Ambassador at Large for Digital Affairs, Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Nele Leosk serves as the Ambassador-at-Large for Digital Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia. Over the past twenty years, she has advised political and public sector leaders in digital governance and digital economy in more than forty countries in Central and Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. Apart from government work, she has experienced the life of private sector, international and inter-governmental organisations such as the UNDP, UNU, OECD as well as academia. Nele is the chair of Digital Cooperation and Digital Diplomacy network, member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Agile Governance, advisory board member of GovStack Initiative, and active in several networks on women in tech. Nele holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI), Italy. She is a former Fulbright-Schuman grantee at the National Centre for Digital Government at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at the Governance Lab at New York University, USA.
Digital sovereignty or tech sovereignty was already high up on the agenda of government leaders. That is even more so the case in the lights of the acute threats to sovereignty of the war in Ukraine. Digital sovereignty is rapidly becoming an important theme for public administrations in their e-governance. They need to contribute to safeguards for sovereignty, whether national or EU, and do so in a sensible and responsible way. They need to consider their choices of foreign and domestic cloud providers. They need clarity on control of critical digital infrastructures and key services such as e-identification. They want to carefully consider AI-based service delivery so that trust and respect continues to be the basis of relationships between citizens, communities, and government. The keynote speech will introduce the need for digital sovereignty as well as the challenges and pitfalls of digital sovereignty for e-governance. The high-level panel will bring together perspectives, from the big picture of how geopolitics affects governments in their digital policies to the practical choices that public administrations need to make for sovereignty-respecting e-government services, and to the values and vulnerabilities of the relationship of citizen and government, where personal sovereignty meets state sovereignty.
Join the GovStack team for a hands-off experience in the co-design of government services based on user needs and using a building block approach. You will learn how to architect a digital service solution using reusable software components/building blocks (BB) & technical specifications from GovStack Global - like digital identity and verification, interoperability, digital signature, payments, among others - to accelerate the digitization of government services. This approach saves time and resources, allowing governments to upscale by using the same component across different digital services. We look forward to collaborating with you!
Digital sovereignty or tech sovereignty was already high up on the agenda of government leaders. That is even more so the case in the lights of the acute threats to sovereignty of the war in Ukraine. Digital sovereignty is rapidly becoming an important theme for public administrations in their e-governance. They need to contribute to safeguards for sovereignty, whether national or EU, and do so in a sensible and responsible way. They need to consider their choices of foreign and domestic cloud providers. They need clarity on control of critical digital infrastructures and key services such as e-identification. They want to carefully consider AI-based service delivery so that trust and respect continues to be the basis of relationships between citizens, communities, and government. The keynote speech will introduce the need for digital sovereignty as well as the challenges and pitfalls of digital sovereignty for e-governance. The high-level panel will bring together perspectives, from the big picture of how geopolitics affects governments in their digital policies to the practical choices that public administrations need to make for sovereignty-respecting e-government services, and to the values and vulnerabilities of the relationship of citizen and government, where personal sovereignty meets state sovereignty.
