ICT equals transparency
These days, nobody cares about technological news in Turkey. After all, there is a never before seen turbulence in the government and state institutions. Writing about booming internet businesses would be very off topic today.
Instead, I will write about why we failed with e-governance and why we will never be able to establish open governance systems like Telia Sonera establishes for Nordic countries. They build municipality systems by which you can reach any municipality worker and see his/her output and vote on his/her performance. Can you imagine something like that in Turkey?
TeliaSonera’s subsidiary, the mobile operator EMT in Estonia, created a world’s first mobile identification service in 2011, which makes it possible to vote via mobile phone. For the first time in the world, citizens of Estonia cast their votes in the parliamentary elections of 2011. Can you imagine something like that in Turkey?
It is very difficult for me.
I have been writing about the tenders in the biggest ICT project of the national education system, FATİH. I write constantly that FATİH is not transparent. Unfortunately, I see that it has become the norm in many areas if you do business in Turkey.
There is a major difference between any other industry and the ICT industry when it comes to transparency. You can still have a building, a road, a hospital, a publication even if the tender process and the service level agreement is not transparent, but you cannot have an ICT solution in place if you are not fully transparent about everything.
That is the nature of ICT and that is why societies that are used to doing deals behind closed doors can never be successful at e-governance. Mind you, only a handful of countries can do it, the USA, for example, is still lagging very far behind Finland.
Will Turkey clean itself from un-transparent culture?
It is remained to be seen. I can only tell that if we do not embrace everything that comes with being fully transparent and accountable, then I will never be able to write a successful ICT project about e-governance in Turkey.
