Ille-et-Vilaine's Inventory of Algorithmic Treatments — a French Département Publishes 91 Algorithms, Without Source Code

The Département d'Ille-et-Vilaine (Brittany, France) put online at the end of May 2024 an inventory titled 'Recensement des traitements algorithmiques'. It lists 91 algorithms used in its missions, from child protection and support for elderly and disabled people to roads, schools and culture. Examples include payments of the personalised autonomy allowance (APA) to care-home residents, restocking of period-product dispensers in schools, routing of RSA beneficiaries to the right 'mission locale', and allocation of IT equipment by job type.
Each algorithm has a descriptive sheet covering the context of use, legal basis, purpose, data processed, degree of automation and impact on individuals. The sheets do not explain how the algorithm works. The work was led by the department's data administrator and data protection officer, with consultant support, and mobilised all business departments of an organisation of more than 4,000 staff. Many of the 'algorithms' turned out to be simple spreadsheets rather than sophisticated software. The register is to be updated once a year, with the DPO identifying new algorithms.
The inventory answers a duty created by France's 2016 Digital Republic Act, which Acteurs Publics describes as rarely respected nearly ten years later. Limits are clear: no source code is published (the department says this is work it 'should look into'), non-compliance carries no sanction, and no outcome evaluation exists. The open-data dataset is listed in a civic-tech directory as active and was last modified in 2026. The case shows that a mid-sized subnational body can meet a long-ignored transparency duty with internal resources, but that inventory is not the same as scrutiny.

Read the full analysis: https://data.ille-et-vilaine.fr/dataset/recensement-des-traitements-algorithmiques