e-⁠residency turns five — help us celebrate!

Hannah Brown • Nov 01, 2019 • 4 min read

Register now for your chance to attend e-⁠Residency Week (24 November — 1 December 2019)

2019 is a year of milestones for innovations in travel, communications, and more connected world.

This year, the aviation industry is celebrating one hundred years since KLM was founded in 1919 when Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands granted it the royal title. One hundred years later and 4.6 billion scheduled passengers are flying somewhere in the world this year. By shortening travel times, commercial flying has helped to bring significant changes to the world. Global business, tourism, and migration has boomed. The world has become a smaller place and people are only limited by their passport and imagination.

2019 also marks fifty years since the first message was sent on ARPANET, a network of computers that eventually developed into the Internet. Communications would never be the same. Now there are 4.33 billion active users of the Internet (nearly 60% of the world’s population) sending and receiving up to 300 billion emails per day. The Internet and technologies that have come with it have fundamentally changed the way people live, work, and interact with others. The world has shrunk in a physical sense but expanded online, where borders barely exist and the possibilities of digital identity, global business, and virtual reality are seemingly endless.

E-⁠Residency is also celebrating its own important milestone in 2019: its fifth birthday!

December 1st marks five years since Edward Lucas, then Senior Editor of The Economist, became the first e-⁠resident of Estonia. This was the first time that a country provided a digital identity to someone who lived beyond its borders, ushering in a new era of how we think about the relationships between governments and the people they serve.

Since then, over 60,000 people from 165+ countries around the world have joined Estonia’s digital nation as e-⁠residents. E-⁠residents have so far established around 7,500 new companies and, by doing so, they have not just benefited from e-Estonia but also made a significant contribution towards its further development. They’ve conducted business with other Estonian companies, invested in Estonia, travelled to Estonia, and some have paid taxes to Estonia.

Perhaps most interestingly, e-⁠residents have also raised greater awareness of Estonia globally — including the country’s proud culture and values.

To celebrate our fifth birthday, e-⁠Residency is hosting a series of events for our community around the world as part of e-⁠Residency Week, hosted in partnership with Estonia’s embassies and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Most events will take place between 24 November and 1 December 2019 at the Estonian Embassies or other locations in a number of cities, including Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Dubai, Geneva, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kyiv, Lisbon, London, Madrid, New York, Paris, Prague, Seoul, St Petersburg, Warsaw, and Wroclaw. There is also an earlier event in Milan on 8 November.

Each event will feature:

A welcome message from Estonia’s ambassador or another representative
A retrospective view of what happened during the first five years of the e-⁠Residency programme
Information about how e-⁠residents can start and run a company fully online
Discussion about exciting developments that are on the way for our community of e-⁠residents around the world
A chance to meet and network with other e-⁠residents and friends of Estonia

All are welcome, whether you are an e-⁠resident or not! However, please note that space at the events is limited and so registering your interest to attend does not automatically guarantee you a formal invitation.

Invitations will be sent out by embassies or other organisers prior to the scheduled event. Only those receiving an official invitation via email will be allowed to attend.

If you can’t make an event, you can stay up-to-date with all of the events on our social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

We will also be debriefing e-⁠Residency week here on the blog and via our social media channels in December so stay tuned for that!

In the meantime, e-⁠Residency wants to thank everyone in this community for being a part of our five year milestone: especially to the e-⁠residents.