Vermont has a bill trying to emulate this idea and I'm aware of the success that the E-Residency program has in ROI for Estonia. However, how do you respond to the pushback by both US and EU partners in regard to your project?
To understand the modern governance processes and to witness some of the very advanced development in the e-government tech I went to Estonia in 2017 and joined the e-Residency program, which is on the cutting edge of the digital ID movement and government innovation. This experience expanded my vision of what's possible within a government given the right motivation and commitment to change for the better. Estonia is a great example of a society that came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union with barely anything. In early 90's Estonians made a bet on transparency, legitimacy and technology (particularly the internet) and it paid off greatly. With the population of just over a million people, it does incredible things, and other countries are staring to pay attention, and either use some of the Estonian technology directly (for example X-Road, the data exchange layer of Estonia is available on github) or are heavily inspired by it. For instance, last year at the annual e-Gov conference in Tallinn over half of the attendees were high level officials from African countries, eager to modernize their societies and learn from the examples of digital government. We foresee a growing interest in the e-government solutions in the next decade, especially given the adoption of electronic identity documents (inevitable in our view), and with that will come the desire to improve the services offered to citizens.
Of course, we don't expect all governments to move as quickly as Estonia in the adoption of digital technology. Our aim is to start working with the quicker and smaller countries first, where there is already a desire to modernize operations.
Also, we are starting from the bottom up, from the communities and the network to collect and process the data. Once the network gains critical mass, the insights Consensus will be able to give to the decision makers will be valuable and will save the government time and money, which will help facilitate adoption. Over time, the countries using Consensus will have a clear advantage over those that don't, which will help push the adoption by the "laggards".
Also, if you're thinking about cities rather than countries, then the adoption is easier, since the local governments can implement the tech faster than federal gov.