Estonia's newly-launched "Donate a speech" campaign—to improve language-processing technology for the Estonian language—is both hosted on free and open source software, and aims to advance the speech processing capabilities of its free and open source AI virtual assistant (Bürokratt, see OSOR's 2022 case study). Organised as part of the Estonian Language Strategy 2021-2035, the first step of the project is to gather samples of speech from as many people as possible through Estonia's Open Data Portal. The speech materials are in a database which itself is free and open source, highlighting how…

Petteri Kivimäki, CTO at the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS), agreed to be interviewed on the history and the impact of X-Road®, the open source data exchange layer solution. Could you give us an overview of X-Road, in your own words? X-Road is a decentralised data-exchange layer that provides a secure and unified way to exchange data between organisations. X-Road is published as open source under the MIT licence, so it is free for any individual or organisation. Originally, X-Road was developed in Estonia twenty years ago, in December this year it will be its 20th…

Estonia is known for its tech-savvy government, regularly topping international indicators, such as the European Commission’s DESI Index for Digital Public Services. The Estonian government states that “99% of governmental services are online” and “70% of citizens use their ID-card regularly” for digital government services. The infrastructure software enabling many of these services, X-Road, is already open source software, but recently the Estonian government decided to make all government software publicly available. The Estonian Parliament, the Riigikogu, approved the necessary changes to…

In collaboration with Gofore Plc and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), NIIS assessed the environmental footprint of the X-Road ecosystem solution, in order to reduce its CO2 emissions and make it the most sustainable data-exchange solution in the world. The X-Road® initiative represents a global success for the open source community. Revolving around the concept of interoperability, it is an open-source software and ecosystem solution that provides unified and secure data exchange between several organisations around the world. At the beginning of 2021, the Nordic Institute for…