fedorov has already come up with a digital strategy for the next 5 years to create what President Zelensky and Fedorov call the State in a Smartphone project.
Based on this strategy, Fedorov has assigned some 100 tasks to various government agencies. He says he has an online dashboard to supervise their progress.
Fedorov himself is directly involved in auditing the registries, preparing draft laws, introducing internet identification tools and rolling out new e-services.
With the parliament’s first session, he and other newly elected lawmakers from Servant of the People will start implementing his goals. The party will have a simple majority in the parliament, holding 254 out of 423 seats. 226 votes are enough to pass laws in Ukraine.
“But for now, we are doing the maximum we can with no official roles,” Fedorov told the Kyiv Post.
Busy September
What can Fedorov do without legislative authority? He and his team have been preparing 35 draft laws for Ukraine’s tech industry and e-government.
These are laws on cybersecurity, e-residency, storing data in the cloud, radio frequencies needed to cover rural Ukraine with 4G internet, and technical neutrality — all long-awaited in by the tech industry.
In fact, it was the industry players — tech companies, associations, and nonprofits — that wrote these drafts. The president’s digital aide just collected them and refined them.
“We asked the business what they wanted the government to work on,” he says. In many cases, business people handed his team draft laws they would like to have passed.
After the team of lawyers who work for Fedorov has revised the drafts to make sure they are up-to-date and align with the e-government roadmap, Fedorov will hold what he calls a “Digital Day” in the parliament to pass the most important laws all at once. He promises to do it in September.
Corrupt registries
Another one of Fedorov’s projects promises to be controversial.
His office will carry out an audit of Ukraine’s numerous registries: from the general population registry to more specific ones like the registry of entrepreneurs. Fedorov says there are at least 250 of them, “but nobody knows for sure.”
This unaccountable bureaucracy opens the door for corruption. Fedorov claims that shady individuals stand behind every registry and take bribes to change the information recorded there, sometimes illegally.
“They passed the word to me through different people” that they want to meet, he says. But Fedorov is reluctant to do that — he does not want to be associated with these shady characters.
“Although,” he adds, “I am kind of curious how everything works, and they know for sure.”
After the audit, however, Fedorov aims to make the registries electronic and, thus, fully transparent. That should make it impossible for anyone to change information within them anonymously.
An Estonian firm that has reformed registries in Estonia, a country viewed by many as a role model in terms of its e-government, will take on the task of combing through the registries here. Fedorov’s team will spend up to $150,000 on the project, with the money coming from international donors like Swiss development agency EGAP and USAID.
This is money well spent, Fedorov says, because maintaining some of the paper registries now costs $20 million a year, which he terms “highway robbery.”
The digital team of Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential campaign works at the campaign’s office on Feb. 27, 2019. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Useless ID cards
E-services rely on interconnected electronic registries. But they also require people to be able to identify themselves online. Introducing tools for that is another priority task for Fedorov and his team.
There are currently three potential identification tools: a phone number, an electronic key, and a mobile app. Fedorov’s team is going to work on all of them, but they put a lot of trust in a mobile app called SmartID.
“But I don’t really care how people will sign their online docs. The main thing is to make the process more convenient for them,” Fedorov says.
The previous government, however, used a different approach, which is now obsolete, according to Fedorov. Ex-President Petro Poroshenko introduced smart ID cards, a plastic piece of identification used in place of paper domestic passports.
These cards have a special chip built in for identifying their holders online. But the previous government lacked legislation to make them work. As a result, since their introduction in 2016, Ukraine has issued only 1.3 million ID cards for 44 million Ukrainians.
In 2018, the government fully replaced paper passports with smart ID cards, so more people will soon have them. But there’s a problem: Ukraine has no devices to read them, which makes the cards useless on the internet.
As a result, Ukraine will have to skip many technologies that it has missed, like ID cards, and start using MobileID and SmartID right away, Fedorov says.
“(The ID cards) are a thing of the past. Today everything is done on the phone. We will simply have to pass over some stages of our evolution.”
‘Little offshore’
Despite having no proper e-government at the moment, Fedorov already plans to share its benefits with other nations — in advance.
He envisions Ukraine possessing e-residency, something Estonia has had since 2016. But Ukraine’s version will be better, Fedorov claims.
Being an e-resident in Estonia means one can use all its e-government services remotely, including business registration and the services of European Union banks. However, the e-residency card holder does not have a residency permit or a visa and pays the flat 20-percent Estonian tax rate.
“And we have a 5-percent tax for entrepreneurs. This can make us a little offshore and open us up to the world. It’s great marketing for the country,” the former marketer says.
The Kyiv Post’s technology coverage is sponsored by Ciklum. The content is independent of the donors.
