Speakers

Marten Kaevats, is the National Digital Advisor in the Government Office of Estonia or unofficially the Chief Innovation Officer of Estonia and the co-founder of a global digital governance architecture initiative, GovStack. He, being responsible for information society and innovation in Estonia, is working on upgrading the interoperability system architecture of his country. The goal of all of his work is to build adaptable and future-proof governance architecture, while acknowledging well that predicting that future in its complexity is impossible. Estonia, being a prime example of distributed governance architecture based on human-scale values where every end user is in control of their data, is perfect in testing out new forms of governance suitable for the 21st century.

He legalised the testing of self-driving vehicles on all public roads in Estonia in 2017 and is the initiator of the Estonian AI policy. He has a Master's degree in Architecture and City-planning from the Estonian Academy of Arts. Marten joined the Estonian governmental talent programme in 2015. He studies the impact of various scalable technologies on the socio-spatial behaviour of individual people and communities and describes his discipline as governance architecture. Before joining the government, he was the chief of Tallinn Architectural Biennale 2015 "Self Driven City" curatorial team. Marten is also an active member of several civil society organisations; he was also one of the founding members of the Uue Maailma Selts (New World Society) in 2007, which triggered reformatory changes in participatory democracy and a revolution in civil society, also he founded and contributed to the creation of open source community web platform Community Tools, established in 2008.