Today, 18 March 2022, in Talavera de la Reina, Castilla La Macha, the Government of Spain, through the Secretariat of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence is celebrating the Constituent Assembly of the Spanish Hub of Gaia X, seeking to support the Association’s mission in data sharing and digital sovereignty and aims to ensure data availability, interoperability, portability and compliance with European standards and values.
Following Spain’s accession to the Gaia-X European initiative in summer 2021, the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA) boosted the process of creating an Association that would serve as a vehicle for the hub’s initiative.
Since then, 57 entities of the data sharing ecosystem have worked on drafting and revising the statutes that have been adopted today.
During this process, the Government has submitted the candidacies and subsequent voting of the physical headquarters for the Association, being elected Talavera de la Reina, proposed by the Junta de Castilla la Mancha. In this city, the institutional opening ceremony of the Assembly took place, with the First Vice-President of the Government Nadia Calviño, the President of Castilla La Mancha Emiliano García Page and the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence, Carme Artigas, participating.
Regarding the constitution of the Association, the statutes and the members who will be part of the Board of Directors of the Association were approved by vote.
Since the launch of the Gaia-X National Hub, several sectoral data space working groups have been promoted, seeking to have an account of the status of the challenges and opportunities for data sharing in each sector, as well as to identify mission use cases that allow this sector to benefit from the advantages of the data economy.
So far, various workshops have been held in data space on Tourism, Mobility and Industry 4.0, all of them in different places in the Spanish geography (Madrid, Valencia and Bilbao respectively). Over the coming months, these workshops will continue to take place, exploring other sectors such as agri-food, health and social data.
The Government of Spain is working intensively to create an enabling environment, through the various initiatives on data economy as per the Digital Spain 2025 and deployed in the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, the Plan for Connectivity and Digital Infrastructures and the Strategy for the Promotion of 5G Technology.
These priorities are part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, seizing the opportunity of the NextGenEU funds to boost it.
The event agenda in Spanish is available here.
