BAIDATA initiative to promote peninsular leadership in the data economy

May 06, 2022

DESCRIPCIÓN

The first association to promote public-private leadership in Spain and Portugal in the data economy is born. Its name is BAIDATA, which means "yes to data" in Basque, as is the commitment of its members to the sector.

The last few years have seen how data technologies have grown in their use and advanced in their possibilities. For this reason, a group of organisations in the Basque Country, noticing these dynamics and the impulse of the European institutions to regulate them and the development of collaborative platforms such as data spaces, decided to join forces with the aim of influencing their development and helping the sector to grow. Aware of this group's moves, the International Data Spaces Association (IDSA), one of the main continental initiatives in the development of the Single European Data Space, also entered the operation, determined to make its resources, models, technologies and knowledge on shared and sovereign data spaces available to all stakeholders. IDSA was born in 2016 with the mission to unite companies and organisations from all over the world that believe in the data economy, its free movement and in the data owner's ability to decide the conditions and restrictions they deem appropriate for the data they share. In this sense, BAIDATA was born from the promotion of the Innovalia association, as representative of IDSA in Spain, with the support of the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and the support of the Cluster GAIA - the Industry Association of Applied Knowledge and Technologies in the Basque Country. However, it did not end there, as it did not seek to be an exclusively Basque initiative, but also wanted to include the interests of companies and institutions from all over Spain and Portugal, as their participation in these data spaces was also expected. In this way, organisations in the ecosystem could share their data on a voluntary basis through the development of a decentralised infrastructure under commonly agreed criteria that will provide trust and security.

The initiative is the first peninsular organisation aimed at boosting Spain and Portugal's leadership in data sovereignty and the data economy. The association aims to develop a public-private data ecosystem through different research, training and development activities. To this end, BAIDATA offers its members the possibility of connecting their business to the data economy through pilot actions; access to the necessary infrastructures to implement shared data spaces; advice and support in the creation, deployment and maintenance of a space to promote peninsular leadership in the shared data economy, as well as training plans to train companies and bring technologies related to the data economy closer to them. Likewise, the association wants to help in the creation of a European Data Union, promoting the connectivity and interoperability of the territories' data space with other regional and national data spaces and with the common European data market, and to serve as a connection to European data environments, transmitting leading initiatives from other European countries to Spain and Portugal, as well as the activities of the territories to the rest of the continent.