Reusable tools for information collection

What is this action about?

The Lisbon Treaty has introduced the “European citizens’ initiative”, which enables one million citizens who are nationals of a significant number of Member States to call directly on the European Commission to bring forward issues of interest to them in an area of EU competence.

This initiative requires an efficient process to enable citizens to exercise this new right, particularly as statements of support for citizens' initiatives can be collected by organisers both on paper or electronically, and online collection is potentially prone to fraud and raises issues linked to data protection.

Under this ISA² action, specialised software has been developed and provided to the local organisers to undertake this process efficiently.

In addition to the technical and security standards that the software needs to comply with, the following features have also been included in order to facilitate the management of the initiative by the organiser and the verification of statements of support by Member States’ authorities:

• adaptations of the statement of support form, according to the Member States of residence/nationality of the signatory;
• automatic grouping of statements of support according to the Member State to which they will be sent for verification;
• possibility to export the statements of support as a data file, which could then be sent directly to the relevant Member State.

The software is compatible with mobile devices.

What are the objectives?

• providing organisers of citizens' initiatives with a reusable tool that permits the online collection of statements of support in a way that complies with the Regulation on the European citizens' initiative regarding the format and data collected, as well as with security and technical requirements;
• providing the reusable tool as an Open Source web application, made available as a free download;
• facilitating compliance with the legal requirements by organisers of initiatives and certification of online collection systems by the relevant Member State authorities.

What are the benefits?

• provide free, downloadable open source software;
• help organisers build their online collection systems;
• facilitate the online collection system certification process;
• support the use of standard software to facilitate the verification of online collection systems;
• facilitate the data verification of statements of support by the relevant Member State authorities via the consistent collection of data using the software.

What has been achieved?

• The ECI Online Collection Software (OCS) was developed. The tool helps the ECI organisers collect online statements of support.
• A new version of the Online Collection System was released improving the User Experience for the Citizens and organisers of initiative and implementing a responsive architecture that make the software compliant with any mobile devices ( smart phone, tablet…)
• Proposals to improve the current ECI Online Collection System and the ECI Register.
• Study on Electronic identification in the context of ECI Online Collection System.
• Accessibility study for the ECI Online Collection System.

What has been achieved?

The main milestone is enhancement of the ECI central platform compliant with the new ECI regulation 2019/788 (e.g. integration of the eIDs of the new MS having notified their eIDs, update of the front end components).