IDP2016 (IV). E-government

Notes from the 12th Internet, Law and Politics Congress: Building a European digital space, organized by the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science, and held in Barcelona, Spain, on 7-8 July 2016. More notes on this event: idp2016.

Communications on E-government
Chairs: Agustí Cerrillo

Innovation management in public organizations: open data in the threshold of open government.
Adrián Vicente Paños, Diputació de València; Servicio de Transparencia y Gobierno Abierto.

In general, innovation is badly managed in European public administrations: lack of reusage, management deficits, etc.

e-Government, in many cases, has been used as a flagship for the “modernization” of public bodies. And, in particular, open data and open data portals are increasingly becoming the first stop for pubic bodies to face modernization and innovation. 84% of European countries have open data portals, although less than half of them have a certain degree of maturity.

Reuse of data vary significantly depending on the type of data and sector. Thus, finance, contracts, geospatial data and some others are by far much more used than other datasets.

There is a need to improve communication so that the end-user (e.g. the citizen) can reuse data, be more easily found, etc. Benchmarking good practices across different bodies would also have a potentially high impact.

The asymmetric regulation of third parties’ rights in the procedures of access and reuse of public information.
Leonor Rams Ramos, Profesora Contratada – Doctora de Derecho Administrativo (acreditada a Titular de Universidad) en la Universidad Rey Juan Carlos.

The new Spanish Law on Transparency (Ley 19/2013) was much needed, but has been criticised because of its wide limitations, very open cases for non-admittance, and lack of instruments for assessing its efficacy — among others.

What happens with third parties that, despite not being public bodies, they have relationships with public administrations and thus these have data that can be requested by the citizen. Can these third parties, these private bodies oppose to their data being published or given away by public administrations under the Transparency Law?

The Art.19.3 LTBG makes it compulsory to notify third parties if they could be affected by a request of data, and they then become an interested party of the procedure. It is not a right to veto: it just triggers some alerts so that the data from third parties is accurately dealt with. If the data required falls within the category of personal data, the veto is automatic. If not, it has to be analyzed case by case.

The problem is that the citizen that makes the request has no voice in the whole procedure, or can argue against the decision to veto the delivery of data. Even worse, the person requesting the data does not know what the third party can do or will do to avoid the disclosure of data. And hence cannot react or anticipate any movement from the third party, which rends them defenceless.

The collaboration of the private sector in European digital public services of digital identification.
Ignacio Alamillo Domingo, Abogado y auditor. Colaborador docente de la UOC.

Digital identity has ceased to be a matter of security, circumscribed in a very tiny area, to something that is ubiquitous, spreading all over a myriad of platforms and institutions.

On the other hand, digital identity is not only a matter of cost (cost to create an identity) but also a consumer good or even a capital active, and including a social good, liked to social networking or reputation, and leading to the appearance of public providers of digital identities (e-ID).

eIDAS aims at creating a public system of digital identification within the European Union. It focuses in security and interoperability, so that national systems can interact one with each other.

What is the role of the private sector in this system? It is possible that a means of digital identification can be private. This means that the public sector admits private means of identification and uses them or interacts with them. And by doing it at a national level it is enabled that it can be done at the European level. The problem here is how to assess private eIDs and their features, or how to avoid the (explicit or tacit) creation of monopolies or monopolies of e-identification private systems.

Last, but not least, no only public bodies can use eIDs, but also private parties can benefit from eIDAS and use an kind of eID issued by public or private bodies in any member state of the EU.

Discussion

Ignacio Alamillo: it would be interesting that the public sector accepted different degrees of identification, with different levels of security, compliance, etc., in collaboration with public-private-partnerships, etc.

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12th Internet, Law and Politics Conference (2016)

If you need to cite this article in a formal way (i.e. for bibliographical purposes) I dare suggest:

Peña-López, I. (2016) “IDP2016 (IV). E-government” In ICTlogy, #154, July 2016. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
Retrieved month dd, yyyy from https://ictlogy.net/review/?p=4454

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