Sofia and the Eurocities Algorithmic Transparency Standard — A Shared Register Schema Still Awaiting Local Publication

Amsterdam and Helsinki launched the world's first public algorithm registers, city-run inventories disclosing what automated systems local government uses, on what data, and under what human oversight. Building on that precedent, the Eurocities Digital Forum Lab convened a follow-on cohort of cities to design a shared, reusable schema.
On 19 January 2023, Eurocities announced that Sofia had co-developed an open-source Algorithmic Transparency Standard together with Barcelona, Bologna, Brussels Capital Region, Eindhoven, Mannheim and Rotterdam. The standard defines a common set of fields — purpose, legal basis, data sources, human-oversight arrangements, and a public contact point — that any city can use to publish its own register, freely available at algorithmregister.org.
Unlike Amsterdam and Helsinki, however, there is no public evidence that Sofia Municipality has yet published its own live register of deployed algorithms using this schema; the available sources document Sofia's role in co-designing the standard, not a completed local rollout.
This case is included honestly as a standard-setting practice at an earlier stage than the mature registers already documented elsewhere in this catalogue: it shows how a well-designed, replicable transparency tool can still leave a gap between publishing a shared standard and a participating city actually putting it into public use.

Read the full analysis: https://eurocities.eu/latest/nine-cities-set-standards-for-the-transparent-use-of-artificial-intelligence/