Gaia-X Hub Portugal
The Gaia-X Hub Portugal was created on 26 May 2021, at a public ceremony held in the Auditorium of the Rectory of the University of Aveiro, as a joint initiative between the Secretary of State for the Digital Transition, the Gaia-X AISBL Association, and TICE.PT, the Portuguese Information, Communications and Electronics cluster. Since then, TICE.PT has been responsible for the dynamization and running of the Portuguese hub of GAIA-X.
The Gaia-X national hubs are the points of contact for all stakeholders in each participating country. The national hubs do not belong to the central Gaia-X association, but act as think tanks and facilitators and drivers of local support.
Data is increasingly a critical factor in creating new business models, driving the creation of innovation ecosystems and promoting European competitiveness and economic prosperity.
To boost the European Union's leading position in the data economy and cloud computing, it is necessary to create an open digital ecosystem that allows European companies to compete at global level.
This is the background to Gaia-X, a project born in Europe, for the World, which aims to create an open, secure and reliable federated data aggregation and cloud computing infrastructure.
Gaia-X Hub Portugal has the following national objectives:
- act as a local ambassador for Gaia-X,
- to publicise and promote Gaia-X within the TICE.PT ecosystem and the national global system, contributing to raising literacy on Data Spaces (DS) in Portugal,
- identify national and international projects already underway with TICE.PT associates that can contribute to the formation of sovereign DS as a crucial element of digital transformation, e.g. and as a priority, in the Recovery and Resilience Programme (PRR), thus contributing to its more effective implementation, adopting the Gaia-X principles,
- identifying and energising priority EDs and any specific national needs in this area,
- influencing government structures to adopt the Gaia-X principles, starting with the acquisition of cloud solutions,
- promote mutual knowledge of the various data initiatives/projects in Portugal.
Gaia-X Hub Portugal has the following international objectives:
- to learn in detail about the state of definition and development of the building blocks that Gaia-X will generate,
- collaborate with the other Hubs to establish multi-national working groups,
- collaborate with the other Hubs to develop pan-European EDs,
- establish links with Gaia-X's Lighthouse projects as a source of lessons learnt, synergies and inspiration for national use cases,
- promote the establishment of Gaia-X Lighthouse candidate projects with TICE.PT members,
- feed the Gaia-X framework with specific needs and requirements identified in national use cases, to be implemented in the Gaia-X framework,
- identify sources of international (and national) funding that are transversal and/or of interest to a sector/domain
- promote the adherence of new members to GAIA-X AISBL.