On 1 February 2018, the European Commission has adopted a proposal for the revision of the Drinking Water Directive. This proposal in reaction to the Right2Water European Citizens' Initiative foresees, among other important elements, an obligation for EU Member States to improve access to water and ensure its access for vulnerable and marginalized groups. The Right2Water initiative used the Open Source Software (known as the Online Collection System - OCS) developed by the Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) of the European Commission and financed by the ISA² Programme.
The Right2Water initiative was one of the first European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) launched in 2012, just after the ECI instrument was introduced on 1 April 2012 by the Treaty of Lisbon. The OCS helped the initiative collect the required one million statement of supports in one year, which is the minimum number requested by the ECI regulation for the European Commission to trigger the legislative lifecycle.
So far, the OCS has been used by 38 out of 48 European Citizens’ Initiatives collecting statement of supports; out of which 4 initiatives (3 using the OCS) have reached more than one million statements of supports.
Together with the OCS, DIGIT also provides the Europa Web site that a group of citizens can use to submit their proposed initiative to the Commission and launch a new Initiative. In addition, DIGIT also offers, since 2012, the hosting, free of charge for citizens, of the European Citizens’ Initiative in its Data Center in Luxembourg.
New features are constantly added to the open source version of the OCS. As an example, last year it went mobile using Angular 2 and current developments are focusing on aligning it with Angular 5 and eUI.
The future of the ECI is currently under discussion between the European Commission, the Council of the EU and the European Parliament following the proposal of the Commission to revise the ECI regulation. If the future regulation enter into force, it will mean for DIGIT to build a permanent central OCS platform in the new Secure Hosting Service (SHS) offered by the Data center, integrating with DIGIT's building blocks (EU Login to ensure eIDAS compliance, EU Secure File Exchange Service to transmit the statement of support for validation by EU Member States).
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