The SMOOTH project aims to assist organisations to comply with key requirements of the GDPR by designing and implementing an easy-to-use and affordable cloud-based platform. It will generate awareness on their GDPR obligations and will automatically analyse their level of compliance with the GDPR.
SMOOTH is also promoting the creation of a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) on Guidelines for micro enterprises GDPR Compliance.
SMOOTH platform validates micro businesses compliance according to the legislation and informing them of the elements needed to be revised to avoid potential fines. In order to be able to develop an automated compliance assessment platform, SMOOTH partners have worked on the identification of key GDPR compliance elements and GDPR legal requirements applicable to micro- enterprises. The result of their study is the basis of the CWA.
A CWA is a document designed to meet an immediate need and forms the basis for future European standardization activity. A CWA developed by a Workshop is especially attractive for European research projects because the participation is open to key stakeholders, regulators and main players in the specific area, enabling their active contribution to the workshop. The benefit for stakeholders to participate to the CWA is that it is a way they can help to shape its content by contributing to what later can be a standard at national, European or international level. The document will include guidelines, recommendations, best practices and methodologies, and can be considered as a pre-normative document.
Participation of stakeholders dealing with privacy and GDPR compliance issues will be specially welcomed, and their benefit to be involved would be to give visibility to their engagement in the CWA, given that the CWA text itself mentions entities and persons who approve it.
Why a CWA is important? Because it can constitute the prelude of a standard, and standards are reference documents establishing a set of rules governing how organisations are supposed to complete a given task, represent a consensus among the players in each domain, defining the characteristics and rules for a specific field. It compiles the knowledge in the domain and brings innovation because provides structured methods and reliable data for saving time in the innovation process and facilitates the dissemination of groundbreaking ideas about edge techniques. Moreover, standarisation is a development tool for SMEs and all type of organisations because it builds customer trust in systems, services or products. Standards bring technological, economic and societal benefits because helping to harmonize technical specifications of products and services, break down barriers to trade.
The CWA on `Guidelines for Micro-enterprises GDPR Compliance´ is going to be tailor-made for micro-enterprises engaged in low-risk processing and will provide guidelines on the following aspects:
- What are the key GDPR elements and principles they have to take into account?
- What are the legal requirements they have to fulfil?
- What are the technical and organizational measures to take?
- How and when do the exemptions for low risk processing apply?
It is intended to be used by micro-enterprises, as well as by organisations providing services to micro-enterprises (e.g. consultancy, training, compliance assessment platforms etc.).
The programme to reach the CEN Workshop Agreement entails a process of 9 months:
- from the public availability of the project plan and agenda in CEN’s website foreseen in June-20,
- then the Workshop kick-off meeting in Brussels in July-20,
- after, internal review of the draft CWA by the working groups in September-20
- later, Workshop plenary meeting for registered participants for discussion in October-20
- next, Public comment phase on the draft by stakeholders and players, from October to November-20
- following, Plenary meeting for registered participants for resolution of comments if needed in January-21
- And lastly the final document published by the CEN-CENELEC Management Centre, meaning that the publication of the CWA is foreseen for January 2021, when it will be freely available.
