blockchain

The 2024 Best Cases Awards of the Public Sector Tech Watch observatory now have finalists. These awards seek to highlight solutions that use emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence or blockchain, in public administrations, through two categories:

• Solutions to improve the public services offered to citizens (Government-to-Citizen or G2C).
• Solutions to improve the internal processes of the administrations themselves (Government-to-Government or G2G).

The awards are intended to create a mechanism for sharing the best experiences on the use of emerging technologies in the public sector and thus give visibility to the most innovative administrations in Europe.

Almost 60% of the finalist solutions are Spanish.

In total, 32 proposals have been received, 14 of which have been pre-selected in a preliminary evaluation. Of these, more than half are solutions from Spanish organisations. Specifically, nine finalists have been shortlisted for the G2G category -five of them Spanish- and five for G2C -three of them linked to our country-.The following is a summary of what these Spanish solutions consist of.

Solutions to improve the internal processes of the administrations themselves.

• Innovation in local government: digital transformation and GeoAI for data management (Alicante Provincial Council).

Suma Gestión Tributaria, of the Diputación de Alicante, is the agency in charge of managing and collecting the municipal taxes of the city councils of its province. To optimise this task, they have developed a solution that combines geographic information systems and artificial intelligence (machine learning and deep learning) to improve training in detection of properties that do not pay taxes. This solution collects data from multiple administrations and entities in order to avoid delays in the collection of municipalities.

• Regional inspector of public infrastructures: monitoring of construction sites (Provincial Council of Bizkaia and Interbiak).

The autonomous road inspector and autonomous urban inspector help public administrations to automatically monitor roads. These solutions, which can be installed in any vehicle, use artificial or computer vision techniques along with information from sensors to automatically check the condition of traffic signs, road markings, protective barriers, etc. They also perform early forecasting of pavement degradation, monitor construction sites and generate alerts for hazards such as possible landslides.

• Application of drones for the transport of biological samples (Centre for Telecommunications and Information Technologies -CTTI-, Generalitat de Catalunya).

This pilot project implements and evaluates a health transport route in the Girona health region. Its aim is to transport biological samples (blood and urine) between a primary health centre and a hospital using drones. As a result, the journey time has been reduced from 20 minutes with ground transport to seven minutes with the use of drones. This has improved the quality of the samples transported, increased flexibility in scheduling transport times and reduced environmental impact.

• Robotic automation of processes in the administration of justice (Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts).

Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts has implemented a solution for the robotisation of administrative processes in order to streamline routine, repetitive and low-risk work. To date, more than 25 process automation lines have been implemented, including the automatic cancellation of criminal records, nationality applications, automatic issuance of life insurance certificates, etc. As a result, it is estimated that more than 500,000 working hourshave been saved.

• Artificial intelligence in the processing of official publications (Official Gazette of the Province of Barcelona and Official Documentation and Publications Service, Barcelona Provincial Council).

CIDO (Official Information and Documentation Search Engine) has implemented an AI system that automatically generates summaries of official publications of the public administrations of Barcelona. Using supervised machine learning and neural networkstechniques, the system generates summaries of up to 100 words for publications in Catalan or Spanish. The tool allows the recording of manual modifications to improve accuracy.

Solutions to improve the public services offered to citizens

• Virtual Desk of Digital Immediacy: bringing Justice closer to citizens through digitalisation (Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Courts).

The Virtual Digital Immediacy Desktop (EVID) allows remote hearings with full guarantees of legal certainty using blockchain technologies. The solution integrates the convening of the hearing, the provision of documentation, the identification of the participants, the acceptance of consents, the generation of the document justifying the action carried out, the signing of the document and the recording of the session. In this way, legal acts can be carried out from anywhere, without the need to travel and in a simple way, making justice more inclusive, accessible and environmentally friendly. By the end of June 2024, more than 370,000 virtual sessions had been held through EVID.

• Application of Generative AI to make it easier for citizens to understand legal texts (Entitat Autònoma del Diari Oficial i Publicacions -EADOP-, Generalitat de Catalunya).

Legal language is often a barrier that prevents citizens from easily understanding legal texts. To remove this obstacle, the Government is making available to users of the Legal Portal of Catalonia and to the general public the summaries of Catalan law in simple language obtained from generative artificial intelligence. The aim is to have summaries of the more than 14,000 14,000 existing regulatory provisions adapted to clear communication available by the end of the year. The abstracts will be published in Catalan and Spanish, with the prospect of also offering a version in Aranesein the future.

• Emi - Intelligent Employment (Consellería de Emprego, Comercio e Emigración de la Xunta de Galicia).

Emi, Intelligent Employment is an artificial intelligence and big data tool that helps the offices of the Public Employment Service of Galicia to orient unemployed people towards the skills required by the labour market, according to their abilities. AI models make six-month projections of contracts for a particular occupation for a chosen geographical area. In addition, they allow estimating the probability of finding employment for individuals in the coming months.

You can see all the solutions presented here. The winners will be announced at the final event on 28 November. The ceremony takes place in Brussels, but can also be followed online. To do so, you need to register here.

Public Sector Tech Watch: an observatory to inspire new projects

Public Sector Tech Watch (PSTW), managed by the European Commission, is positioned as a "one-stop shop" for all those interested - public sector, policy makers, private companies, academia, etc. - in the latest technological developments to improve public sector performance and service delivery. For this purpose, it has several sections where the following information of interest is displayed:

• Cases: contains examples of how innovative technologies and their associated data are used by public sector organisations in Europe.
• Stories: presents testimonials to show the challenges faced by European administrations in implementing technological solutions.

If you know of a case of interest that is not currently monitored by PSTW, you can register it here. Successful cases are reviewed and evaluated before being included in the database.

Most likely, most of us will know, or at least have heard of blockchain technology, because of its relationship with the most popular cryptocurrency nowadays - Bitcoin. However, blockchain is not a technology born solely to sustain this new digital economy, but like many other blockchain technologies its main purpose is storing and managing data chains in a decentralized and distributed way.

Blockchain has a number of features that that will make it a useful technology in several fields of application: privacy, (quasi) anonymity, integrity, trust distribution, transparency, security, sustainability and Open Source. While it is clear that its most widespread application so far is in the field of finance, and more specifically cryptocurrencies, it can also be very useful for many other areas, both within and outside of governments, particularly everything related to personal identificationor the protection of personal data through the decentralization of privacy.

Regarding the improvement of governments, blockchain can contribute in very diverse areas such as the provision of public services, the authenticity of public registers, the management of public sector data, the fight against corruption or the guarantees in the voting processes among others. There are also dozens of examples of entrepreneurs applying this technology to innovate in such important fields such as health or agriculture.

In short, blockchain is a technology with the potential to transform our political systems and at the same time enable relevant social changes. But, as happens also with any other disruptive technology and still in the maturation phase, not all are advantages and we will also find some disadvantages and limitations to be overcome, such as scalability problems, the high computational cost and interconnection that support the operations, the environmental impact associated with that cost, the excessive centralization of each chain or the high complexity of the cryptographic processes.

On the other hand, even though blockchain has quickly become a trendy technology  and despite the apparent simplicity of the underlying concept, it remains at the same time one of the most cryptic and misunderstood technologies as regards its potential beneficiaries. Therefore, in order for these decentralized data management technologies to become popular in the near future, it will also be necessary to face another type of entry barriers of a more structural nature related to the need for more training, an improvement in usability, greater capacity for institutional adaptation or the development of the necessary regulatory changes to support it.

The imminent application of the recent GDPR (May 25th) modifies the European panorama in terms of security and privacy of personal data. Overall, the GDPR could be considered a "Digital Declaration of Rights". As we saw earlier, this Regulation lists the detailed requirements that any institution or individual that processes personal data from citizens of the 28 member countries must comply with, regardless of where that company is located.

GDPR increases citizens’ rights and puts limits to the power of “digital states” such as software platforms and those that make use of them. However, it also assumes centralized models of storage and transmission of digital data. Under the new decentralized blockchain paradigm, new challenges are opened to be resolved under the common framework of GDPR.

The use of blockchain technology brings us closer than ever to digital identity models, where the user is the main owner of their data. Currently there are many different implementations of blockchain. Not all of these implementations follow the original model of the Bitcoin network as a public and pseudo-anonymous network. Many blockchain technologies are specially designed to build private networks where there is a similar figure to the central authority, which grants identity certificates to operate in the network. It would be something similar to a special participant who is responsible for issuing digital IDs to the rest of the participants. In other words, many of the applications that use blockchain continue to operate using the centralized authority model. EU GDPR was designed for this model.

In the medium term applications aimed at end users will begin to proliferate, with the objective of complying with GDPR framework and data security and privacy using partial or total implementations of blockchain technology. For example, providers of data storage software products begin to emerge. On the one hand, this product will store user data in their database systems according to GDPR and, on the other hand, they will use blockchain technology to protect the metadata associated with the stored data.

In this same line, the Blockcerts standard pursues the development of an open source technology, which allows the exchange of user certificates (academic diplomas, criminal records, work certificates, letters of recommendation, etc.) through a blockchain. Under this standard, a user requests his work life certificate through a mobile app. The corresponding authority issues the corresponding certificate and the transaction is entered in the blockchain. Then the user can share his certificate with the hiring company. This company can verify the authenticity and validity of the certificate by its hash.

Therefore, Blockchain joins other technologies that can help companies facilitating compliance with GDPR, such as data tracking tools or security solutions that allow threats detection in real time. Thanks to GDPR compliance, organizations have the opportunity to optimize their information processes, making them safer and more transparent for citizens.

Content prepared by Alejandro Alija, expert in Digital Transformation and innovation.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.

DataCentric is a data company. They build solutions focused on customers, technology and information. They learn from data to improve the performance of business processes and optimize investments in commercial and marketing actions, always sharing an analytical vision and the insights derived from the projects.

Their passion for data led them to build the DataCentric Data Lake. A complex information system based on Big Data techniques, connected to the Internet and the most relevant Data Sets, both public and private, relates to consumers, companies and territories. Thus, they develop solutions and vertical APIs to be able to make better decisions in real time.

Respect for privacy and legal compliance are part of its essential values. They guarantee the best custody and treatment of their client most valuable asset: the information about their customers and their business.