| Extensive parts of the administrative legislation
are inherently of executional
nature, e.g. tax laws, social welfare programs,
and require both government and individual data for
proper application.
The ongoing transition of government agencies into
service units is a wide open field for improvement
of citizen-administration interaction.
Putting the bulk of filing forms on internet servers is
only a small first step. Helping citizens to understand
individual options and implications of choices involves
complete consultation cycles. The implementation of
such servers must use processing on the client side for
acceptable response times, reasonable server cost, and
adequate privacy protection.
Systems capturing legal bodies and administrative expertise
have been implemented and widely reported, but only at
corporate or consulting company level. MINERVA enables
to deploy this technology at much lower cost to a far
wider client population, thus opening the way for
much more supportive and service-oriented government.
Look at laws as public domain software. Financed by the tax payer,
laws are accessible to everybody. However, to make optimal use
of this generally available body of rules
requires expensive legal and tax advisors.
Consulting systems running on centralized government servers
can not completely resolve this deficiency, because consulting
must follow a goal and avoid conflict of interests: a government
server would lack both the bias in favor of the client and a
safe structur to protect client privacy.
MINERVA allows to do case studies, "what-if" simulations etc on the
client side, using the legal body downloaded from the server, but
executed locally on the individual machine. Even if private data
is needed during the simulation, it is never handed over to the
server. By design, confidentiality is never compromised.
The steep cost barrier to legal and other law-related advice
shrinks dramatically: the MINERVA client only needs standard
internet access, available at rapidly decreasing cost to
wide portions of the population.
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