THE INFORMATION SOCIETY IN FINLAND
Towards a Policy Analysis

1 October, 2000
Draft, please quote only after requesting for permission.
Please report on errors and omissions in the text.

Prof. Dr. Pertti Ahonen, DSocSc, MScEcon
E-mail 
hlpeah@uta.fi
Homepage – Kotisivu 
http://www.geocities.com/pertti_ahonen

1 Introduction

Available data of international comparison reveal that in definite respects Finland is one of the world’s leading information societies in per capita terms. Although here small population, just over 5,1 million in 2000, precludes a dominant international role in this respect, the success of the company Nokia has provided her a national industrial base to proceed and a definite albeit often implicit international visibility. It is true that Nokia, named after a small town just west to the Finnish town of Tampere about a hundred years ago, is often taken as a Japanese name, company and a trademark among many common users of Nokia mobile phone handsets. 

However, it is not the Nokia group alone by far that expresses Finland’s advance in the field of the information society. The country is one of the global leaders in the frequency of internet hosts, mobile phones and personal computers as well. This is a common Nordic feature, concluding on the basis of data on Sweden, Denmark and Norway. (Table 1.) The significance of this fact that the world’s best elaborate – and among some audiences, notorious – welfare societies have become information society leaders is a features that must be analysed in detail in another context. Time will show of spicing up the welfare state with ICT (information and communication technologies) will generate the expected benefits – or perhaps even more. In any event, the very focus of this paper, government policies, is a conceivable interface between the welfare society on the one hand and on the other the welfare society.

To proceed before long to systematic policy analysis of government policies of the information society in Finland, in other European Union Member States and other developed countries – and countries of a lesser development as well – this web research document charts Finnish government policies related to the information society. The document only involves public domain information and numerous links to relevant websites. It is true that some of the documents found therein are in the Finnish language, but English language versions are common as well. No absolute comprehensive coverage of the relevant websites has been tried, but a good coverage has been seen as sufficient. The document is selective in further ways as well, such as with a focus on links between Finnish and European information society strategies and programmes.

Table 1. Data on the information age in selected countries (the World Bank according to International Telecommunications Union statistics and statistics of the Internet Software Consortium at http://www.isc.org (http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2000/pdfs/tab5_11.pdf).

Country	Mobile phones per 1 000 people, 1998	Personal computers per 1 000 people, 1998	Internet hosts per 10 000 people, 1999	
Austria	282	233	478	
Belgium	173	286	267	
Denmark	364	377	540	
Finland	572	349	1 117	
France	188	208	111	
Germany	170	305	174	
Greece	194	52	60	
Ireland	257	272	157	
Italy	359	217	157	
Luxembourg	..	..	..	
Netherlands	213	318	403	
Portugal	309	81	59	
Spain	179	145	77	
Sweden	464	361	581	
United Kingdom	252	263	271	
For comparison:				
Norway	474	373	754	
Switzerland	235	421	371	
United States	256	459	1 509	
Japan	374	237	164	

2 The official Finnish policies: from strategies to concretisation and particular measures 

One part of the Finnish policies of the information society have a strategic nature, that is, they have played the role of spelling out the government strategies and the wider societal strategies for the governance of the information society and its further development. There have been:

•	The May, 1994 government decision on information management in government; which called for electronic transactions within agencies as well as between agencies and citizens and agencies and other stakeholders. 
•	In 1994-5 government spelled out its national information society strategy. 
•	1998, government together with numerous social partners had a national strategy for the information society elaborated by the quasi-government Sitra Foundation (http://www.sitra.fi/tietoyhteiskunta/). Note that this strategy can be seen not as one of government as narrowly taken but instead as one of broader societal governance, involving a multitude of relevant social and societal partners. 
•	There is the Ministry of Education plan for education and research in and on ICT and the information society. This plan involves several elements including ones of strengthening ICT and multimedia education and research at universities and research institutions. 

The Finnish government programmes its activities by the means of its general programme devised at the formation of each government and special programmes, if any. The present government, set up in 1999-, has like its predecessor, defined a particular “project portfolio” to given direction to its policy-making and policy implementation activities. For the time being, three projects essentially involving information society themes must be mentioned:

•	Improving public services using ICT
•	Enhancement of social and medical services by the means of ICT, promoting multimedia content production, and advancing telematics serving purposes of transportation
•	Promoting joint network services and information security, and developing electronic procurement and improving access to public sector information 

In relation to European programmes and initiatives for joint action in the information society field the Finnish government policies can be seen to be well in line. This concerns also the two following important initiatives:

•	eEurope (http://europa.eu.int/comm/information_society/eeurope/index_en.htm), to be discussed below in more detail
•	The eContent EU programme for content production for the digital media (http://europa.eu.int/comm/information_society/econtent/index_en.htm)

The Finnish government has institutionalised the monitoring of its information society policies. For this purpose there is the Information Society Advisory Board co-ordinated by the Ministry of Finance. The Board is to render its first report in the autumn of 2000 (check at http://www.vn.fi/vm). The Public Management Department of the Ministry of Finance has a long-time role in co-ordination ICT-related activities jn the national government (http://www.vn.fi/vm/english/public_management/index.html). However, Finland early chose a rather decentralised than decentralised way of enhancing ICTs in government. The solution seems to have been the right one.

Proceeding within the Finnish government and its administration, three particular policy steps must be taken up:

•	A 1998 ruling
•	A decision on information management of 2000
•	The law of 2000 on electronic transactions in government

The government ruling in 1995-9 put in 1998 into effect a decision on electronic transactions, development of electronic services and reduction of data gathering (http://www.vn.fi/vm/kehittaminen/tietoturvallisuus/hst/hsteng.htm). Implementation of this decision has involved:

•	Definition of certification authority and certification services (carried out by the Population Register Centre)
•	An electronic citizen identity card, available since December 1999, serving as a Schengen treaty mini passport as well
•	Law on electronic transactions in administration, passed in the beginning of 2000 (http://www.om.fi/2838.htm).
•	An X.500/LDAP directory on electronic addresses, available since 1999 (http://www.julha.fi)

On 2 March, 2000 the Council of State made a decision-in-principle on information management (IM). The decision covers the aspects of inter-operability, joint services, and co-operation between agencies on IM (http://www.vn.fi/vm/english/public_management/it.htm).

The Finnish law of 2000 on electronic transactions in administration in Finland was the world’s first of its kind.  The purpose of the act is to ensure smoothness and speed of services and data security. The act regulates the rights, duties and responsibilities of the authorities and the customers. In addition, the act regulates the electronic identification of persons.  Authorities and agencies that are able to do so shall enable the public to send messages to designated addresses or devices to have a matter handled. The authorities shall offer the public the option to deliver documents and messages electronically. The authorities can sign decisions electronically as well. 
http://www.vn.fi/vm/english/public_management/index.html

3 ICT in political empowerment of the Finnish citizens

The programmes of the two recent Finnish governments (“Lipponen I”, 1995-9 and “Lipponen II”, 1999-) have included the utilisation of ICT for citizen participation among policy directions to promote. For the time being, two projects must be taken up. 

3.1. The extended participation project: enhancing democracy through the web

Equally as the case has been in Sweden, in Finland the government has wanted to experiment with extended participation of citizens in government and official decision-making. The actual key terms both in Swedish and Finnish imply something deeper than mere “participation” (“participering” or “deltagande” in Swedish, “osallistuminen” in Finnish). Instead, the terms are “delaktighet” and “osallisuus”, respectively. One can rightfully say that “participation” refers only to some or perhaps almost any degree of activity in relation to the decision-making. “Delaktighet” and “osallisuus”, in their turn, refer to a deeper stake of the citizens in the political community at hand – whether it be European, national, regional or local, or whether it be one of politics of one of work – in the line the so-called “strong democracy”. Benjamin Barber and Robert Putnam are among the best-known authorities of the extended democracy, and there are lesser authorities who have contributed on electronic possibilities to the same ends as well. The respective projects aim at complementing and enriching representative democracy, spicing up standard, indirect and so often citizen-distant liberal democracy with new elements. This is evidently sensitive given long-established practices in government, in government-citizen relations and in municipal self-government as well. (For the Finnish project, see http://www.intermin.fi/eng/curr1.html; for recent Swedish measures, see – in Swedish – http://www.justitie.regeringen.se/pressinfo/pdf/ju00_11.pdf).

The Finnish extended participation project is being carried out during a period of several years. For the time being, the time frame extends until 2002 after a few years of implementation already behind. The project involves co-operation between the national government, the municipal self-governments, political parties, private non-profit organisations and businesses.

One of the extended participation project particular projects consists of the Idea Factory or Idea Incubator, owned by the Espoo City Youth Council. The Idea Factory invites the young people to discuss their ideas on the Internet until the ideas may reach the decision-makers with a political mandate in the city. Ideas presented are moderated into motions, opinions or letters and returned onto the virtual forum for a vote. Should a proposal ends up with the ma*jority of the votes, it will be placed in the web signature page for approval. Thereafter the proposal is communicated to the municipality, the decision-makers and the media. All material is transparent to all visitors to the site. To keep spammers out the users must engage in confidential registration. (http://www.nettiparlamentti.fi/ideahautomo/.)

In another extended participation project with ICT support, the Home Street Project, the initiator was the Federation of Associations of Helsinki City Quarters acting together with the Association for Local Culture and the Helsinki University of Technology, with funding from cities and government ministries. The goal is to empower citizens in urban planning and design and strengthen local culture and urban identity. To take an example, Pihlajisto is a Helsinki neighbourhood of some 3 000 inhabitants. The project has created home pages for this neighbourhood with an interactive forum. The pages involve a presentation of the neighbourhood; information on housing; a gallery of events and news; information on local services; and pages by the City of Helsinki planners including an interactive forum with the citizens. (http://www.suomenkotiseutuliitto.fi/pihlajisto/.) The concept has been extended to other neighbourhoods. Home Street has developed an interactive Internet tool for Nature Management Planning as well (http://www.hkr.hel.fi/viher/index.html?luonnonhoito.html).

Almost all participation project municipalities will implement the Internet election machine. This service has aimed at increasing interest in municipal issues before the municipal elections of October 2000. The machine is implemented in co-operation with the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s largest by far. The machine is to spread to further municipalities by the municipal elections of 2004.

3.2 The UUTIVA project: ICT and citizen participation in government decision-making

the UUTIVA project aims at improving citizen-government connections especially by the means of the Internet. A visible part is a pilot forum launched in February 2000 (http://www.otakantaa.fi), open to everyone without need to register. 

The subjects covered are the UUTIVA-project itself, electronic government, and the quality of public services. The most popular part of UUTIVA have been proposals that citizens can send to the Ministry of Finance proposing cutback targets; over 1 500 proposals a month has been received. In September-October, 2000, a Youth Forum working with the Committee for the Future of the Finnish Parliament has hosted the discussion forum on the theme the Future of Work. As a further activity there is going to be an on-line discussion between members of parliament and youth.

4 Services, changes in supply practices, and actual improvements

4.1 An selective overview of services

If the Finnish citizens and other stakeholders want and provided that they have the necessary ICT at their disposal with the basic user skills, they can nowadays very well keep track with official decision-making and legislation. In 1998 government opened a public register on legal preparation projects and actual preparation work (www.hare.vn.fi). The Prime Minister’s Office offers information on bills drafted in the Ministries (http://www.vn.fi/). Parliament offers access to drafts and documents (www.eduskunta.fi). Legislation passed by Parliament is published on the web by the Ministry of Justice (http://finlex.edita.fi/). A new act now makes access to legislation free unlike until present that the citizens had to buy copies of the Official Journal or collections of legal texts published with frequent intentions of commercial earnings. 

A well covering service is a Citizen’ s Guide on the web that the Ministry of Finance has provided (www.opas.vn.fi). The Guide involves following features:

•	It covers essential information that citizens need at different stages of their lives, and companies and associations are serviced as well. 
•	Anyone can access the Guide from any computer with an Internet connection, and retrieval of information is free. 
•	The Guide is available in Finland’s national languages Finnish and Swedish and a English version has been built to help immigrants and visitors. 
•	The front page of the Guide links to Internet pages of various authorities. This page is used as well to inform the citizens on recent legislative and administrative decisions. The Guide incorporates over 1 000 separate links, and it has an internal search engine. 
•	More than one hundred various government authorities provide information for the wide, and municipalities do so as well. The information is constantly updated. Users can send feedback and questions to the Guide webmaster. 

It is relevant as well that the Ministry of the Interior has produced a public directory of contact information of officials in authorities and agencies (www.julha.fi).

Forms used in public administration are available to citizens in the electronic form service (http://lomake.vn.fi). In early autumn of 2000 there were 380 different forms on the web, and 200 000 users had used the services over two years. The forms can be printed out and filled in by hand, or they can be printed out after filling them in first on the computer. Once electronic signatures will be widely introduced, filled forms can be sent electronically to the authorities. 

Consolidation is to expect in the services that the Finnish national government provides through the Internet. A pilot for a government Internet portal will be developed by the end of 2000 together with several regional portals.

To provide services over the Internet may not require fundamental organisational changes. However, there are a few cases where ICT has been more directly used in modifying the supply of public services by the Finnish national government. 

The Finnish national tax administration has a central call centre. Customer calls can be redirected from loaded offices to others in peak times. Individual tax returns can be processed outside a customer’s own tax office. All this mainly shifts work off the overloaded Helsinki region. The Ministry of Labour has since 1995 a call centre in the city of Mikkeli ca 200 kms off Helsinki. Most of the calls come from the Helsinki area, making the solution resemble the one in the tax administration. The Mikkeli centre also processes inquiries and open vacancy notices that come via the Ministry of Labour web service (http://www.mol.fi)

4.2 Towards further policy analysis of ICT-enhanced public services

At the beginning of launching certain services by the support of the ICT a common observation in Finland was that the number of customer service points first increased as all points could share the same information. However, when the services consolidated and as self-service has been increasing as the Internet has stepped in the number of service points has started to decrease. The previous one-service points tend to be replaced by multi-service offices, which service scarcely populated areas, in particular, where it is not fiscally feasible to continue numerous one-service points. However, there are sensitive issues involved, as the local citizens may not be ready to accept the reduction in the numbers of the service points they are used to. Moreover, it has not been ruled out that the new multi-service points arise in the population centres of the rural areas, and the remote village citizens may feel their community impoverished if the previous one-service points nearby are closed down in the name of improvement and modernisation of service.

Finns possess a PC more often than most other European citizens (Table 1). However, from the viewpoint of actual Internet access it is relevant that the actual Internet penetration rate in Finnish homes is comparatively not very high. This has such reasons as the rather high local telephone call rates, which is what the Internet users must bear even when using an Internet portal that may be in itself free. Access options with a fixed monthly rate irrespective of use remain pricey for the private low-volume users until the fees will go down as examples from some other EU Member States now suggest can be supposed to happen. 

However, the Finnish public libraries, involving one of the popular free public services among the citizens, have no fewer than 1 400 free Internet access points, and there are terminals in other public spaces as well. Although access times at libraries for each users must have been limited and although reservation of sessions times of queuing may be necessary, actual use of the service is extensive. Internet access at work is very common among the Finns. For instance, in 2000 no fewer than 76% of national government officials had a connection to e-mail that enables them communicate outside their office, and 78% had web access. This is of course also an aspect of the reachability of the civil servants by the citizens and the other stakeholders. Youth have access at schools, universities and other education institutions and municipal youth clubs. Internet cafés run by private business, common in some other countries, are not widely prevalent in Finland, which suggests that there are unlikely to be any very serious problems of free public access or access at homes. 

For the time being it is likely that some of the Finnish citizens, able to use the Internet or willing or able to learn feel they cannot afford a connection, or their use remains lower to much lower than it were, should cheap access options exist for homes. Here the Finnish official policies differ from the Swedish ones. The Finnish government has not felt, unlike its Swedish counterpart, that government should step in to facilitate cheap access at the citizens’ homes.

Electronic government is likely to have a very interesting near future in Finland. Once actual Internet penetration in homes increases while cheap permanent connections independent of the actual use volume become widely available also for low-volume users one obstacle has been won over. Next, there is the futuristic option of very widespread mobile Internet use. For the time being the existing WAP solutions are not rarely used, but the services available are not extensive. Instead of the WAP, it is more likely that in a few years actual Internet access through the coming generations of high-performance mobile phones and coming networks of mobile telephony will be a challenge and opportunity for the Finnish government as well in the rendition of public services. 

There remain further interesting aspects to study, ponder and evaluate. Although questions of equality are not prominent in the Finnish scene of the information society policies – and besides being constantly transcended by the rapidly falling price-per-performance rations of ICT – the actual coverage of the services brings forward resembling themes and challenges. For instance, should certain services be extended to practically every citizen, financial or resembling limitations to access are an obstacle to win. 

An important facet of policy analysis of the Finnish information society policies is joint, systematic policy analysis approach to the multi-pronged ensemble of the relevant government strategies, decisions, norms, programmes and projects, carried out with or without one or more other stakeholders in the own country or in other countries. The approach should cover as well the various tools being used, the various players involved and the various types of their interactions, the various rules of each part of the “game”, and a deepending analysis of the efficiency, the effectiveness, the relevance and the sustainibility of the actual policies and parts thereof.

Last but not least, how the Finnish policies link to European information society policies remains an interesting question. Finland, equally as Sweden, are now European leaders in wide and deep promotion of the information society in their respective societies. However, as I stated at the beginning, the small size of Finland, and the not-so-huge size of Sweden make that they can make the best of their efforts rather in a context of international co-operation and integration than acting fully separate. Such co-operation certainly takes place already, and it is likely to extend as well. How and where it extends is the more open as a question the more distant the future at hand. However, it is exactly this open-endedness that makes the whole issues are so very interesting.