Paradigm, the competent regional authority for the European Commission’s Interoperable Europe Act
As part of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), designed to promote the sharing of information and knowledge between EU Member States, the European Commission has adopted an Interoperable Europe Act.
This Act, which came into force on 11 April, aims to strengthen interoperability and cross-border cooperation in the public sector across the European Union, and proposes to introduce a structured and shared cooperation framework for public administrations.
The goal is the creation of a network of sovereign and interconnected digital public administrations, capable of providing better public services to citizens and businesses.
In this context, Paradigm is establishing itself as the competent authority for the Brussels-Capital Region!
To achieve this
The cooperation framework of the Interoperable Europe Act touches on many dimensions: for example, it is necessary to develop common referents at European level for data flows; technically, it is necessary to ensure that we have the same data sharing systems; at the legal level, it is necessary to ensure that data sharing is equivalent in all countries, etc.
Who is concerned?
The entities of the Union as well as public sector bodies that regulate, provide, manage or implement trans-European digital public services are concerned by the Interoperable Europe Act.
In this context, the European Commission has called on each Member State to designate a national SPOC as well as National Competent Authorities (NCAs) at regional level.
BOSA will be our national SPOC. Paradigm will be the National Competent Authority for the Brussels Region while Digitaal Vlaanderen will be that of Flanders. For the moment, no NCA has been identified for the Walloon Region.
Support
To promote this cross-border cooperation in the public sector, the European Commission has provided different types of support:
Via a Opens in new windowdedicated portal, it offers administrations and their employees access to knowledge communities, extensive documentation, a catalogue of open source building blocks (software), guidelines for system evaluation, tools for assessments, etc.
A Opens in new windowplatform is also entirely dedicated to offering free training, ranging from interoperability to artificial intelligence, from the European Interoperability Framework to European licenses, from data management to cybersecurity, etc.
The European Community also provides funding and operational assistance to interested administrations for their transition to open source* for tools such as eSign, eDelivery, chatbot, eProcurement, data platform, etc.
And now?
As the National Competent Authority for the Brussels-Capital Region, Paradigm must fulfil a number of recurring tasks before participating in the Report intended every 4 years to the Commission:
- Provide support for interoperability assessments
- Coordinate and promote participation in measures
- Organise simulation exercises on data reusability
- Support administrations when collaborating with other states
More information coming soon on this subject!
* The open source designation applies to software whose license meets criteria precisely established by the Open Source Initiative, i.e. the possibilities of free redistribution, access to the source code and creation of derivative works. Open Source software is code designed to be accessible to the public: anyone can view, modify and distribute the code at their convenience. This source code is generally the result of a collaboration between programmers.