1. The strengthening and European harmonization of a “Digital Europe by default principle” for public procedures, documents, processes (the analogue format shall be an exception to the digital rule; rather, today, in many Countries the digital format is considered as the exception to the analogue rule);
    
2. A “Digital Europe reciprocity principle” so that, if a service or document is already legally processed in a digital form in the context of a European PA, then it must be possible to be processed in that form before any other European PA (by extending and strengthening article 23 of Regulation 2016/1191 relating to to Public Documents);
    
3. A “Digital Europe smart practices automatic take off and landing principle” which should imply that any digital solution, adopted in the public interest and already successfully tested by a PA of the European Union, can be directly replicated in other European cities/PAs, without the need for further legal bases except for financial coverage (in this sense, the establishment of a unique on line “Public Digital Europe solutions marketplace” could significantly help)
    
4. A “pseudonymisation purpose compatibility principle for smart public services” could imply that each Public Administration in EU should be able to process personal data, even of special categories and collected for other purposes, to pseudonymise them in order to develop knowledge bases for Artificial Intelligence and IoT tools in the public interest; totally anonymised data are often useless to build a robust knowledge basis for effective AI/IoT-driven solutions, while a strong pseudonymisation could anyway protect individual rights and freedoms, fostering public smart services innovation. Indeed, pseudonymised data processing is considered a (still) personal data processing activity, and often PAs do not find a valid legal ground to carry it out according to the GDPR framework and respecting the strict “purpose limitation principle” (so far, the GDPR provides for “purpose compatibility by default” only for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes). It could be clarified ex lege this further purpose compatibility;
    
5. To establish new specific European legal grounds which should allow, by default, the lawful sharing/transmission of public documents containing personal data from PAs of one Member State to other PAs of other Member States, for the performance of joint cross-border smart-service initiatives in the common European public interest. In Italy, for example, the inter-subjective transmission of personal data between PAs is only allowed, according to the Italian Privacy law, in case it is expressely entailed by a law or by a regulation provided by law, or in case it is authorised by the National Data Protection Authority. This prior authorisation regime could slow down new joint initiatives for smart services in the public interest: a simplified option could be the possible provision, in the EU law, of “European Data Protection Board General Authorisations mechanism for personal data transmission between PAs”, linked to the above mentioned “Digital Europe smart practices automatic take off and landing principle”;
    
6. Since general and abstract norms could not eliminate the everyday risk of bad practices, establish a network of Digital Europe Ombudsmen/Ombudswomen in each European city, to ensure a fast track in the handling of citizens' and undertakings’ complaints, in the event that a PA does not recognize the legal validity of digital documents, processes and schemes that comply with the common European legislative framework (e.g. EIDAS Regulation, Public Documents Regulation, etc.).

Legal subgroup – Work Plan priorities 2023 

• Understanding and Assessing European legislative measures and policy proposals, such as the Interoperable Europe Act proposal  

• Supporting the development of standard contract clauses for the procurement of AI  

• Exploring legal aspects of algorithm registers  

• Discuss legal tools and processes related to the development and operation of urban data platforms