What a year for our BLSI community! 

In the past year our community developed, shared knowledge and connected with experts and relevant stakeholders from EU Institutions, other public administrations & beyond!  

The digital-ready policymaking was considered as key element for a future interoperability policy (see their recommendations) by an Expert Group on Interoperability of public services. Further to this, earlier this year, the Better regulation: guidelines and toolbox included our very own Tool 28 on digital-ready policymaking highlighting the importance of identifying any barriers to interoperability.  

We assessed the results derived from our digital screening process of policy initiatives in the “Have your say” portal between 2019-2021 and realised how COVID-19 boosted the digital-ready policymaking. 

The BLSI community kicked-off of the new BLSI (Better Legislation for Better Implementation) Knowledge Hub, gathering a number of learning needs and piloted a first online course: “What is BLSI and why it needs teamwork?” (the course is no longer available, please check out our revamped course Digital-ready policymaking).

We kept informing you about interesting events (e.g. EOLE 2021) and inspiring news (e.g. Rules as Code OPSI & CoHuBiCoL). And were happy that also first community members started to share their interesting content (Danish evaluation and German studies). We would love to see more knowledge exchange in the future. We also continued to organise our regular virtual breakfast/apero webinars welcoming speakers from around the globe,  upon several topics like automation and AI in law-making, ethics challenges of digital-ready policies, multidisciplinary policymaking, innovation fostering legislation: 

• In our March 2021 virtual breakfast, we had the chance to welcome two speakers Mr Bertrand de Longueville, EC, JRC - SeTA, a Semantic Text Analysis tool and Mr Yannis Charalabidis, Prof of Digital Governance in the University of the Aegean - ManyLaws, EU-wide Enhanced Access to Big Open Legal Data discussing about their cutting edge AI-powered solutions for screening legislations;
• Our April event, fell under the umbrella of the DigitAll conference and was co-organised with the LEOS (Legislation Editing Open Software) team, presenting the key enablers of digital-ready policymaking: multidisciplinary teams & tools; 
• In June 2021 we embraced a brave new world having discussions around digital-ready law-making & ethics that you may find recorded following the link; 
• September’s event was dedicated on skills and learning needs for policymaking in a digital world, while the input received from the webinar was reflected in the BLSI learning Hub; 
• In October 2021 virtual apero, we explored how to regulate public sector interoperability in the EU hosting several interoperability experts. 

We have now moved towards Interoperable Europe - the initiative of the European Commission, supported by the Digital Europe Programme - that has replaced the former ISA² Programme and will create a reinforced interoperability that will work for everyone.  

What to expect in 2022 

• We will keep the conversations going, keep learning about your needs and listening to your ideas with more virtual sessions which are planned as of January 2022! Keep yourself posted by visiting our dedicated Joinup page! 
• We are happy to inform you that we are working on automating the process related to the screening of the “Have your say” portal, having set up keywords and rules to facilitate this automation. We will co-draft the future interoperability policy announced in the 2022 Commission Work Programme. With this we are hoping to strengthen the future EU approach to digital-ready policymaking.
• Finally, we hope to hear more from you on our Joinup platform, where you can bring your insights, ideas and launch discussions in our BLSI community following our step-by-step guide! 

We keep growing and hope to have you together in the next Brilliant, Lovely, Spectacular, Impressive year of 2022! 

Thank you and happy holidays to all of our members and your families!  

Please share with us any ideas and content in comments or in discussions directly on our Joinup space. You can find a video tutorial here. 

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