Newsletter

Would you like to know the magic word describing best the first months of our BLSI – Better Legislation for Smoother Implementation – community? Read on… and pull together your Italian knowledge!

Back in early July, our legal interoperability team sent out the first BLSI newsletter and prepared with trembling knees and lots of excitement for our first community event, baptized virtual breakfast on digital-ready policymaking. And it worked: you showed up, got engaged and we received sufficient munition to go on!

Thus in the autumn, we came back with more content: we informed you about interesting events (e.g. OPSI event on Rules as Code) and inspiring news (e.g. a course on legal interoperability) and saw happily your interest in our webinars:

• In our October virtual breakfast, Kristoffer Nilaus Olsen from the Danish Agency for Digitisation presented their approach to digital-ready legislation.
• Our November event fell under the umbrella of the OECD Government After Shock conference, where we explored the topic of legislation & technology with the help of speakers across the globe.
• In order to close the year in beauty, we invite you to join us in our December virtual breakfast on financial regulatory reporting and start sharing your ideas on how to streamline regulatory reporting in general.

We are also pleased that what we are doing is part of a greater growing trend, moving from a niche subject to a recurring core issue of many conferences (e.g. ReMep 2020, Icegov2020, Digilabs20) and interesting projects popping up around it (e.g. the Flemish linked local governments data experience). We can hear the call for more European and international cooperation on the topic and this is exactly, what we would like to facilitate.

So what is our magic word for the BLSI community in 2020?

Thanks to you, our community journey so far was gorgeous! Let's continue our collaboration in the same spirit in the next year!

And what are our plans for 2021?

• We expect that digital-ready policymaking will get even more attention – you may want to keep an eye on the upcoming Berlin Declaration on Digital Society in this respect.
• We hope to support projects, which bring technology closer to legislation and move forward the efforts streamlining regulatory reporting.
• We will keep learning about your needs and listening to your ideas so we shape our community together! To walk the talk, please let us know by end of December what topics you would like to discuss in our next webinars, which will continue as of February 2021.
• Finally, we hope to see more and more of your content on our Joinup space, where please feel free to launch discussions, comment on existing ideas and publish your news – relevant for our community.

Warm regards,

Cécile, Isa & Zsofia

We had a great variety of virtual breakfasts together with you this autumn, and our last event of the year will be no different! Join us on Thursday 10 December for our “December virtual breakfast: Financial regulatory reporting in the spotlight”.

What’s on the festive menu? You will have the chance to hear about what the Directorate‑General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (DG FISMA) is doing to make regulatory reporting more effective.

Experts from DG FISMA will share insights into how they are successfully using innovative approaches to ensure clarity of their regulatory requirements and reduce overlaps between different reporting frameworks. Their ultimate goal is to make submission of regulatory data a smooth and seamless process for the local authorities.

During the webinar you will have the chance to discuss lessons learned and good practices that are or may soon be put in place in DG FISMA and how these will affect the Member States in the long run.

You can register to the event here.

As we already mentioned in our last webinars, we are closely involved in the design of a future EU interoperability policy for 2021. CEPS is providing us with three interrelated studies on the impact assessment, as well as the evaluations of the ISA² programme (Interoperability solutions for European public administrations, businesses and citizens) and the European Interoperability Framework.

To collect your feedback, CEPS will hold a kick-off workshop to discuss the key questions that lie ahead for the EU’s new interoperability policy on 3 December from 10:00 to 12:00.

Join us and read more about it here!

On 17 November, we hosted our third Better Legislation for Smoother Implementation virtual breakfast. It was hosted as part of the Government After Shock event by OPSI and it discussed crisis-proof policymaking and lessons learned from the COVID-19 crisis with participants and speakers from around the globe.

Read all about it and the key workshop takeaways here!

We are happy to announce that we are adding a new section to our Better Legislation for Smoother Implementation Joinup collection. As part of our BLSI community, we will be exploring together the benefits of streamlining regulatory reporting, how to do it and the innovative approaches that emerge.

Regulatory reporting is a process that helps to monitor the compliance of concerned stakeholders with a particular piece of legislation, hence serving as an important element in the policymaking cycle.

However, like most processes involving multiple stakeholders, it comes with recurrent and shared challenges. More often than not, the obligations related to regulatory reporting result in unnecessary administrative burden for the parties involved in its compliance (i.e. submitting reporting data). For instance, existing overlapping regulatory frameworks result in parties reporting the data more than once.

But just as these obstacles are shared by many different actors, their potential solutions can also be shared:

• The use of emerging technologies can greatly support the streamlining of regulatory reporting process. As we enter the age of automation, stakeholders involved in the regulatory reporting process are taking bold steps to innovate. Let’s be vigilant and identify practices for reuse together!
• The European Commission has launched a Regulatory Reporting Community of Practice to serve as a space for the exchange of lessons learnt and best practices. The main outputs of the Community of Practice are open to members of BLSI to reuse, comment and propose new ideas on which aspects of streamlining regulatory reporting the European Commission should focus on.

Read more about the importance of streamlining regulatory reporting in our new custom page!