The DE4A Moving Abroad pilot has been working for some time. Now we have two countries live with pilot services (Spain and Slovenia) for the use case enabling to request an extract or copy of civil status (Birth and Marriage) certificates. Slovenia (data provider) is providing both types of certificates to the Spanish online citizen portal (data consumer). Additional cross-border combinations also involving Luxembourg, Romania and Portugal will soon be launched also for registering a change of domicile address (with subsequent deregistration of an old domicile address in the case of Portugal).

Getting hold of your fundamental evidences for life in the EU is not always easy nor has it been easy for clerks to verify the authenticity of such evidences; Marriage & Birth Certificates and Domicile addresses. Moving to a new country should be easy and you should not have to worry about basic administration: the EU Member states will support you.

Today it often takes several weeks and requires obtaining documented proof that must be uploaded or sent by email. The piloted solution enables company citizens to securely send evidences across borders without language barriers. We can now send Member States structured evidences within minutes. It saves time, effort and money to complete the fully online procedures and provides public authorities with reliable, structured and authentic data they can easily process.

Public Authorities and pilot testers that are involved are enthusiastic about the new solution and the possibilities it will offer on a large scale.

Main components reused were the DE4A Once Only Technical System for securely exchanging authentic information, and eIDAS to securely authenticate citizens.

The infrastructure has been integrated with population registries and public authorities provide modern services for citizens. These basic certificates are used in many services and we expect that new public agencies and Member states can and will reuse the services in other procedures.

See the pilot videos and read the lessons learnt here:
https://www.de4a.eu/movingabroadpilot

DE4A and GLASS Collaborate to Deliver Greater Efficiencies for the European Commission and Improved Services for EU Citizens
EEMA Fosters Cross-Project Collaboration for EU Funded Initiatives

Through its work on many European Commission funded projects, EEMA has a privileged position from which it can identify commonalities across ongoing initiatives. In doing so it delivers meaningful change that enables stakeholders to align on how they address specific challenges and opportunities for the greater overall ambitions of the European Union.

On 22nd September, EEMA is unique vantage point to a workshop entitled ‘Semantics – Alternative Project Methodologies: Citizen-Centric Evidence Transfers’. The two-hour online session was hosted by the Chair of EEMA, Jon Shamah, and brought together consortium partners from the Digital Europe for All (DE4A) and GLASS projects. “These two important projects highlight the importance of semantics, as the number of EU projects that will require interoperability grows,” observes Shamah.

DE4A supports the Single Digital Gateway Regulation across Europe, helping to make the digital single market a reality. It aims to facilitate the migration towards European Digital Public Services co-delivered across borders, across sectors and with different participants, reinforcing trust in public institutions, and realising positive impacts of citizen centricity on efficiency and a reduction in administrative burden and costs. Meanwhile, GLASS aims to create a new paradigm for the sharing and transfer of personal information, placing the citizen in control, by using e-wallets. It is developing a distributed framework for sharing common services of public administrations across the EU for citizens, businesses and governments.

Jon Shamah was joined by Ana Rosa Guzman, from DE4A who opened the interactive discussion by highlighting the semantic interoperability challenges involved in sharing information across national borders. These include different types of evidence, language barriers, many competent authorities and demarcations, as well as different rules and components, and distributed documents.

Sharing their approach to the same challenge of sharing and transferring documents, were George Domalis and Aris Gioutlaki from GLASS. The project assumes that every country will share the same type of data, however, it will be presented differently. Therefore, the challenge is to find a way to standardise the format of these evidences (such as a password or ID card), so that they can be understood by everyone. To this end participants were introduced to a piece of middleware developed by the GLASS project the ‘AI Data Schema Transformer’ which aims to resolve the issue.

The workshop provided an opportunity for both GLASS and DE4A participants to learn about respective objectives and developments and in doing so, forge closers ties and alignments that it is hoped with realising greater efficiencies and better outcomes for each project, the European Commission and ultimately for EU citizens that chose to live, study and work in different Member States.

It proposed that a strategic group comprising a number of representatives from each project are formed, to develop the progress made during the workshop further and propose recommendations to the European Commission.

A recording of the ‘Semantics – Alternative Project Methodologies: Citizen-Centric Evidence Transfers’ workshop will be available shortly.

More information about EEMA, DE4A and GLASS can be found at:

www.eema.org
www.de4a.eu
www.glass-h2020.eu

Digital Europe for All (DE4A), a three-year Member State-driven project that is supporting the Single Digital Gateway Regulation across Europe and helping to make the digital single market a reality, today announced the launch of its Doing Business Abroad pilot.
The Doing Business Abroad pilot aims at demonstrating in practice the benefits for companies and competent authorities of realising across borders the principles of Once-Only and digital-by-default. It also supports the use of innovative approaches such as validating mandates of company representatives. The pilot is proud to announce that the first cross-border service has been launched for piloting.
The service largely corresponds to a fully online procedure of the 'Starting, running and closing a business' in the Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR), which allows companies from Romania to easily register their company with the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) in The Netherlands.
Further cross-border services and combinations of Member States are expected to be launched in the coming days.
Details of the services and the guidelines for participation can be found on the microsite of the Doing Business Abroad pilot at https://www.de4a.eu/doingbusinessabroadpilot

The Studying Abroad pilot of the DE4A project aims at demonstrating in practice the benefits for students and competent authorities of realizing across borders the principles of Once-Only and digital-by-default. The pilot is proud to announce that new cross-border educational services have been launched for piloting.
The services largely correspond to the fully online procedure of the 'Studying' Life Event in the Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR), which allow students from Slovenia to easily pre-enrol for a master degree study at University Jaume I in Spain, and Spanish students to apply for study grants at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia. Students will use their national eIDs to access the services and will explicitly request the use of the DE4A technical system to have their diploma evidence required by the service transferred electronically from a trusted source in their home country satisfying applicable provisions of the SDGR and the GDPR. This way, students will no longer have to search for the evidence and fill in the necessary application forms by themselves.
Details of the services and the guidelines for participation can be found on the microsite of the Studying Abroad pilot at https://www.de4a.eu/studyingabroadpilot
Further cross-border services and combinations of Member States are expected to be launched in the coming weeks

Digital Europe for All (DE4A), a three-year Member State-driven project that is supporting the Single Digital Gateway Regulation across Europe and helping to make the digital single market a reality, today announced the launch of its Studying Abroad pilot.
The Studying Abroad pilot aims at demonstrating in practice the benefits for students and competent authorities of realising across borders the principles of Once-Only and digital-by-default. It also supports the use of innovative approaches such as self-sovereign identities, digital wallets, and distributed ledgers in higher education domain, while also incorporating the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI). The pilot is proud to announce that the first cross-border education service has been launched for piloting.
The service largely corresponds to a fully online procedure of the 'Studying' Life Event in the Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR), which allows students from Slovenia to easily apply for recognition of higher education diplomas in Portugal. Students use their national eIDs to access the service at INESC-ID, a partner of the project affiliated with Instituto Superior Técnico, the largest engineering school in Portugal. Using that service, students can request their diplomas, which are stored in a DE4A digital wallet in the form of verifiable credentials, to be recognised in Portugal. The digital wallet on a mobile phone allows students to securely manage their diploma evidences received from a trusted source in their home country.
Further cross-border services and combinations of Member States are expected to be launched in the coming weeks.
Details of the services and the guidelines for participation can be found on the microsite of the Studying Abroad pilot at https://www.de4a.eu/studyingabroadpilot

Digital Europe for All (DE4A), has been selected as a partner for the European Week of Regions and Cities. The EU funded project, that is supporting the Single Digital Gateway Regulation across Europe and helping to make the digital single market a reality, will host a live online information session during the event. DE4A consortium partners will demonstrate how interactions between citizens, businesses and governments can be streamlined, through the demonstration of its Moving Abroad pilot.
In an efficient Digital Single Market, effectively enabling the cross-border exercise by citizens and businesses of their Single Market rights is just as important for cities and regions as for Member States. Speeding up the efficiency of business is essential for continued growth. Staff and citizen mobility is both a complementary requirement and an essential requirement to attract incoming business activity. The DE4A project is streamlining how EU citizens, business and governments interact.
As a selected European Week of Regions and Cities partner, DE4A will host a live free-to-attend online information session entitled ‘Streamlining how citizens and business interact with governments’. Taking place on Tuesday, October 12, from 17:30 to 18:30 (CEST), the session will present the current challenges of cross-border interoperability and how the DE4A project is helping citizens and businesses overcome them. DE4A will introduce its Moving Abroad pilot which be launches in October 2021, with the aim of creating a digitised process for requesting and delivering evidence in real-time (free from any language barriers), to streamline the process for EU citizens moving from one Member State to another.
The European Week of Regions and Cities (#EURegionsWeek) is the biggest annual Brussels-based event dedicated to cohesion policy. It has grown to become a unique communication and networking platform, bringing together regions and cities from all over Europe, including politicians, administrators, experts and academics.
Registration for DE4A’s ‘Streamlining how citizens and business interact with governments’ webinar is open now.

The project covers the establishment of those building blocks that are intended to enable the implementation of cross-border electronic services according to modern principles and requirements of legislation. The emphasis is on combining and integrating past projects that addressed isolated functionalities (cross-border data exchange on a "one time" basis, cross-border authentication compliant with eIDAS requirements, "digital default" - STORK, TOOP projects, etc.) into comprehensive e-services , which meet the requirements of modern principles and relevant legislation at national and EU level. It includes the potential use of innovative technologies (eg blockchain and artificial intelligence) in areas where this makes sense

DE4A is in compliance with the Single Digital Gateway (SDG) – of which the European Commission states: “The single digital gateway will facilitate online access to the information, administrative procedures and assistance services that citizens and businesses need to get active in another EU country. By the end of 2020, citizens and companies moving across EU borders will easily be able to find out what rules and assistance services apply in their new residency. By the end of 2023 at the latest, they will be able to perform a number of procedures in all EU member states without any physical paperwork, like registering a car or claiming pension benefits.”

At ISSE 2019, EEMA was proud to reveal that it has been chosen to participate in a new EU-funded initiative - Digital Europe for All (DE4A). DE4A will enable an open and comprehensive environment and platform for collaboration and innovation, leveraging common eGovernment baseline patterns for secure, privacy-preserving and trustworthy realisation of essential Once-Only and Relevant-Only principles, and with re-use of existing and new building blocks and Digital Service Infrastructures at national and EU-wide levels. Innovative technologies like blockchain, machine learning, self-emerging ontologies and zero-knowledge proofs will be addressed for effective sharing of common services. Earlier this year EEMA announced that it would be taking part in the LOCARD project that aims to provide an holistic platform for chain of custody assurance of digital evidence. EEMA is also currently participating in the FutureTrust and LIGHTest projects.