Hi !
This week, we had a LinkedIn Live session on how to succeed with privacy in a small municipality. In this newsletter, we have written a summary of that conversation â the key points we want you to take away.
But first, a brief introduction!
It has almost become an accepted truth that smaller municipalities are worse than larger ones at handling privacy. In recent years, there has also been a tremendous growth in the use of digital resources in schools.
This was particularly evident after the educational reform and, most notably, after the pandemic, when all teachers and students â in many places overnight on March 12, 2020 â had to switch to digital and interact on digital platforms.
To meet the needs of both the educational reform and the pandemic, digital tools have been adopted to a much greater extent than before in Norwegian schools in recent years. And it's not always that the school owner has made the necessary assessments on privacy and information security before they were adopted.
A significant increase in your portfolio of digital learning materials, lack of risk assessments, and perhaps also a lack of structure to manage the digital resources, mean that school owners are lagging behind, perhaps especially in terms of privacy. And this backlog can be overwhelming and difficult to tackle, especially if you are a small municipality.
In this newsletter, you will find where to start and what advantages you actually have as a smaller municipality when working with privacy.
You have to start somewhere â make a plan
When you are a municipality and a school owner, you most likely have a backlog regarding the digital learning materials that the municipality uses. This means that the municipality uses learning materials that you do not have an overview of.
If you haven't done anything about privacy and information security for a while, this is where you start. And the purpose is to get an overview, so you can decide if you need all the learning materials the schools are actually using.
When you are a small municipality, the volume of digital learning materials is probably somewhat smaller than for larger municipalities. And that means it's somewhat easier for you to get an overview. So how do you start?
Look at the integrations you have with Feide. This will give you an indication of the learning materials you are using. But it will not give you the complete overview. You need to map all LMS, all digital learning materials, learning resources, and tools. Here, you need to check internally.
And then you also need to talk to people. Contact the schools in your municipality, and ask if the list matches what they are using.
Dare to delegate to dedicated teachers at your schools
In the conversation on LinkedIn Live, Viggo talked about how Narvik municipality has organized the work with internal control. Narvik has established what they call digital educators, these are teachers at the different schools who have been tasked with being a type of first line for digitalization, information security, and privacy.
When someone wants to use digital learning materials at school, it is the digital educator's responsibility to assess the need and make the initial privacy assessments.
Digital educators are teachers at the school and colleagues to those who request new learning materials. When a colleague, someone you know, tells you that before you can use this great new digital solution, you need to make some assessments, it is a message that resonates.
And when you give people authority, delegate a task to them, give them authority and responsibility to solve a task, you give them ownership of privacy. You have given them trust, responsibility, knowledge, and power to be a frontline.
And although it is work to train other people to help you, you have given them ownership of a task in a way that will actually help you get your job done.
Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration
When you work with privacy and information security in a small municipality, you are most likely the person who knows the most about your field in the entire organization. You are quite alone. And then you need to find your peers elsewhere.
You need to find places and people from whom you can learn. And that means you need to collaborate with others. Even though finding time to participate in Digi-networks, contacting professionals in neighboring municipalities, attending member meetings in the Association for Data Protection Officers, or events organized by KS or Kins is difficult, it is something you should prioritize.
Simply because you will benefit a lot from networking in the long run.
I wish you a wonderful, privacy-friendly week-end!
Best regards,
Ida Thorsrud
Project manager national DPIA
This newsletter was translated from Norwegian to English with assistance from ChatGPT by OpenAI. While it guided our translation, we made independent editorial choices. Any discrepancies result from this combined approach.