Report from the conference Future Is Data 2021
A review of the most interesting lectures from the 2nd conference The Future is Data, of which our company, Transparent Data, was a social partner. The conference was organized by the Chancellery of the Prime Minister in Poland on November 9, 2021.
II edition of the conference “The Future Is Data”, Poland, 2021
The main topic of the international conference Future is Data, which was held entirely online for the second year in a row, was mainly challenges related to open data: data management, data processing, and making government data public. The conference participants had the pleasure to listen to the speeches of experts who deal with digitization and open data in Poland on a daily basis (representatives of the Ministry of Development and Technology, the Central Statistical Office, representatives of foundations and enterprises that deal with data processing) and experts from the European Commission.
The official agenda of the Future is Data 2021 conference can be found on the government’s website Open Data, and we, as the social partner of this event, present below an overview of the topics of the statements we found the most interesting:
- Digital transformation in the European Union — the European Commission’s plans for a data strategy for the EU
- How to digitize Polish business registers to meet the expectations of data recipients and business
- Open data story of benefits — case study of GTM Metropolia
- Data Governance Act (GDA), and more precisely, why this act is somehow still inconsistent with the GDPR
Digital transformation in the EU
Building a European internal data market
The first presentation at the conference was made by a representative of the European Commission, Christian D’Cunha, who introduced EU plans to develop the open data market in the EU countries. Digital transformation, and more specifically the transfer of data to the cloud, which will directly contribute to the creation of the internal data market in the European Union, according to D’Cunha, is a response to an attempt to combine the needs of stakeholders from various industries.
Which industries do not use the potential of data? Agriculture is a prime example. Millions of data are collected each year that could be successfully used for more effective crop planning, but although they are publicly available, they are open in such a form that small agricultural enterprises and individual farmers are not able to extract any relevant conclusions from them quickly and easily. They are not data analysts, and also breaking through several hundred databases is too time-consuming for a standard industry representative.
D’Cunha estimates that there are perhaps only 8% of large organizations worldwide that are able to process this data and actually use it. So the data is there and “waiting”, but so what? It turns out that there is a shortage of organisations that would “take” this data under a microscope and process it in a way that realistically supports the sector. In other words, companies that would do something with the data for farmers, as we do at Transparent Data with the registration data for compliance departments.
D’Cunha also pointed out that there are still many barriers to the open data market in the European Union. One of the most serious ones that the new data strategy will try to fight is that most of the entities that have data want to share it on their own terms, where standardization is needed for obvious reasons.
Digital transformation aims to ensure the free flow of data in the EU and to meet the challenges of data explosion by encouraging different sectors to data altruism.
Data altruism — let’s share what we have
The EU Commission points that many entities don’t have access to the data that de facto generates their own products. It goes, among others, about data collected by professional research companies when they create reports of specific industries — these are usually quite expensive publications, and the entities themselves don’t always know about their existence. Encouraging the sharing of your own data (even with competitors), integrating data management, and removing access gaps — these are the challenges we face today.
How to digitize Polish commercial registers?
About opening new data in line with customer expectations
Contractor verification can be — let’s put it straight — a torment for a simple trader, who has to check 2–3 different registers on average — sometimes only to perform due diligence in VAT. Such a verification process is time-consuming, especially if we add various restrictions, such as Captcha, limits on the number of checks in the register or technical breaks of business register’s search engines. Arek Hajduk, CEO of our data software house, mentioned all those problems during his prelection.
What is more important, he pointed out that in order to set the right direction for opening business registers, it is necessary to listen to the users of these databases — users, which are citizens and business.
What are the expectations of the users of Polish business registers?
- They want to have free access to registers whenever they need it, with no limits on searching and downloading data. They don’t want to wait an hour or a day until they can check a company again.
- They want to access up-to-date data real time — they don’t want to find out about the closure of a contractor’s company after several months.
- They want data to be presented in an easy-to-read and understandable form. They want to quickly find out if a given company is financially stable and how much it has earned, instead of exercising with financial statements in XML, which only companies with the appropriate technological background can easily read.
- They want to find all the information for their business risk assessment in one place. They don’t want to wonder in which register they can find the appropriate data — they want to be sure that they will find the same company identification number in each commercial register.
- They want to receive full, comprehensive information, for example, to find out how many employees a given company has.
- They want to have access to historical data — to be able to check whether contractors run other businesses in the past and they went bankrupt.
In which direction should the digitization of public registers go to make it better?
Arek Hajduk emphasized that Polish state authorities don’t have to “reinvent the wheel”. If you look at good practices from abroad, you can just produce simple and fast applications that will show related information from different registers, and:
- Give them to citizens for free,
- Sell them to business,
- Develop applications in the direction indicated by the paying customer.
In other words, we need the data to be open, open and open, and also shared with the help of fast APIs. We need to support the developers of applications that process these registry data, because their products can become a driving force for the Polish economy.
An open data story of benefits
Data from local governments for citizens — case study of GZM Metropolia
How can data owned by local governments be used to improve the quality of life of the inhabitants of given regions? The example shown at Future is Data 2021 is the GZM Metropolia application called M2GOinfo. As Paweł Krzyżak and Hubert Morawski said, the new app allows users to check the location of all tram stops and the actual waiting time for trams and buses (i.e. it shows real-time transport data). Moreover, users can personalize access to information about the connections they use most often. It’s therefore a new quality compared to popular connection search engines storing data from official public transportation timetables, which, as is well known, often don’t correspond with reality.
M2GOinfo is only a fraction of what the Metropolis GZM is currently working on. The unit is investing heavily in expanding the repository of open local government data — at the moment you can find hundreds of open data sets on budgets of individual municipalities, education, ecology, culture and, among others, spatial plans.
Data Governance Act (DGA) vs GDPR
Discussion on the mechanism of personal data transfer
During the Future is data conference, the Data Governance Act — new models of data exchange was also organized. Sille Sepp (MyData), Anna Lytra (European Data Protection Council) and Mirosław Gumularz (Gumularz Kozik Kancelaria) participated in it. The Data Governance Act, or DGA, is a new EU act on which work is to be completed in December 2021. Its task is to increase the security of data processing and increase the general market confidence in this process.
The panelists pointed out significant inaccuracies in the act, which must be clarified if DGA is to bring tangible benefits to data economies in the EU. The current problem is that the DGA still lacks a clear responsibility for the data transmitted. At the moment, DGA is in contradiction to the GDPR, which clearly says that the responsibility for personal data rests with the data controller. The DGA doesn’t clarify who is responsible for data management, there is no definition of who is the data controller and who is the processor, and whether they should be responsible for inappropriate use of this data by other entities. Without specifying these points, DGA will create a large field for possible abuses. Many potential service providers will completely give up intermediation in providing such data, because they will not be able to meet the requirements of the regulations.
Perhaps you will also be interested in the report from last year’s conference:
