eSignature Legitimateness for Notice of Promotion in European Union

How to eSign a document: e-signature legitimateness for Notice of Promotion in European Union

yeah just exactly we will record this meeting so please click uh confirm uh i will hand over in a second to new small um for short welcome afterwards elisa will look at the european level and speak about civil society and they use digital policies um then um dr henry mcgarrin will bring in the irish perspective and share more about the digital transformation in the irish context and the second part of this event is about you it's a co-creation sessions with a focus on five topics digital democracy economy rights safeguards and education and as you have seen we are recording this event the follow-up email will include all presentations we share here today all the links all the materials and of course also this recording so and that's it already i hand over to neve hi everyone and welcome to today's event thank you very much at the organizers for inviting myself and um as a representative of um the consultation institute and so the consultation institute just for a bit of background is a not-for-profit best practice institute and promoting high quality public and stakeholder consultations and across the public private and voluntary sectors they also run a membership mf fellowship where people can come and become members of the consulate consultation institute and but more information can be found about that online and my role today at this event is responsible primarily for the final report um based on the findings uh of today's event uh which will be circulated to all participants in the follow-up email so if anyone has any questions or queries about that um you can contact me at um my email which i'm sure can be circulated as well um and i'm just really looking forward to today's event and thank you very much again right thank you so much neve uh and this is already the time to hand over to elisa who will share um uh more about civil society and the use digital policies and i would stop sharing my screen now is that correct yes thank you i have a small presentation i'll share my screen here you go so hi everyone um i am i'm very excited to be here today and i'm very happy to have this collaboration with the wheel and the consultation institute so my name is elisa and i work as the program director on european democracy for the european citizen action service and together with my colleague vasiliki we will be hosting the co-creation session later on and this co-creation session is really about how we can have a digital transformation in europe that leaves no one behind and it is an event that is co-funded by uh the european union it is one of our activities our projects as an ngo based in brussels our mission is to empower citizens to exercise their rights in the eu and of course one of the most important rights is the the right to participate in policy making processes um so i would like to just give you a brief overview on why we are hosting this event what is the the point of it what is the objective and why you are here today so basically ecas for the past year has been working quite hard with other ngos in order to form a coalition called the civil society convention which has more than 90 organizations all over europe we created this coalition a year ago because of the conference of the future of europe and we wanted civil society organizations to have a voice in this conference on the future of europe for those of you who are not familiar with the conference and the future of europe it is um it was an initiative of uh president of the european commission ursula van der leyen when she started her her mandate she promised to european citizens that they would have a participatory democracy mechanism where they could actually participate in to voice what they wanted the eu to do in the future around certain policies and this has been happening over the last year we're actually at the the final stage where on the 9th of may europe's day the the institutions will come back to citizens to tell them how their ideas will be implemented in the next few years so um so civil society came together to actually support this uh conference on the future of europe so what we did as ecas was that since we're part of the steering committee of this convention we had different tasks and different policy areas and ecas was leading the digital transformation cluster so through this process we opened um basically a crowdsourcing platform in order to collect civil society's recommendations on digital transformation in europe and we've been running this crowdsourcing platform since last year july and we just closed it in january and then we started our policy making so what did um this uh crowdsourcing do um this crowdsourcing platform was open and there were five different topics in it digital democracy digital education digital safeguards digital uh rights and digital economy and most probably you've received also this information in advance before this event i hope you had the time to flip through it because we're really just going to go through these recommendations and the goal today is really to give you a perspective of what ngos in europe have been asking the european union to do regarding digital so these are the topics and i just wanted to show you a bit of the timeline that we had through the convention so as i said it was in different phases on the crowdsourcing platform the ideas collection pace so this means that from july to november last year we opened up this crowdsourcing to receive ngos specifically perspectives on these five topics i mentioned in the second activity from december to january we closed the first phase and we took these ideas and put it in the second phase where ngos had to vote for which ideas they thought were the most important to bring to the european level in the conference of the future of europe and then there was the policy formulation phase so we took the main ideas selected in the second phase and transformed it into a resolution and then in the fourth step as you can see in march we had the final resolution which was adopted then from um the different ngos in the in the convention so the working group that did the policy formulation was composed of 15 to 20 ngos um that worked together so on the platform we generated more than 200 ideas and recommendations and the working group members by themselves since their umbrella organizations represent approximately 1200 csos all across europe as you can see these are the list of some of the uh working group members that i had the privilege to really work together with and come up with these recommendations um as you can see maybe you're a bit surprised to see that these ngos are not specifically dealing only with digital issues but they're really um dealing with inclusion and accessibility and and how to make european integration stronger and dealing with european democracy so the whole point was for ngos to come up with the values that they would like to see in digital policies and we look forward really to working together um to know irish citizens perspective on these recommendations and also to have a co-creation session to know how you think um you know we should actually move towards more digital inclusion now we have a very quick um ice breaker so i would like for you to all connect on slido so the easiest way to do so is basically if you can use your phone and just use the qr code you can access immediately to this little poll if not you can just go to slido.com you put the hashtag 736065 and then you put the pass code which is inclusion without a space in the end just inclusion and you will access to this little icebreaker that we have this is also to test out if the platform for the crow creation session works because we will be using slido so you can keep this open on your browser or on your phone so i'll just give you just a few more seconds and already you can see the results from the participants it's a live function and it's good to see that we have quite the sometimes the opposite so some have a lot of um background on digital transformation in the eu and uh some have some basic most of you have some basic knowledge and there's also 31 percent who is going to learn a lot i guess today and which is great as well just so you know this whole co-creation session doesn't at all um mean that you need to be a technical expert on digital policies not at all it's you will see that the co-creation session has quite easy questions you can make it as technical as you want it to be and we just really want the insight from local partners of ngos so the point is for us as a european organization to come to the local ngos and to understand how much do they know about this topic and what would they like the eu to work more on so okay thank you very much um i will stop sharing now and i'll hand it again over to christina and i look forward to co-creating later with all of you thanks thanks elisa uh great thanks for giving this overview and also putting it in context where we are in because like this event is actually part of this european process that elisa just um told us i just saw in this in the chat that some of you are trying to put the password and it's not working so i had it before also so maybe it's the same you go to slider you first put this hashtag and then it asks for the passcode so and also of course facility also shared it right now try to um do it with a no space at the end so it's really um need to be the exact one let us know if it works out otherwise we will try to to help you on that um thanks everyone for contributing already and now um coming from an eu level perspective to the irish context i would like to hand over to dr anmarie mcgorrin she's our speaker for today and she will share more about the irish context of this topic hey great thanks a million christina and thank you to yourself and your colleagues for asking me to speak today so i'm going to try sharing screen now so hopefully that will work it was great earlier so how does that look uh yes we see yes that looks perfect okay so um i work for an organization called nest the national economic and social council so just to give you some background on that it was set up in the 1970s to advise the teacher on government on strategic policy issues relating to economic social and environmental development in ireland so it's made up of two parts there's a council kind of like a board which is made up of social partners from employers trade unions farming pillar environmental groups community and volunteer groups there's also the heads of a number of government departments and independent nominees and then the other part is a secretariat of researchers and i'm a woman so we draft reports that are requested by the council and they approved them at their meetings that are held four times a year and they're chaired by the top civil servant in the department of antisec so last year and the year before as covid was having a huge impact we did a number of reports in nes looking at the social impact of covet so looking at digital inclusion was part of that and you will see our report on that on nesq ie and i will just talk today about some of the relevant things that came up in that research so in my talk i'm going to cover um three of the topics that you're looking at today digital education and democracy and some on digital economy so i look at what digital inclusion means and who is impacted by digital exclusion and then i'll look at irish policies and programs that promote digital inclusion and some innovative international approaches and then finally just have some quick reflections on roles that civil society play and can continue to play and develop so what is digital inclusion it really means that everybody can contribute to and benefit from the digital economy and society so that means having convenient reliable access to affordable and accessible digital devices and an internet connection and also the ability to use these confidently in your day-to-day life so if we think about these different gateways to the digital world first obviously there is the broadband connection um and that varies by areas usually very good in ireland and urban areas but maybe not so good in a number of rural areas particularly north and west for example then you need a good device i think before covert we were thinking oh will everybody be moving to do things on phones but then we started to realize during covert that actually you need a laptop to work um to be well connected to the digital world you need good software good devices printers a range of material there in terms of skills you need two kinds of skills to engage with the digital world the technical skills of going online and they're kind of tricky because unlike reading once you've learned it you still have to keep learning all the new technology and the new ways of going online the new apps and a lot of new skills that constantly need to be updated and that makes it difficult for people who are just grappling with the digital world for the first time and secondly you need good content literacy skills so to be able to read things and say is this a scam is it misinformation if i click in this link you know where is it going to bring me and so a range of important skills that you need there and of course you need the confidence to engage online because quite a lot of people who are not well engaged online say that they they don't need it it's not necessary for them but they can tell you all the disadvantages of not being online like not being able to book flights missing out on digital or online uh discounts so support scale help people to be confident to go online is very important as well so who are the groups who are most impacted by digital exclusion well obviously those in rural areas they um tend to have poor broadband connections and also in rural areas you have more older people who are less likely to be proficient um in going online those with less formal education have poorer digital skills and those in lower incomes tend to be less connected to the internet or have poor quality connections they own less devices and they have lower skills and all of these things kind of interconnect and migrants there can be pluses and minuses for the digital world for them they're able to stay in touch with home but it can be difficult to use public and private services online when you don't have good language skills in your new country in terms of businesses we know the very small businesses and those with older owners and managers tend to not be so proficient online and have less and online um facilities and use less and digital technologies so we have seen since 2020 there are changes more people on low incomes for example have got broadband and people's skills have improved but there still is a strong social gradient there and we can't assume that these will be caught up you know uh there will always be groups falling behind and we do need to target supports at these particular groups because if you don't have good digital skills it impacts the employment and training you can access how you can access public services and private services such as banking it's more difficult to communicate you lose out on online savings and if you've poor skills you may inadvertently um you know click the wrong links online and it has big impacts for independence like so many services that can only be used online and older people who need to get somebody else to help them access these services so ireland has had a lot of programs focused on getting more people online going back to the late 90s so we've had a number of programs to roll out broadband connections the latest is the national broadband plan it will bring good quality fixed broadband to 99 of homes over a seven-year period and as part of this uh the government is also funding 300 broadband connection points or bcps and these are in communities where and broadband is going to be rolled out later in the whole national brand program so these are kind of um community services where you can go and access the internet and there's a free broadband connection and there can be devices and during coverage government and others suddenly realize that these little centers could become much more than just a place to get free broadband and are developing these so that they can be a bit more towards digital hubs and communities we also have the eu's electronic communications code it makes accessible affordable broadband at home a right and ireland is transposing that into legislation and then we have some free public broadband through the wi-fi for eu program in terms of helping people with the cost of devices and connections we have services available computers available in public libraries we also had some digital poverty grants during covet from some local authorities they helped people to get online or to get cheaper devices we had the laptop loan scheme during covered for third level students that was funded by government and then we've had a number of programs where for example facebook and microsoft have connected with local authorities or libraries to provide devices and connections at a low price we also had a lot of skills programs going back over 10 years to the digital skills program which was free 10 hours of training and in different locations around the country that anybody could access and we had a range of skills training through etbs and unemployment training courses and last year the government published its new adult literacy numeracy and digital literacy strategy which really kind of moves forward from the existing programs and it's going to provide more very it's going to provide more funding for um digital literacy training and support more communities bring together the existing skills programs and kind of provide a kind of a roadmap for people in a one-stop shop they can go there and say this is the level of skill i have and then people in the one-stop shop can say well this is where you can get training at the next level and so just to kind of really have a better infrastructure for digital skills training and in terms of government services online we have commitments in the e-government strategy and the civil service renewal strategy to move as many services as possible online public services but there is also a commitment to have assisted digital supports and offline services for those who are not proficient or not able to use online services we have the eu's web accessibility directive to make websites accessible to those with disability and the center for excellence in universal design in ireland's national disability authority provides good um guidelines on how to make your rit accessible so just to look at what some other countries have done there's some very innovative programs uh internationally to get more people online uh the french have this arduous tablet and they're it's owned by a company linked to the french post office and it's a tablet specially designed for older people it comes pre-loaded with um a number of apps that they would use an older person can buy it for i think it's 200 euros and then pay i think about 15 euros per month for an internet connection and to help line and remote access by a family member or a friend to help them out if they get stuck and if you buy it it's delivered by your local postman who comes in and runs through how you can work this tablet so kind of really interesting program that brings together community business trusted people to help this group to get online the uk and australia have the good things foundation it's a big charity that connects funding and community organizations to train people in digital skills to now provide devices and just kind of a really good infrastructure there to bring a few different things together and get more people online they have worked with lloyds bank which has a digital champions program so staff members volunteer to train people in online skills and to help people do online banking and singapore has a range of really interesting programs for example it has a seniors go digital program you can drop into a local digital hub and get support as an older person you can ask questions you can do training you can get guidelines on how to do your shopping online how to do online banking and they have programs for young people to get free laptops while you're in school or if you've left school for example you can get a loan to buy a laptop or if you don't have a job you can do hours of community service to pay for your laptop so some really innovative things there as well um in terms of public services being online the uk civil service has done a handy guide for public sector organizations and outlining the nine different stages of digital skills that most people have and saying you know this is how you should design your service for most people to be able to use um and they also have guidelines on assisted digital support denmark has a digital post box for public services so it's like my gov id here but people must use it but they have exemptions for people with a disability people without computers or with poor broadband locally or people who don't have a good grasp of danish language so they can all apply to get um you know correspondence from the state by ordinary post um and then i think poor school has gone beyond that again it has 700 what are called citizen spots so i think it would be a bit like the citizens information board here except you can get help and accessing public services digitally so they have this kind of double screen system you can go in and you can watch um somebody on the screen filling in your details and you can fill some of them in and kind of click okay and kind of get guidance there they have mobile citizen spots that go around the country to very remote areas and they even have ones that go to nursing homes to help older people access services online so some really interesting outreach there so just to have a quick think about things that civil society can do and are already doing and can develop more to help with digital inclusion i think some groups can play a great role making this visible to policy makers who don't see it very well i think some middle class policy makers don't realize that there are groups who really struggle and with various aspects of getting online getting the right skills having the devices having the money for good broadband connections um you could advocate i think particularly for older people who are often a bit invisible for those with literacy and language difficulties as well because they just end up having to read through a sea of stuff online which is very hard for people dyslexia for example and i think there's a role to lobby the eu they fund digital inclusion for those of working age but obviously there's a lot more for example older people who need that help i think civil society is really good at partnering with other organizations in the community or a business or government or perhaps with them all to really help have multi solutions to get people online i think civil society is a great role as being a connector from the community into other organizations like business and government and civil society organizations are a safe place that people can go to and say you know i don't have good digital skills you know they can admit that and they can be helped with that or they don't even need to admit it because civil society groups are good it's kind of saying oh we can help you do this so thank you very much for your time i'm really looking forward to the conversation today and i'll pass over i think now to elisa and vasaliki thank you yeah i'm just saying thanks yeah sorry just saying thanks to uh john marie great that was excellent but and now over to vasiliki and elisa thank you christina thank you anwary um well welcome everyone in our co-creation session as mentioned by my colleague elisa today we will focus on five topics uh for its topic elisa will uh sorry to interrupt its margaret here the other interpreter has just come online and we just want to do a swap over if that's okay christina you are muted yep absolutely so thanks margaret thanks a lot and we welcome darren thank you hi darren we're happy to have you hi guys thanks very much um should they go on christina yes absolutely okay so thank you everyone for joining us in this co-creation session uh today with eliza we will take you through five topics for its topic eliza will give you a presentation sharing a bit of details regarding the eu landscape policy landscape the main challenge is the main terminology so that you uh later on can contribute uh through an interactive sessions uh where you will have the opportunity to respond to questions that will help us understand better your perspective on inclusion policies for digital transformation now how you log in into the slider you either go through the qr and then put as the passcode inclusion with no space after it or you go to slide.com you put then the event code hashtag 736065 and then you again put the passcode inclusion with no break after it i think that it's pretty straightforward and you will be able to see the q a in your screen so during elisa presenting you will have the opportunity to share any questions maximum two questions will be answered due to the tight schedule of the event and i think having said that elisa let's begin with the topic of digital democracy and how we can make it truly inclusive perfect thank you very much vasiliki so i hope that everyone can can connect online so that we can do the co-creation um so as vasiligi was mentioning for each and every uh 15 minutes we will change topic and this topic is digital democracy and i will always be giving a bit of the terminology around digital democracy what it means and then i will move on to a few of the recommendations and proposed actions by civil society organizations in the convention so first of all what is digital democracy it's really the use of information and communication technology in uh political and governance processes there are mainly three big topics concepts around digital democracy the first one is e-government and this is really focused on the government and it is the use of ict to enhance public administration or public services just an example when you uh for example there are some countries in which you can declare your taxes online this is an example of e-government the second big concept is e-transparency and it's really the use of technologies to enhance the transparency of governments by allowing citizens to access online information so every time you go on a governmental platform or portal and you manage to get information that you need for example even about the members of the parliament or how a legitimate the procedure is going and you have access to this information this is e-transparency the third big concept is e-participation and it's really the interaction between the government and the citizens and it's how the use of technology can allow citizens to participate in decision-making processes to improve policy outputs or in the best case scenario even co-create policies together with their representatives so co-creating a law together for example the fourth concept here is actually part of e-participation but we specify it a bit on its side because it's e-voting and e-election so to allow voters to vote online and this has been a big discussion also at the european union level where we talk about maybe a possibility of e-voting at the next european elections so what has a civil society been calling for at the uh convention for the european union so the main challenges around digital democracy ing to civil society is ensuring accessibility ensuring inclusiveness and ensuring transparency and you will see that actually the result of our whole crowdsourcing process leads to the fact that these three challenges are horizontal throughout the five different topics so we will see them constantly also under digital economy etc so uh just to go to some proposed action so um civil society organizations think that um free equal and affordable internet should become just a fundamental right for every eu citizen and it should be mentioned in possibly the next treaties for example it should become a right for everyone to access the internet and this was taken as an example because in finland for example it is a fundamental right for finnish citizens to to have equal affordable and high-speed internet taken as an example the second action proposed is around public services that are fully accessible and how to reach this goal is funding and collaborating with civil societies can that can support those who are excluded from the digital transition or expanding more initiatives to guide citizens in the digital transition then another thing that was mentioned was that e-government solutions should always be made free and open source um with a software license so this was something very practical um as for e-participation so the interaction between citizens and governments there should be more channels at the european union level for now we have consultations from the european commission petitions to the european parliament but we just think that these channels are not enough we have the european citizens initiative for those of you who know it but we think that there should be more testing more pilots and more new methods of engagement using technology and one of them could be e-voting at the next european elections uh provided of course that it is technically secure efficient and can guarantee transparency in the process so that being said we will start now actually with already our co-creation session and i would like you to all join in on slido if you have it already open that's great because you will receive already the uh first question answer under polls and uh so uh how we're going to do this is simply that you will see on your screen all of the questions of this session you'll see that there are eight of them six of them are closed session um questions and two of them are open and we will just give you the time to fill in this uh this little survey and especially for the two last questions that are open questions just take your time to really think about the challenges i will read through the different questions now and you can already start um yeah answering them so the first question is do you regularly use online e-government public services in ireland yes no or sometimes vasiliki will we be seeing the um the live results um let me let me see normally they should be displayed i yes we have two votes already and does anyone have any problem with voting just drop me a direct message through zoom okay we already have four okay perfect um great okay so i see that everyone is um yes uh do you want to to go through the questions and then see all the results yes sure so i was just waiting to see if people are connecting and i see that everyone is slowly um connecting so that's fine i'll just please feel free to just click on the um the answers um because so we will look into the whole results afterwards so the first question as i said is just to say if you regularly use online e-government public services in ireland the second one is do you prefer public administration services to be online or offline of course most of you will prefer them to have them both as they can be complementary but if you were to choose one do you like doing your public administration you know work online or offline the third one is do you find it easy to access online governmental information for example around public services legislative procedures policy making processes info on finding information on your mps etc do you find it easy to access online information this time of the european institution so while the other questions were really about local and national services um this question is more about the eu if you ever if you ever actually go on the european commission's website to check a legislative procedure or what's going on or even on the european parliament's portal to see what your mep is doing anything like that then the next question is did you ever use an e-participation tool to voice your ideas or even engage in policy making both are fine for example have you ever filled in a consultation um in ireland or did you ever go to a citizen assembly um which is online or a participatory budgeting exercise from your local mayor or anything that is like that and this one is more on the european union level would you be comfortable in voting online at the next european elections so we have now two open questions and it's very good to see that people already joining what do you think is the main challenge to accessing e-government services online so just think about when you're trying to deal with e-government services you're trying to fill on an administrative form or reach out to someone in the in the public sector um is it easy for you and what do you think is actually the main challenge to accessing it and please always put yourself in the context of for vulnerable groups and even if it's not difficult for you if you think of someone from a vulnerable group and then the last question is what should be improved in terms of accessibility and inclusiveness in the digital in digital democracy so here it's we would really value your input as we said the whole goal of this um co-creation session is also to come up with guidelines on how we can make digital transformation more inclusive elisa um we have uh only four minutes to go so maybe you would like to comment on some contributions or maybe uh dr ann marie would like to comment something yeah sure and marie would you like to say a few words or no i'm fine it's really interesting to see uh what everybody's suggesting and that's great really loads of information for me thank you everyone yeah so we'll just give you a couple of minutes more just to take your time especially for the open questions just to say that we already have 33 people that have voted maybe in this question because it is open-ended we have only 21 contributions but in most questions we have more contributions okay we have two more minutes so everyone uh wrap this up we have 35 contributions uh once elisa changes her slide you will not be able to contribute anymore so [Music] you have one minute and something i don't know okay and just for people um i just wanted to also mention that for people who are not managing for example to get on slido and if you want to send your contributions afterwards via email this is also possible um so please let us know um if you feel like you know sending more suggestions afterwards and um maybe christina would we be able to follow up with a google form for for anyone okay i will create the google form and you can send it out to them yes absolutely no problem right so everyone will contribute if they want to okay elisa what do you think so do we move on yes sure so i hope everyone had the possibility to contribute i think we've been receiving a lot of inputs and yes feel free to also if you have anything else on the chat you can also mention it there yes we have 36 contributions already okay so thank you all for your contributions and we will make sure to go through them in a more detailed manner after the event with the support of the consultation institute we will publish a report summarizing today's contributions let's move on the inclusion aspects and challenges when it comes to digital economy thank you basilici so now the second topic that we tackled as ngos um was digital economy um so digital economy is really the development of our economy based on digital computing and there are just so many aspects around digital economy um and first of all i would like to go through a few of the the terminology um so as you can see here i won't go through every single thing because i don't want to make this too technical but when we talk about digital economy there are some things that we need to think about for example digital finance so really the impact of new technologies on financial services and this includes uh e-banking services for example um elijah i just want to swap it down please yeah sure go ahead margaret thank you no problem then we also have data economy which is the creation of a single market for data in the eu where data can flow across the sectors uh to benefit all and the point is to have this use of data that is fair and practical and clear and respected then we also talk about a lot of environmental concerns if you're into cryptocurrencies you might know about them so in digital economy it is also important to support green digital solutions so mainly developing and investing more in green technologies to achieve of course all of our climate neutrality targets and accelerate the the green digital transition um there were also discussions around wealth welfare social welfare and the digital age and also of course the creation of businesses companies with the use of technology so um some examples that are mentioned here are uber and amazon but of course there's just so many others and of course um it is a big debate in issue so as i said we are now moving to the proposed actions that we received and which were in the final resolution as you can see the main challenges on your left are always the same ensuring accessibility inclusive and also one specific challenge is the creation of a single market for data in the eu that was discussed a lot amongst our working group um as proposed practical actions to the eu ngos call to support digitally and ex and socially excluded groups and um so once again the target the target is all of those people who are left behind due to inaccessibility unaffordability of technologies una availability and also because of lack of connectivity or digital skills so this is always number one in each of the subtopics then there were more practical call for actions for example to introduce a corporate tax rules so that profits are registered and tax based on where the businesses are geographically located um another call for action was to set up a central pool of advisors that can be requested by smaller companies to help them to support them on what they can improve and then a specific one on crypto assets and um yes uh and here maybe i would like to mention why this discussion also came out if you know a bit about also when we've seen the the situation with russia and ukraine and how cryptocurrencies have been used um so examples in which authoritarian regimes try to circumvent global sanctions ngos are calling for more regulation also in cryptocurrency so this is why this debate also came out so once again i would like you to uh be on slido and now we have only uh if i'm not mistaken just four questions because it is quite a topic and um we did not want to overwhelm the the participants in on this topic so first of all do you think digital finance so meaning um you know e-banking services for example the impact of new technologies and the financial services are accessible to everyone yes no or i don't know um go ahead elisa and take them through the whole survey because we will see at the end the results after they have submitted the whole survey perfect so please just fill it in and i'll just read the other questions what could be done to improve the accessibility to these services so again an open-ended question and really think about practical services that you use also in your daily life around the e-finance do you see the use of technology to create new value in business models um customer experience and the internal capabilities that support its core operations so such as uber amazon as a good thing or a bad thing for a society i do realize that um you know the examples might might lead you to think mainly bad but of course there are so many companies that have been using technology and have been really um yeah have grown a lot thanks to technology and without that technology they would have never existed so and then the last question uh no the last question yes are there any suggestions on how to make our digital economy more inclusive so as you can see we have left these questions quite open and you can feel free to take a few minutes again to just take your time and reflect on them how many minutes do we have yes so we have four minutes and and we already have 16 contributors and marie if you want to chip in with a few comments uh please uh feel free to as an expert thanks i i don't know if i'd be an expert in this area but i do keep thinking you know that uh companies have a huge role to play those who are designing um you know like new software new computers knew everything like somebody told me about how they were teaching an older lady how to use microsoft and she said oh so when you wanted to stop you press start i remember thinking yeah you know there's all these things that we don't think about and that are have been there since the beginning of ict and yet make it much more difficult for people who are arriving later to um you know to take part and to get up to speed you know even things like all the little icons now when you go into um to do things they use icons instead of words explaining what things are so there's just so many things i think could be looked at yes questions definitely yes definitely if you have more anecdotes to to share but this is really it's really a problem and sometimes it's just not visible enough how much of a of a challenge it is for for for people and in the working group we had we also had representatives of um ngos that were trying to to protect seniors and um and uh yeah to to help also understand uh how we can support uh seniors in in using digital tools but i mean our conclusion as ngos was simply that we always have to complement the online with the offline um because the reality is that we cannot also expect everyone to be online either for their own choice or because there is a digital divide so yeah yeah i'm just looking to interrupt one minute just to inform the participants go ahead uh i was just looking at somebody's suggestion and international iconography i think a good idea because i remember trying to explain to my mom you know what the google play store app looked like on her phone over the phone because i have an iphone and the app store logo was completely different so i wasn't yes sure what it looked like so i think some standardization of things would help as well um you know as things move from being you know new and innovative to being used by everybody we probably have to think about some things like that um yeah definitely definitely i completely agree so okay thank you anne marie thank you elisa our time is up and it is time to move to the next topic which we will be discussing um about defending rights and freedoms in the online world that emerges aliza could you please enlighten us on the main challenges that arise yes definitely thank you very much so as you can see here we had a sub-topic which was called digital rights and defending freedoms online and the reason is that you know we wanted to to make sure to understand also what were the rights that citizens should have in the digital world so when we talk about digital rights we're thinking about secure and sustainable digital infrastructures and the right to everyone to access uh these digital infrastructures as the main goal um and when we were mentioning digital rights we had different topics that that came up as you can see online privacy net neutrality for those who don't know what this is it's the right to the internet access to internet access which should be offered to everyone on a non-discriminatory basis without favoring certain websites applications or services then we talked a lot here about data data protection gdpr of course and the right to um this protection all the time and the knowledge also about data retention so what happens to your data when you actually put it on a website or you're doing e-shopping how do they retain this data and use it afterwards for marketing purposes um then we also had discussions for example around around copyright and the way that it should be implemented which benefits the creators and the society and this is because the eu has been working for many years on a copyright directive then we have also um the safety of journalists on online because you know the right to of freedom of expression and how to protect journalists in this environment and in general protecting fundamental rights online the main challenges here were always around the accessibility to this data digital infrastructures and also equality amongst people online so what we have seen is that there are certain discriminations that happen online for example people with disabilities are using certain platforms for them to access a certain website and we've seen that um these websites actually um you know they they keep the fact the data around these uh people with disabilities uh um and they they mark them as people with disabilities so there should be more neutrality on how this data is kept then there is also yes ensuring online privacy and data protection is a challenge ensuring net neutrality so there are some calls for action which is a stronger e-privacy regulation also reinforcing the gdpr nationally then protect highly sensitive information such as migration status sexual orientation race or any information on vulnerable economic conditions and the proposal here is for example to restrict the access to this information as much as possible or limit the requirement of information for very exceptional cases or ensuring for example that public decisions are not based on big data and biased algorithm then around net neutrality there are some specific technical issues around zero rating um you don't have to go into that then for example encryption it should be better protected and there is a chat control legislation as well around it then we have also building public digital infrastructure such as public charging stations and wi-fi and ensure its financial sustainability um one interesting one is number six on the ban mass surveillance and a facial facial recognitions technology now um in the past few years i don't know if you know this but there has been a european citizens initiative that means that citizens all across europe have been um have opened this initiative which is basically a petition to ban mass surveillance and facial recognition technologies this has been a really really great big debate among civil society organizations and and um yes and for now there are some controversial issues because from the side of the institutions for example certain facial recognitions technologies were introduced also to for counter-terrorism plans etc so this is why there's a lot of debate around this um then uh there is also the reform of the copyright right directive which is also quite technical so it's not um too important to go into detail so we can start with the co-creation session here i would like to you to join here we have also uh just five questions the first one is do you think everyone in the eu should have the right the fundamental right actually to free affordable high-speed internet and access to technological infrastructures so here the case was for example in finland in finland it is a fundamental right this means that all finnish citizens have the right to free affordable high-speed internet do you think your rights are sufficiently protected online so we were just wondering if every time you go online you think that your rights as a citizen as a european are sufficiently protected is it clear to you how your personal data is treated every time you connect online this is interesting because we know that everyone is using constantly apps chat functions not only the big social media but also different uh um different apps nowadays are even under the same umbrella so for example whatsapp is connected to your facebook instagram etc um and also when you go on a governmental service do you know how they treat your data so not only the big companies but also others what do you do if it is unclear to you how your data is protected it's nice to see that the first answer was proceed anyway because i think that most most people just proceed i mean i have to admit that i am one of them um i try to refuse everything that they ask me permission to do but yeah sometimes there's just no choice and you just want to see it but it is good to see that some people are more conscious about the fact that it is unclear to how they store and how they use their data so don't open it close it and shut down the device is also a good answer not use certain services such as social medias like facebook it's also interesting how should we ensure that all citizens know what their rights are when they connect to the internet because some um of course the directive like the gdpr is extremely complicated also for a european ngo such as ours so it's interesting for us to see what do you think should be the way forward how can we make sure that citizens or even younger people are for example trained to know what their rights are when they connect to the internet and here we mention really data rights but also the right to defeat freedom of speech or you know everything that that goes around those topics okay actually we do have more uh five more minutes so maybe um i don't know you would like to to discuss a bit about the responses but i don't know so we can just give them time to to respond whatever you want to listen sure i was already commenting i was wondering if anne marie found some of the answers also interesting from her perspective yeah i did there's lots of um there's lots of great suggestions on digital democracy and education um and i find you know you've provided a lot of interesting information for example on safeguarding that i don't know much about so this is great um i look forward to seeing the i think the google doc of all everyone's suggestions would be really good for me to go through um we already have 25 votes so let's give one more minute for everyone to finalize their uh responses and submit them and then we can move to the next yep so i'm going back to the first question i find it interesting that um someone answered that they don't think that all eu citizens should have a free affordable high-speed internet and i would be very curious you know why as well it would be interesting to know if they can leave a comment in the chat section of course if they feel like it of course all of this um just so everyone knows the this is all anonymous as you can see there are no names on the screen so do you think your rights are sufficiently protected online most people say no interesting to see here no one said yes yep is it clear to you how your personal data is treated every time you connect online most people the majority says no as well i do think that with the of course um with the gdpr at least on the european continent in europe this has helped a lot as well to protect our our personal data yes i think we can move on to the next topic okay perfect so thank you everyone the next topic is quite relevant since it remains in the broader sphere of digital rights let's move to discussing the possible digital threats and how we can protect those citizens from them alissa the floor is yours thank you all right it's uh darren here i'm just going to swap with margaret again perfect thanks darren um so digital safeguards is um there were many concepts around this one it was a bit of a long one because we decided that it goes to have this sub-topic because we do think that it is important to discuss what we think are the safeguards that decision-makers at the eu level should put in place to ensure the respect of values ethics and norms in the digital space so while in the previous section we talked about the rights in digital safeguards we we want to make sure that there are eu policies and regulations also in place to protect those rights so the certain the different subtopics we mentioned were around cyber security and this also uh came a lot and from the recommendations of citizens in the conference of the future of europe so it was tackled a lot so it's really the protection from hackers fraud viruses and the managing risk of hybrid attacks the second big big topic which is also constantly talked about at the european level is artificial intelligence so what ngos are striving for is an ai that is ethical and that protects people's communities and society from escalating economic political and social issues proposed by um by ai then together with ai of course there's also the discussion more about algorithms um sometimes these two are actually for some people the same concept but i think the difference here when we talk about artificial intelligence is that artificial intelligence goes a bit beyond algorithms artificial intelligence is really a machine learning mechanism and at a certain point it even goes beyond the human uh process and starts learning on its own what is the best ways forward well aguilar algorithms of course is more about deciding what the algorithms are in the beginning from human view and there is a bit of machine learning but not as much as artificial intelligence of course and here the importance around the transparency is of how these algorithms are implemented is very important then the fourth topic we tackled was around online disinformation protection and i can imagine that everyone is concerned about it in the digital era because we just constantly see so much false inaccurate misleading information online that is sometimes used to also cause public harm or make a profit um another uh point we mentioned was around audio-visual media services so how to regulate this online content and the role of online platforms in disseminating um information and the direct impact it has on the freedom of expression and access to information the sixth point was around the integrity of elections so protection of integrity of elections and promotion of democratic participation online then the seventh was around online hate speech so prevention of practices um that really denigrates people based on their race ethnicity gender and social status and this is also a very big topic and which goes together with the last one which is illegal content online as well so what are the safeguards to effectively tackle illegal content online so as you can see a lot of sensitive issues as well the usual challenges while the challenges go along with what i said before so ensuring cyber security the ethical use of ai the transparency of algorithms um the monitoring constantly of online disinformation and what to do about it um ensuring accessibility of course and also the monitoring of online hate speech but also of illegal content so around ai we had a very big discussion around civil with civil society organizations and there have been some debates on uh the fact that ai should always require a human intervention now i have just one anecdote on this which i think that you could find interesting so when i was discussing this with one of the digital ngos um representatives he told me be careful of saying that ai always needs a human review because for example on a platform such as facebook illegal content terrorist content is automatically eliminated by an ai before there is any human review and there has been research showing that if there were to be human actually doing the the filtering of this type of content it can lead to depression of people um because they're exposed to such um you know negative content that it actually has a psychological effect on them so we came up together with the working group and we figured that the best way is to develop a framework that determines the type extent and form and moment of human intervention in an ai automated decision making and we think that the eu should create this sort of framework that could determine the criteria that should be the impact of the ai on rights duties and liberties so we mean that it should be on a case-to-case basis um when this human intervention should be so the second point is to regulate ai systems including those that fall under the remit of the common foreign and security policy and this one was also another interesting debate because there was one member of our group who also suggested that we should just ban all ai systems for weapons and military purposes and as we can imagine the reality is just much more complex than them than that so we should regulate it in some ways um provide support technical policy financial um support for civil society organizations of course to to help institutions to counter online hate speech etc then the fourth one is to defend fundamental freedoms and deter illegal hate speech by including an online content moderation regime that requires a human review and form the fifth one is include more specific safeguards in the digital service act which is one of the acts of the european commission and then ensure that member states transport and implement effectively the audio visual media services directives and you can feel free to also check these out if you're more interested in eu policy make so we can start the co-creation session here as i said the questions are not so um are definitely not so difficult um so the first one is ing to you how can we ensure that artificial intelligence and algorithms do not lead to discrimination what can we do do you agree on the human review always sometimes so this is the first question we'll give you a few minutes of course are there specific safeguards that policy makers should implement especially to protect vulnerable groups and then i'll go to the third one because i think that one of the most important questions of this co-creation session is this what do you think are vulnerable groups in our digital society when i say when i say vulnerable groups who do you immediately think of and or please list the vulnerable groups that you think we should be protecting and what are their vulnerabilities and in this case please specify if you're talking about seniors about children about people with disabilities people with migrant status what do you think are the vulnerabilities of this specific target group so vasiliki can you tell us a few um how many minutes for this um yes so because we have four uh open questions we can give them 10 minutes i mean this is a good time if someone wants also to have a short break to go drink some water we will be here we will be monitoring live then the votes we already have one vote um eliza maybe you want to to see it to take a look at the answers the person gave no just waiting to see if there are more yeah i think it takes them a bit of time because they have to fill in the whole survey yeah so go ahead go ahead i'll just leave it on this one so okay and marie as usual if you want to chip in with your expertise you can always feel free to digital safeguards is quite a complicated one yeah i'm just thinking it's not it's not an area focused on but i was just thinking about you know the scale of what you would need to do here really would need international agreements you know we know that some of those who are you know sending misinformation or targeting the vulnerable are in other countries like in africa and russia and others like there's huge difficulties here in how you hold them into account and how you get agreements um i think it's a very tricky area but obviously regulation and good you know i don't want to say good punishment but you know effective punishments for those who who don't abide by these safeguards in the areas you can control i think would be a good start um [Music] you know we're not we're not going to be able to solve all of this i think some of it would just be better education i think um yeah and i think also another thing to remember as well is there's a lot of benefits from algorithms you know like in terms of definitely you know even you know identifying you know medical diseases and things like that um but and human review decisions isn't always practical as someone has said um like it is impossible for humans to review everything that's posted online um so i think this will be kind of difficult yeah yeah many guidelines for developers and involving more people in the design of algorithms um yeah yeah one thing that we really struggle i think in our conversations with civil society i mean which is a big challenge is always to find the balance right of using the benefits the potential of technology but at the same time safeguarding citizens and vulnerable groups so this was always difficult and another big debate that we had actually was around online content moderation and it was more about uh the fact that there were two different points of view and one was really about you know you should just eliminate completely like um false news uh um online disinformation it should just never even appear on social media and i think that uh that was a bit yeah i i honestly don't agree personally with that point of view because i don't think that we want some sort of uh policing around what should be online or not so i'm more for the educational side so really stimulating critical thinking of people understanding that not everything that you see online is true to check your sources and yeah so there were some also some citizens recommendations the conference was really about we should create some sort of authority like an independent authority with different stakeholders in it that could actually constantly monitor and eliminate bad information but who would be part of this authority was my question and you know how would you actually do it um so i'm more for the we should have more digital education which is actually our next topic and just really train people to understand that what they see online is not always the truth i don't know if you have any uh perspectives on that as well yeah i think training it does have a huge role to play um and i know some countries are very good on it i think finland and estonia are really really good on it and they have it in schools and more broadly so yeah we could definitely do more on that i suppose it's not so much about the a ai and algorithms that we're looking at now but just more broadly for misinformation scans you know and i think also something about you know people are afraid to admit when they're scammed as well we need to kind of talk a bit more about things people are afraid to talk about um and i was also thinking of an ocean a gibney who was uh logging on earlier who's the head of chief commissioner in iraq she and her thesis looked at ography online you know how do you protect people from that it's something that we don't even talk about you know but uh there's a lot of bad stuff out there and just the education for young people and like what's real and what's not real would be helpful yeah thank you okay um i think our time is almost up so elisa if you want to comment on any of the responses go ahead or we can go ahead to the next session if you want as you speak yeah sure i think that these are all very interesting uh perspectives and it is great to see uh so many inputs and we'll definitely have we'll do an analysis of them and come back to you with the final report of course okay yes let's keep it a bit more because now i see a lot of votes coming in so i am giving one more minute for everyone to submit their answers okay yeah yeah so just so everyone knows when we were working with these mgos we really had all parts of civil society that were dealing with vulnerable groups so we had representatives from as i said uh ngos working with seniors or also with people we had the european disability forum as well working together with us on the recommendations but also fianza which works with the homeless people we also had other organizations working together with migrants so the recommendations are really uh yeah they were really co-created all together also with people specifically working also of course the european youth forum was there thank you everyone thank you elisa and let's move to the last uh session for today a concept we experienced intensely during the pandemic but it seems to be here to say digital education policies and norms are already shaping and entail many challenges balancing between an innovative society and inclusive education is a tougher question to solve and elisa maybe you can take us through the main dilemmas of the field and the main terms okay um yes and thank you for everyone's uh um patience and resistance throughout these sections so this is the last one and it's about resetting education and training for the digital age so we have five different um let's say terminologies here um digital competences and digital skills which seem the same but actually digital competences is around the basic set of skills covering information and data literacy online communication and collaboration digital content creation and safety problem solving when we talk about digital skills we mention more specifically job-related sk