The Government of Catalonia (Generalitat) is taking part in the European DT4Regions Digital Transformation for Regions project, which aims to develop and implement a platform to enable European regions to exchange valuable resources to facilitate the digital transformation of public administrations, in the context of big data processing and artificial intelligence.

Catalan participation is channelled through the Ministry of the Presidency’s Directorate General for Digital Administration, with the collaboration of the Secretariat for Digital Policies of the Ministry of the Vice-Presidency and Digital Policies and Territory, as the driving force behind the Catalan artificial intelligence strategy (Catalonia.AI), and the presence of other Catalan actors such as Eurecat and the Computer Vision Centre, members of the Centre for Innovation in Data Technology and Artificial Intelligence (CIDAI).

The Director General for Digital Administration, Núria Espuny Salvadó, said that participation in this project “positions Catalonia as a European player in the development of digital solutions for the transformation of public administrations”. In this respect, the DG emphasised that the project “strengthens our relations with the European Commission as members of an innovation network, and should allow us to better understand and take advantage of opportunities for collaboration with other actors and promote a qualitative leap in the provision of public services”. 

The two-year project started working sessions last September. It is funded by the European Commission and led by the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, with the participation of fourteen partners from nine European states. Catalonia is one of the main actors, together with several European regional governments such as those of Helsinki, Flanders, Aquitaine, Euskadi, Moravia and London, and other public and private actors.

The role of the Directorate General for Digital Administration, due to its experience in the digital transformation of the Catalan Administration, is focused on defining the functionalities that the platform will have to have in order to be useful and usable, both for administrations seeking answers and guidelines and for those that have made progress in aspects that may be relevant enough to be shared with other members.

It will be a platform based on cooperation between sub-state European governments, in which some governments will pose challenges related to the development of tools and services of public interest, and others will help them to solve them through tools of all kinds related to artificial intelligence and big data.

In this way, the aim is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the services provided by these administrations. Collaboration will also be the key to its design, with a diversity of institutional actors contributing to the identification of the platform’s functionalities and content, as well as the future public services to be developed and offered.

Participation in this project will also enable the Catalan Government to establish relations with a network of administrations that can provide strategic information on European policies on digital transformation, as well as experience, and potential partners to promote future transnational cooperation projects.