The e-Governance Conference in Tallinn was a good opportunity for the SCOOP4C project team and the steering board to meet again and discuss the first project results and the projects strategic direction. The project meeting took place at the 30th May and the steering board meeting on the 1st June 2017.

The main focus of the project meeting was the discussion of the first deliverables 1.1 and 2.1. that will be accessible for the public in August 2017. The deliverable 1.1 discusses the vision of the once-only principle for the European Union by the year 2020 and gives an overview of the barriers and enablers of the once-only principle. Therefore, the project team declares the following vision: 

“By 2020, the once-only principle (OOP) has become a centrepiece of public administration with a clear commitment to transparency, privacy, and data protection. The once-only principle is so well understood by active citizens and by businesses that it is demanded from their respective public administrations. The general public is aware of the significant reduction of administrative burden and trusts implementations of once-only delivery of data across Europe and on national level, based on their ability to verify and track the compliant use of their data at any time. The public administration values the benefits delivered by realising the once-only principle, such as improved quality of data and efficiency gains, and thus considers it as the default option for any new administrative process or reform of existing processes. Based on the full political commitment, any deviation from the once-only principle needs to be explicitly justified. The legislative, organisational, and technological framework for implementing data provision only once also creates new opportunities for innovative private sector services aimed at citizens.”

Furthermore, the document discusses the main enablers and barriers for the once-only principle that are structures along the levels of interoperability of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and certain additional aspect, f.e. trust and transparency, data protection or the socio-cultural influence. The project team discussed last changements for the document and the quality assurance process.

Deliverable 2.1 analyses once-only cases and gives an overview of the actual state of play in Europe. During the meeting the team discussed how to analyse the different cases, how to distinguish between enablers and cases and how to categorize the different cases and enablers. During the discussion it was shown that it is also important to define a terminology for the analysis as the EU uses different ones. This will be crucial for a good analysis of the different cases. 

The two deliverables were also the main focus of the steering board meeting taking place at the 1st June 2017. The members discussed that it is crucial to define legal issues and data ownership for the OOP. A main discussion was on the subject of personal data ownership: Is a person always the owner of its data or is it the state, f.e. who owns the address of a person? It became clear that the different European states have different concepts of data ownership. This discussion will be continued by SCOOP4C project members and first results will be found in the deliverables.