eIDAS 2018 Municipalities Project
The eIDAS 2018 Municipalities Project is one of the early implementations of the mutual recognition principle of European eIDs to access public services introduced by the eIDAS regulation. It enables citizens of EU Member States and EEA countries to electronically prove their identity with their nationally issued eID when seeking access to around 300 services in 81 municipalities across the Netherlands. The solution is currently available for Austrian, German and Belgian eID holders, and should progressively be extended to other countries connecting to the eIDAS network.
European Data Portal
The European Data Portal is an online portal that collects metadata (data about the data) published by public bodies across Europe, collating it into a searchable tool accessible by anyone. Whether it’s a transport tech start-up trying to make commuting more efficient, or a journalist investigating government spending, they can access that data via the European Data Portal.
What are the results?
- Citizens now have a window into public institutions across Europe. There are currently over 750,000 data-sets published on the European Data Portal, freely accessible by citizens, journalists and businesses. People can use their native language to navigate the portal and access these datasets, which leads to initiatives like OpenCoesione.com.it. OpenCoesione analyses projects financed by Italian the department of Cohesion Policies (Dipartimento per le Politiche di Coesione). It shows how much money the department spends on different subjects in different regions, with visualisations. Citizens can analyse how this department within the government is spending money.
- Public services are expected to make gains in efficiency from this greater openness and transparency. By using Open Data, Member States are forecasted to make 1.7 billion EUR in efficiency savings by 2020. One example of Open Data being used to create efficiency is the OASIS project.
- The OASIS project uses Open Data to improve the accessibility of public services, including public transport, in the city of Ghent and the region of Madrid. By collaborating to publish Open Data, the goal is to improve the accessibility of public services and applications that function across borders.
- Innovation in business is fostered by Open Data. Whether it’s air pollution, traffic congestion or public spending, the reuse of data can help the private sector address a market need. On the European Data Portal, there are over 160 cases of Open Data being used in across many different sectors, from agriculture to transport.
- Plume Labs in France tracks the hourly pollution levels in sixty cities in the world, including ten cities in France, four cities in Belgium and four cities in the UK. The start-up uses data made public by different agencies engaged in a policy of Open Data, such as Airparif in Paris.The creation of this central Open Data hub is both a practical and symbolic gesture towards transparency and accountability, adding value.
SPID
Italy: The new Public System for Digital Identity Management (SPID, Sistema Pubblico per la gestione dell'Identità Digitale di cittadini e imprese) will provide acces to offer e-government services to citizens and companies alike. Italy aims to have the system used by ten million users in 2017.
The publication marks a milestone in Italy’s Digital Agenda, notes Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale (AGID). SPID should be implemented by public administrations, but can also be used for commercial services, AGID writes. The agency is responsible for the accreditation of SPID implementations.
SPID will be interoperable with other European eID systems. The solution will be based on the OASIS SAML standard for exchanging authentication and authorization. This standard is used for the European STORK eID project, aiming to develop a common eID infrastructure across the European Union. On its website, AGID provides answers to a wide range of questions on SPID and its implementation. The new eID system will work on multiple computing platforms - it can be combined with PCs, smartphones and tablets, the agency explains. ”Citizens will be free to choose and change eID solutions.” Along with making it easier to access e-government services, the Italian government expects that SPID will reduce IT cost for public administrations, as it will be offered to them free of charge.
Danemark – Digital Post
Denmark’s Agency for Digitisation considers the country’s switch to ‘Digital Post’ a success. With one month to go before the official project deadline, Digital Post now reaches 89% of all Danes over 15 years of age, well above the 80% target. The agency says Digital Post may result in savings of over EUR 100 million per year.
Denmark’s Digital Post allows citizens to correspond electronically with public authorities. Examples include letters from hospitals, pension statements, student grant applications, and correspondence with the tax administration. Users can access Digital Post on two secure websites borger.dk and e-boks.dk.
Not only do Danish citizens use the eGovernment service, the country’s public administrations send millions of digital letters, the Agency for Digitisation (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) reports. “From January to mid-October, public administrations sent 63,600,000 digital letters. That is far more than in all of 2014, when 47,900,000 digital letters were sent.”
Estonia: Estonia shows how innovation can improve public services
"In Estonia a number of public e-services have been developed for citizens. There is a clear potential both for improving the quality of existing services and for developing new cross-border e-services in the EU. If the digital signature alone saves an average of 5 working days per person per year, the benefits for the society are enormous,” said Jaak Aab, Minister of Public Administration of Estonia. (CoR event in Tallinn September 2017)
Estonia is probably the only country in the world where 99% of the public services are available online 24/7. E-services are only impossible for marriages, divorces and real-estate transactions – you still have to get out of the house for those.
Thanks to a safe, convenient and flexible digital ecosystem, Estonia has reached an unprecedented level of transparency in governance and built broad trust in its digital society. As a result, Estonia saves over 800 years of working time annually and has become a hassle-free environment for business and entrepreneurship.
BQ-Portal (Germany)
The Information Portal for Foreign Professional Qualifications by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (EPSA 2015 winner)
Its main purpose is to support the “competent organisations” in charge of assessing and recognising foreign professional qualifications in Germany, which notably include the Chambers of Skilled Crafts, the Chambers of Industry and Commerce, and chambers for the various liberal professions in Germany. The online platform provides them with detailed and scientifically verified information regarding foreign vocational training systems, the substance and duration of individual vocational training programmes and the legal basis on which these are offered. This information is compiled and then organised and published online in a way that makes it useful for the competent organisations.
G-cloud (Belgium)
Le G-Cloud, le programme commun d’innovation et de synergie des services publics fédéraux (SPF), des institutions publiques de la sécurité sociale (IPSS) et des organismes d’intérêt public (OIP), a été couronné en 2016 aux eGov Awards. Avec ces distinctions prestigieuses, Agoria, le groupement d’intérêts du secteur ICT, entend stimuler l’innovation dans la gestion des données et la communication de l’État.
Les services G-Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) et Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) permettent aux autorités de se consacrer au maximum au développement d’applications ICT à haute valeur ajoutée, offrant de hautes garanties de disponibilité, sans qu’elles ne doivent se préoccuper de l’infrastructure sous-jacente. Elles activent à présent des "machines virtuelles" ou des "conteneurs" dans un cloud hautement sécurisé au sein de l’État fédéral. Grâce à la synergie et à l’innovation, les autorités belges peuvent réduire leurs coûts informatiques tout en renforçant le service aux citoyens et aux entreprises. La CAAMI utilise le G-Cloud PaaS entre autres pour sa nouvelle application dédiée au remboursement des soins médicaux. Le Service fédéral des Pensions, quant à lui, utilise le G-Cloud IaaS pour le Moteur de pension. Le potentiel des services G-Cloud est énorme, notamment dans la collaboration directe avec d’autres niveaux de l’administration et le secteur privé.
Openspending in the Netherlands
(OpenGov Award 2016)
In 2014, Open State has launched openspending.nl. With financial data of the City of Amsterdam, including all its boroughs, Open State has launched its openspending.nl platform allowing citizens to benchmark government spending.
When you’re dealing with local governments or institutions, collecting data is a huge undertaking but not impossible. You just need to re-engineer government. Until recently, in the Netherlands it was impossible to gain access to financial open data of all these decentral governments. In 2014, Open State Foundation sat down with some civil servants of the Central Borough of the City of Amsterdam. "We not only got to know how local government organises its finances but also how it was obliged to report their financials to the central government. We discovered that every local government in the Netherlands sends a uniform quarterly financial statement in the form of an Excel sheet with seven tabs to the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands."
Open Government
Other Open government use cases involving local and regional administrations can be found on this webpage.