e-IRG Communiqué on the e-IRG Workshop under Swedish EU Presidency

The e-IRG Workshop organised in the framework of the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the Union coincided with the 20-year anniversary of e-IRG. To celebrate this long-term commitment to policy making for the European e-Infrastructure landscape, a separate anniversary session was implemented in order to emphasize on the achievements and developments during the last 20 years, but also to provide an outlook into the future developments of European e-Infrastructures. This special session was organized with the goal of providing an overview of the most impactful actions of e-IRG at European, national, and institutional level, and also hint on ideas for the future potential of e-infrastructures on key policy issues, as seen from their own point of view. Besides the 20-year anniversary session, and following an organized visit to both MAX-IV and ESS infrastructures, there were also three more focused sessions, as is quite often the case in e-IRG workshops, on issues that concern the Presidency, are of great concern with regard to recent developments, or have been suggested by the participants of previous workshops or EU and MS delegates. The first session, entitled “Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructures (AAI) coordination in the ERA and beyond”, discussed the current developments in AAI and the need for coordination and interoperability across different service providers. The second session entitled “Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructures” was motivated by the NIS2 EU Directive that pertains to safeguarding the security of Vital Digital Infrastructures, which are crucial for sustaining society. This EU directive covers all government agencies in the domain of Digital Infrastructures, which means that most e-infrastructures must adhere to it. The third session entitled “Coordination among generic (domain-agnostic) and thematic (domain-specific) infrastructures in the new ERA”, evolved around the topic of coordination between thematic and  generic infrastructures at institutional, national, regional and EU levels. In fact, the core of this session is a constant topic of focus for e-IRG given the extensive work done in recent years, and more specifically the e-IRG National Nodes document in 2019 and the e-IRG White Papers 2021 and 2022.