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As a follow-up to its Digital Decade Communication of 9 March, the Commission is launching a public consultation on the formulation of a set of principles to promote and uphold EU values in the digital space. The consultation, open until 2 September, seeks to open a wide societal debate and gather views from citizens, non-governmental and civil society organisations, businesses, administrations and all interested parties. These principles will guide the EU and Member States in designing digital rules and regulations that deliver the benefits of digitalisation for all citizens.

Applications for the first European Innovation Procurement Awards are now open. The awards recognise powerful cases of public and private buyers on using innovation procurement practices across Europe. The 2021 edition features three categories:(1) Innovation procurement strategy award, which rewards long-term strategies that trigger different innovation procurements, sustainable solutions and practices;(2) Facing societal challenges award that rewards innovative procurement practise aimed to face the COVID-19 pandemic;(3) Procurement leadership award that recognises outstanding individual(s) who empower(s) their team to succeed and trigger innovation procurement practices.Each category will reward the winner with EUR 75 000 and one runner-up with EUR 25 000. Deadline for submitting applications: 29 July 2021

The first in a series of 5 workshops on B2G data sharing in cities was held on 5 May, setting the scene for an open, peer-to-peer discussion among EU cities on their experiences of business-to-government (B2G) data sharing and how to scale up these practices in cities and regions across Europe.

Malta becomes the 33rd member of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, rejoining the other 26 Member States and 6 Associated Countries in this strategic initiative, which is pooling EU and national resources to build world-class high performance computing (HPC, also known as supercomputing) and data infrastructures in Europe. Supercomputing is one of the essential pillars of the Digital Decade, the Commission's vision for the digital transformation of Europe by 2030, and an indispensable strategic capability for achieving EU digital sovereignty. Europes ambition is to become a world leader in high-performance computing and in quantum computing, the next technological frontier, in the coming years.

India and EU leaders have agreed to build a sustainable and comprehensive Connectivity Partnership, as well as cooperate on supercomputers to bring solutions to challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, during the 16th EU-India Summit held on the 8th of May.

The Commission has launched its first practical guide to connect the media sector with EU funding: an interactive mapping tool to facilitate access to information about financial support mechanisms.

Member States had until 30 April 2021 to share with the Commission their roadmaps for the implementation of the Connectivity Toolbox, detailing their expected plan and an indicative timing for implementing the appropriate measures for the rollout of very fast networks, notably fibre and 5G.

The evaluation of the last CEF Telecom call for proposals (CEF-TC-2020-2) has concluded, and 85 projects in the areas of Business Register Interconnection System, Cybersecurity, eArchiving, eHealth, eProcurement, European Digital Media Observatory, European Platform for Digital Skills and Jobs, and Public Open Data have been selected to receive co-funding by the European Union. The funding is enabled by the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme in the telecommunications sector. The successful projects come from the 27 EU Member States, Norway and the United Kingdom.

This publication is made pursuant to Point 3.1 of Annex 1 to Financial Regulation 2018 that provides for an ex-ante publication on the Institutions websites of contracts with a value up to 138.999,99 EUR.