On February 07, the Better Legislation for Smoother Implementation (BLSI) community held its first 2023 BLSI virtual breakfast! This event, one of a series of webinars, has focused on turning the Joinup community space more co-creative, and gathering your ideas and needs for future training material.
We extend our gratitude to the attendees for their active participation, and to the panelists, Bernard Claes and Petro Dudi from the Joinup team, for their insightful contributions to the webinar. The key highlights of the event and a link to the recording can be found below:
Key takeaways
Digital-ready policymaking: what was achieved in 2022?
- Enabling digital-ready policymaking became one of the five main priorities of the Next Generation Digital Strategy of the European Commission, adopted in June 2022.
- The course on digital-ready policymaking went online in July 2022.
- The European Commission adopted a proposal for an Interoperable Europe Act to reinforce the interoperability of the public sector in the EU in November 2022. The Communication accompanying this proposal includes an entire chapter dedicated to digital-ready policymaking.
The Interoperable Europe Act proposal: What's in it for our community?
This session explored six elements of the Interoperable Europe Act proposal that are of particular interest to our community. These are:
- Interoperable Europe Governance: this will be based on structured cooperation and co-owned by EU Member States and the EU institutions, agencies and bodies. It will consist of the Interoperable Europe Board and the Interoperable Europe community. Our BLSI community will be part of this latter.
- Interoperable Europe Portal: it will build on JoinUp and serve as a one-stop-shop for shared and reusable interoperability solutions. Our community will benefit from its collaborative features and contribute to knowledge generation.
- Interoperability Assessment: it will be performed before setting any binding requirements for IT systems, be they legal, organisational, semantic or technical. Our community may play a role in shaping this mechanism that could be a catalyst for digital-ready policymaking.
- Policy Implementations support projects: they intend to facilitate the implementation of (EU) policies by exploring the options to reuse available interoperability solutions. Our community’s expertise on the links between policy and digital implementation could be an asset in such projects.
- Innovation and support measures: a set of clauses that help test and share innovative solutions for public services. Our community’s interest in regulatory learning and the use of emerging technologies for policymaking can contribute to this.
- Training: upskilling on cross-border interoperability in the public sector will be urged by the Interoperable Europe Act. By gathering information on training needs and preparing instructional materials, our community can help assist with this requirement.
This first edition of the webinar series focused on two elements of the above list: the Interoperable Europe Portal (Joinup), and future training provision.
The Interoperable Europe portal: Joinup platform
- Top reasons to use JoinUp:
- Reuse valuable and free solutions;
- Promote your own actions;
- Be in touch with many professionals;
- Follow news and participate in events;
- Follow the progress of the new European interoperability policy.
- Content creation and engagement with colleagues on Joinup can come in four shapes:
- News, for publishing announcements, press releases and the likes;
- Events for announcing webinars, conferences, and other such opportunities;
- Discussions, for virtual conversations and debates;
- Documents, for exploring certain topics, solutions more in depth.
- Content interactions on Joinup:
- Sharing your thoughts via comments – This is a great way to start a discussion.
- Requesting user contribution via Discussions – You can follow, share or invite Joinup members to a discussion. This provides a way to increase interaction.
- Reaching your community members – Community managers can reach the members by using the announcements tool.
- Reaching your community managers – Community members can get in touch with the community managers via online forms.
- Content consumption on Joinup:
- Managing your subscriptions.
- Topic-based approach to content – This ought to result in more relevant content, and less effort in finding what interests you.
- The “Digital-ready policymaking” Topic page was presented for feedback.
- Overall, Joinup will become friendlier, easier to use, and quicker.
The Interoperable Europe Act: Need for training?
- The participants had the opportunity to share their learning needs and to prioritise different topics. The top three most popular topics were: (a) understanding law as code, (b) digital-ready drafting, and (c) applying once-only and reusing data.
- Participants were also invited to provide their opinion on what types of learning materials would be the most effective. The most popular replies were, among others: (a) discussions and fora to exchange ideas, (b) short videos/learning nuggets complemented by a document, and (c) factsheets.
- Finally, participants made several suggestions on how to improve the usability of the BLSI Learning Hub. For instance, they proposed increased focus on case studies, national and local examples, projects and tools.
Presentation
Please find the downloadable version of the webinar's key takeaways, including the Q&A session and the feedback collected from our interactive visual board, along with the speakers' presentations, attached below.
To access the recording of the session, please click here.
Next steps
The session provided our LIOP team with valuable insights to shape our future activities. We thus look forward to seeing you at our next virtual breakfast session!
Until then, please subscribe to our newsletter and do not hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have.