Digital Nation spends a lot of time crossing borders. This summer, we travelled to one of Estonia’s own. 🌿

For our annual summer days, Taavi Linnamäe’s roots took the team more than three hours from Tallinn, all the way to Setomaa – a distinctive cultural region on Estonia’s eastern edge, where borders, traditions and identities have intertwined for centuries. And we got properly immersed.

We got to taste local delicacies (like the shashlik cooked on a pitchfork in a smoke sauna - the specialty of Harrõoro Hämmätüs catering), take in the landscapes, tried our hand at making sõir – Setomaa’s traditional curd cheese – and joined the local community for the opening of a newly renovated tsässon, or village chapel, in Küllätüvä.

It was a very different setting from the government offices and conference halls where we usually meet. But perhaps exactly the right one for a small change. Our summer days are also a chance to turn the lens inward: to reflect on where we are, challenge some of our own thinking, run internal workshops, and adjust course where needed. The air of the borderlands proved rather conducive to that too.

Digital Nation has always been about more than the sum of its parts. Our team brings together people who have built and led digital government from the inside, but also very different backgrounds, roots, experiences and perspectives outside of it. As those come together, they multiply.

A few days in Setomaa gave us time to strengthen those connections, learn something new about each other and recharge for what comes next.

The ambitions remain high: to keep building the best digital government advisory team out there. And with that, to keep building future-ready digital societies around the world.

We came back from the borderlands with a completely refreshed energy to do just that.