Česko.Digital has been helping to improve digital know-how in government and non-profit organizations for the last two years. During that time we have received hundreds of requests for help with various projects, giving us unique insight into the needs of the Czech public sector.
If we take a look at the more technical projects with higher impact, the single most requested project we have seen is “business process automation”, ie. various computer systems for customer relationship management, document management, data entry & collection, etc.
At the moment, these systems are often custom-built from the ground up. Usually they then fail to adapt to the changing environment (such as changing legislation or market conditions), so the client has to order a new one every few years. Since just a small part of these systems is particular for a given client, most of the work is needlessly repeated, leading to extra ineffectivity and cost.
Some of these problems can be overcome by systems such as SAP or SalesForce. These offer a common ground, a kind of “construction set” the client may use to build the wanted computer system with smaller effort and often zero programming. Many of these systems are also available as open-source software. Česko.Digital wants to adopt one of these open-source solutions, customize it for the Czech environment (for example by adding plugins to connect to the Czech government services) and support its deployment to non-profit and government agencies.
This will create a common digital infrastructure for everyone to build together, instead of everyone making costly investments into their own closed solutions. The project will have big systemic impact leading to environment where digitalization efforts are faster, cheaper and having less risk.
Many volunteers want to donate their time and expertise to help make Czechia a better place to live. NGOs and government institutions on the other hand have lots of projects to improve life in Czechia, but without the know-how and people to execute them.
Česko.Digital fills the void between these two parties. Our mission is to connect expert volunteers with high-impact projects and help organizations with their digital skills.
We offer a high street shop window full of opportunities, half-day to few-day long tasks. Volunteers, either in their free time or as a part of a corporate CSR program, walk by and pick whatever project or technology they love.
The primary role of Česko.Digital is to fill the shop window with detailed tasks from projects with substantial impact, so volunteers, often without solid context, can pick and deliver them effectively.
We have over two years of experience helping NGOs and government institutions with digitalization. During this period we received over 300 requests for help with various projects, and it gave us valuable insights into the biggest pains in the public sector in Czechia.
We analyzed and aggregated all these requests and identified two key opportunities with massive impact on public organizations:
What most organizations want by far is a better website. It’s true that a thousand perfectly designed and delivered websites could significantly improve life in Czechia. But it’s also true that these can be delivered by many other players. We want to be the leader in driving technological change in our country, focusing on more demanding, higher-stake and higher-impact projects.
(But we’d like the thousand better websites to materialize, too, so we’re at least building a self-service knowledgebase to share our know-how. And sometimes make exceptions by delivering important high-impact projects like the Covid Portal.)