The participation of public administrations in data management is essential for Spain to successfully navigate the process of digital transformation.
The director of the Microsoft-Universitat de Vàlencia Chair for Privacy and Digital Transformation, Professor Ricard Martínez M., participated as a keynote speaker in the seminar Reusing public sector information: beyond open data.
The academic argued that digital transformation in Europe means that open data, data analytics and data reuse play a fundamental role in the way political and administrative decisions are made. Indeed, decision-making models in administration and in public policy are operated, or designed, on the basis of data. In other words, “in the immediate future, political decisions will increasingly be based on evidence and not on mere occurrence or intuition”, he said.
Based on this observation, the academic presented the challenges that this transformation will mean for public administration.
Thus, a first issue is the creation of institutions in the public sector that act as intermediary entities for accessing data. In other words, their task will be to provide society with data-processing capabilities that guarantee the protection of fundamental rights. “This will result in a substantial increase in the volume of open data and, at the same time, the development of complex digital information management systems”, he pointed out.
Secondly, Martinez suggested that the public sector should provide governance in the analysis environment of the data that will be made available to citizens. That is, provide rules of use, registration, a data protection officer, external ethics committees, among others. “This means a crucial qualitative change”, he argued, “because as much data that can be guaranteed not to affect any rights can be shared for use”.
A third structural challenge is of an ethical nature and is given by the simultaneous appearance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics. To illustrate this point, he cited the proposed European regulation that will regulate the use of AI. Its focus is on risk management of AI use. “That is, they define scenarios for its use and are categorised according to the risk of data protection violation”, the professor explained. “Consequently, public administrations will have to build methodologies that adapt to these requirements and allow data reuse”, he concluded.
Finally, Martínez explained that all levels of public administration —i.e. central government, autonomous regions, municipalities and universities, among others— will have to define under what conditions will data be managed and stored in a way that is truly useful. “This means a design effort by developers, a clear interaction of data protection officers, the deployment of ethical and data protection impact assessments, and also that any decision is guided by a respect for and guarantee of fundamental rights”, he concluded.
The Conference
The activity was part of the Spanish Government Open Gov Week 2022. Cristian Veses Donet, Undersecretary of the Department of Participation, Transparency, Cooperation and Democratic Quality of the Valencian Government, and Joaquín Martín Cubas, Co-Director of the PAGODA Chair, also participated in the event.
The event was organised by the PAGODA Chair for Open Government, Participation and Open Data, the Universitat de València, the Department of Participation, Transparency, Cooperation and Democratic Quality of the Valencian Government; the Inter-University Institute for Local Development (IIDL) and the Microsoft-Universitat de Valéncia Chair for Privacy and Digital Transformation.
