This has been an exciting year for Better Legislation for Smoother Implementation. Our community of members has doubled in size and together we have managed to accomplish multiple initiatives (our 2021 Retrospective).

During the past year, the BLSI team has organized 5 virtual webinars where we discussed multiple topics touching upon different aspects of digital-ready policies, interoperability and digital tools. Over 300 participants have attended our webinars – thank you for your interest and contribution! During one of the events, you gave your feedback on the needs for learning materials for policy makers, which we implemented in our first BLSI online course.

During 2021, our legal interoperability team was very active to shape the digital-ready aspects of the Commissions new Better Regulation agenda. We are pleased to see that the Commission now underlines the importance of assessing draft policies against digital aspects and provides policy makers with necessary guidelines in this respect.

The need for digital-ready checks of new Commission proposals and the ambition to apply the principle of interoperability by default in policymaking may form part of the future interoperability policy as well, thanks to the recommendation of the Expert Group on Interoperability of public services earlier this year.

While the ISA² Programme has evolved into Interoperable Europe recently, our vision and mission remained unchanged: together with you, we thrive to make better legislation for smoother implementation.

As you can see, this has been quite an eventful and productive year. But there is even more news coming up! In January we will host a virtual breakfast on innovative practices in regulatory reporting – stay tuned for more information! You can also check the key take-aways from our October webinar on regulation of interoperability in public sector available on our Joinup platform. And do not miss the opportunity to read our new paper on the importance of metadata in the regulatory reporting process.

And we are ready to commit to our 2022 resolution! In the next year, we will invite you for more exciting workshops, present a prototype of an automated policy screening tool, add new BLSI online courses to assist policy makers in making policies fit for the digital age. In 2022 we are counting on you to also share your BLSI insights with the community on the Joinup platform.

We wish you very happy holidays and we look forward to welcoming you again in the next Brilliant, Lovely, Spectacular, Impressive year of 2022!

Kind regards,

The Legal Interoperability Team