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The result will be another few weeks of speculation, rhetoric and political crowing -- heavens preserve us!

Enough.

Moving away from elections, I read about an interesting proposition that's been mooted in Australia. Why not give every citizen an official email address on servers maintained and operated by government?

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Forget about the "big brother" aspect of this -- after all, people will be free to use other email services for communications that they feel should be outside the scrutiny of government. Instead, look at the benefits this would offer.

Using this email address would go a long way towards the problem currently facing an effective e-government implementation, namely that of identification and authentication. Of course users' would be responsible for protecting their email login details but this would be no different to protecting login details for any other authentication system.

With a government-run email service, messages could at last be sent with reliable tracking as to delivery and reading status, effectively letting officials know when their communications have been received by those to who they were sent. Court documents and other "official" papers could then be delivered this way instead of by expensive registered mail and/or process servers.

"But what about all those people who don't have internet access?" I hear you saying...

Well that's simply solved too.

If someone doesn't have Net access then their emails will be delivered by way of the postal service. Individual messages (or perhaps a daily digest) would be automatically printed out and mailed to those who have never logged into their email account - thus inferring that they either have no access or would prefer postal delivery.

Even those who only clear their email very occasionally would be catered for by a system that would automatically forward (by post) any emails that had been sitting unread in a mailbox for more than (say) 7 days.

From a bureaucracy perspective this could save a huge amount of money.

Instead of every government department tying up a huge amount of resource to print, sign frank and post mail to citizens, all they need do is fire them off an email. Many will receive that email electronically, the rest will have their messages printed, franked and posted from a central (and therefore more efficient) mail centre.

What do you think?

Would this fly? Is it a viable component of a practical e-Government setup?

Go have your say in The Aardvark Forums

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