The Once-Only Principle. The TOOP Project

Abstract

The Once-Only Principle (OOP) is part of the seven underlying principles of the eGovernment Action Plan 2016–2020. Its importance is highlighted by the Tallinn Declaration on eGovernment, signed on October 6, 2017, and the Berlin Declaration on Digital Society and Value-Based Digital Government, signed on December 8, 2020. OOP aims to make the government more effective and more superficial and to reduce administrative burdens by asking citizens and companies to provide certain (standard) information to the public authorities only once. Thus, the goal of this TOOP book is to describe and document the developments and results of the Once-Only Principle Project (TOOP). TOOP was not a typical example of the type of large-scale pilot usually funded by the EU Framework Pro- gramme for Research and Innovation. It was a horizontal project that was policy-driven, with the aim of showing that the implementation of OOP in a cross-border and cross-sector setting is feasible. More than 50 partners from more than 20 Member States and associated countries of the EU participated in the TOOP project. Several things happened during the project, such as the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, but the most essential "game-changing" event was the establishment of the Single Digital Gateway Regulation (SDGR). With the TOOP book, we wanted to summarize the results of the TOOP project from different points of view, from policy, organizational, architectural, and, last but not least, technical perspectives.