How was 2019 for the ISA² Programme?

365 days give many opportunities to do things. When you have an enthusiastic group of people working on digitalisation of public administrations, numerous planes, trains, nights without sleep and a lot of work, 365 days may even seem like 730! This is precisely what has happened to the ISA² team in 2019.

We started the year attending the Connected Smart Cities Conference, held in January in Brussels, Belgium. A few weeks later, we attended the High Level eGov Conference in Iasi, Romania in February. It was our first time there but not the last one. We came back to Romania, this time to Cluj Napoca, in March to attend the StartUp Europe Summit tand reach out to SMEs and startups. We closed our Romanian tour in June, holding the Sharing & Reuse Conference 2019 under the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the EU. Since we were already there, we stayed for the Digital Assembly.

Between March and June, don't think we were resting! In this period, we attended the Next Techniques and Technologies for Statistics 2019 and collected feedback from our stakeholders at the Interim Evaluation Workshop. We attended the European Citizens' Initiative Day in Brussels; the Western Balkans Digital Summit in Belgrade, Serbia and the e-Society Conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands, all in April; in May we went to e-Governance Conference in Tallin, Estonia; and to the Urbis Smart City Fair in Brno, Czechia and EU Datathon 2019 in Burssels in June. Yes, this was only during the first half of the year! 

Do you think that the second half of the year was calmer? Not at all. Over the summer, we published the Digital Government Factsheets 2019, and still tanned we went to San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy to attend the EGOV-CeDem-ePart Conference in the early September. From sunny Italy we flew to cold but beautiful Helsinki, Finland for the Digital Excellence Forum at the ICT Proposers' Day. We started October attending the European Week of Regions and Cities in Brussels. Here we gathered 140 people to learn about digital public services and digital innovation hubs, and around 30 to learn about Joinup, our repository of IT solutions. Two weeks later, we were flying back to Helsinki where we organised the 9th edition of the SEMIC Conference under the Finnish Presidency of the Council of the EU.

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If you think October was intense, wait until you hear about November… In the first week of the month, we attended the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. For our workshop there, we gathered around 50 people to discuss how our interoperable solutions can help businesses boost sales. The week after, some of us went to the GovTech Summit in Paris, France while others went to Luxembourg to attend the EU DataViz. December has been the cherry on the cake, holding our first Interoperability Academy Winter School together with the KU Leuven. 

With 2019 getting to its end, we are already planning 2020. New events, new opportunities, new ideas and new batteries for all of us to keep up digitalising Europe is our wish for 2020. 

What is yours?

See you in any point of Europe next year, and remember, no matter where you are, with ISA², you click, we link!