Florian Evéquoz
email: florian.evequoz@hes-so.ch

Hugo Castanheiro

Which Lobby Won the Vote? Visualizing Influence of Interest Groups in Swiss Parliament

Keywords: Lobby, Votes, Data Visualization, Politics, Open Data, User Experience

Members of national parliaments (MPs) often have ties to interest groups, or 'lobbies', which might try to influence policies. In order to quantify the influence of lobbies on parliamentary decisions, we design an online platform that allows users to explore votes results, focusing on how interest groups members voted, in order to identify which lobbies voted for or against a given measure and in which proportion. We apply this approach to the specific case of the Swiss Federal Parliament. To achieve this, we build a database that combines two sources of openly available data: (1) a register of politicians' interest ties, maintained by Lobbywatch.ch, an association dedicated to the monitoring of Swiss politicians' interest ties and (2) the individual votes results in the Swiss Federal Parliament, accessible through a web-service provided by the parliamentary service of the Swiss government. Our platform allows users to explore the following perspectives of the data: (1) general information about lobbies (e.g. size, domains), (2) individual votes results, with a drill-down by lobby that shows the distribution of votes in each interest group for each specific vote, and (3) overall (dis)agreement of individual MPs with their party and lobbies across all considered votes. We believe that such an exploration platform can be a powerful tool to help quantify the influence of lobbies in politics. Indeed, a qualitative evaluation of the prototype was conducted with 7 domain experts (5 journalists and 2 politicians). They were all able to complete successfully the submitted tasks. They rated its usability and usefulness as rather high (mean respectively 7.4/10 and 6.8/10). Moreover, most of them reported that such a platform has the potential to increase the accountability of politicians towards the people and consequentially to raise the trust of the population in their elected representatives.

Introduction

Interest groups, or 'lobbies', are organized movements whose mission is to protect the interests of a group of people or corporations active in a particular field, generally by influencing public institutions and political representatives. In modern democracies, interest groups play in important role in bringing specific topics onto the public policy agenda and in shaping the opinion of the parliament and general public alike about issues that concerns them. Therefore, it is not surprising to observe a growing number of ties between members of parliaments (MPs) and interest groups [START_REF] Gava | Interests groups in Parliament: Exploring MPs' interest affiliations (2000-2011)[END_REF][START_REF] Haederli | Les parlementaires fédéraux n'ont jamais été autant liés à des lobbys[END_REF]. Due to the raising influence of lobbies on the work of MPs and overall policy-making, several countries have legislated that MPs shall openly disclose their ties to lobbies. In addition to that effort, the media also plays a crucial role in bringing to light hidden interests of politicians that might not be documented in official registers [2].

Overall, the practical influence of lobbies can be witnessed in different stages along the policy-making process. While a lobby effect is certainly present already in early stages (like pre-parliamentary bureaucratic work, consultative procedures, parliamentary work in privately held commissions, etc.), it remains largely opaque and difficult to observe due to the confidential nature of the process in those stages. For long, common wisdom has considered that the greatest share of the influence of lobbies was carried out during those early moments and that, as such, it would stay mostly hidden to the public. However, recent work has shown that the trend towards the professionalization of politics has resulted in an increasing influence of lobbies on the parliamentary work itself, i.e. the work actually done in the parliament through votes and amendments of laws [START_REF] Sciarini | Political Decision-Making in Switzerland -The Consensus Model under Pressure[END_REF]. Now this stage is open to the scrutiny of the general public. Moreover, in many modern democracies, the individual votes of MPs can even be available publicly on web platforms or as open data.

How can the influence of interest groups on political decisions be assessed at the parliamentary level? Given the observations above, we formulate the postulate that the voting behavior of MPs in the parliament during the law-making process can be a valid proxy for the actual influence of lobbies on policy-making. To explore this hypothesis further, we introduce the design of an online platform that allows users to explore MP votes results, focusing on how interest groups members voted, in order to identify which lobbies voted for or against a given measure and in which proportion. We apply this approach to the specific case of the Swiss Federal Parliament. It should be noted that the implementation of our approach was made possible only by progresses in E-Government and Digital Government initiatives in Switzerland that have enabled the publication of votes and MPs' interest ties as open data [1].

The paper is organized as follows. We first present a state of the art of applications that aim at visualizing interest ties in politics, as well as previous research studying the impact of interest ties in policy-making at the parliamentary level. Then we introduce the platform that we developed ("Lobby&Votes") and a qualitative evaluation in the form of semi-directed interviews with 7 participants that we conducted to assess the usability and usefulness of this platform. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our approach and open perspectives for future research.

Several visualizations have been developed in recent years to help in understanding the influence of lobbies on politics. Lobbyradar.org [START_REF]Netzpolitik: Open Lobbyradar[END_REF] is a website that shows the interest ties of German politicians in the form of a network of connected nodes. Colors are used to distinguish different types of nodes. Groups of interests, parties, companies and organizations are represented in green, while members of parliament are in blue and members of the government are in orange. Nodes representing individuals are linked to their interest ties. A search box allows users to find a particular politician or organization and see their connections. Overall, the visualization forms a dense network of connected nodes with details on-demand and serves as a global map of interest ties in German politics. In the same vein, Kdovpliva.si [START_REF] Slovenija | Omrežja lobistov v sloveniji 2011 -2014[END_REF] presents the map of interest ties in Slovenia. The features are mostly the same as Lobbyradar.org, but it also offers additional details and perspectives on the map, in particular a network of contacts between businesses, their lobbyists, politicians and state institutions and a network of transactions between companies in which lobbyists are legal representatives. At the European Union level, [START_REF] Fasresearch | FASresearch NetExplorerJS: EC Meetings[END_REF] has created a social network of lobby organizations members and political representatives of the EU (commissioners, cabinet members and directors-general) that have met regularly in a certain period of time. This visualization allows the identification of ties between policy-makers and lobbyists. It was also published by the European edition of Politico [START_REF] Cerulus | Lobbyists in Brussels -The social network[END_REF]. In the USA, BrightPoint [START_REF]Political Influence[END_REF] has developed a visualization combining a chord diagram with a network that shows the amount of money received by individual US Congress members from the top 20 interest groups in the USA (Political Action Committees or PACs). In their visualization, colors map to political parties and size of the elements is proportional to the amount involved, which helps in identifying the largest interest ties. In Switzerland, the newspaper NZZ has developed a visualization showing all accredited guests to whom MPs have given access rights to Parliament [START_REF] Nicolussi | Das Netz der Zutrittsberechtigten in Bundesbern[END_REF]. In that visualization, individuals are shown as nodes organized in a circular layout in several strata. The links are hidden by default and revealed only when hovering or clicking on a node. Direct and indirect links of MPs and lobbyists with organizations and other MPs or lobbyists are made visible by interacting with the visualization. Martin Grandjean also published a series of static infographics based on networks that explore the interest ties of Swiss MPs through the lens of access rights (accredited guests) [START_REF] Grandjean | Zones d'ombre : Cartographier les réseaux d'influence et groupes d'intérêts au Parlement[END_REF]. A more recent visualization by NZZ shows the aggregate number of mandates that party members in the federal parliaments have in all business branches. The visualization takes the form of a modified chord diagram and shows in which proportion parties are connected to interest groups and vice versa [START_REF] Ruh | Für wen lobbyiert das im Herbst 2015 neu gewählte Parlament? Eine Datenanalyse[END_REF].

Most of the solutions above attempt to provide a view of ties between individual politicians and groups of interest at a broad level using different kinds of proxies: declared interests, mandates in business branches, meetings with lobbyists, access rights, etc. However, none of them connects those ties to the actual policy-making process in order to evaluate their influence on the political deci-sions of individual MPs. This latter aspect was tackled by research in the field of Political Science that we shortly cover next.

Previous work in the field of Political Sciences has explored the dynamic of lobbies and their impact on votes in parliaments. A comprehensive state of the art of previous studies in the field was presented by [START_REF] Gava | Interests groups in Parliament: Exploring MPs' interest affiliations (2000-2011)[END_REF]. In the following, we pick up only the specific research done in Switzerland that is relevant to our work. Pioneering research studying the voting behavior of MPs in relation to their interest ties have shown that MPs having ties with economic lobbies vote in a more cohesive fashion than MPs linked to public lobbies [START_REF] Lüthi | Fraktionsdisziplin und die Vertretung von Partikulärinteressen im Nationalrat[END_REF][START_REF] Schwarz | Switzerland: Agenda-Setting Power of Government in a Separation-of-Powers Framework[END_REF]. More recently, it was found that MPs affiliated with a large number of interest groups had a higher probability of voting against their constituents (i.e. the people who elected them in office in the first place): "the larger the number of sectional groups that support an MP, the higher the probability that the MP defects from her constituents" [START_REF] Giger | Voting Against Your Constituents? How Lobbying Affects Representation[END_REF]. An econometric analysis based on the votes of politicians in the Swiss Parliament was conducted by [START_REF] Puddu | Dangerous Liaisons: Interests groups and politicians' votes. A Swiss perspective[END_REF]. They were interested in comparing loyalty to the political party versus loyalty to the interest groups with which MPs are affiliated. Their study identifies factors that influence the proximity of MPs to their political party typical voting behavior. Socio-demographic factors (gender, age, canton of origin) seem to play a role, but the authors also find evidence for a lobby effect: MPs with ties in banking, energy, insurance and transport tend to more often cast a vote that differs from the majority of their party colleagues. Their research therefore suggests that studying voting behavior of MPs with respect to their lobby affiliations can shed light on the role of lobbies in shaping public policies.

As we have seen, political science research has investigated the influence of lobby membership on votes at an aggregate level, i.e. for groups of politicians and considering all votes in a given time period. However, previous work in the visualization of interest ties did not explore systematically how interest ties impact the policy-making process through their influence on the votes of individual MPs. Our work presented in the next section attempts to fill this gap by relating MPs interest ties with their voting behavior through an online platform supported by data visualization.

'Lobbies & Votes' Platform

The platform developed in the context of this project takes the form of an online website that we called "Lobby & Votes". It allows the exploration of lobbies and votes in the Swiss Parliament along different perspectives and is supported by data visualizations and other navigation features. The platform introduces a novel perspective on the interweaving of interest ties, political parties and voting behavior of MPs. While our implementation does not have the ambition to go beyond the stage of a proof-of-concept realization, we believe its design can be influential and easily replicated in other countries.

Data & Infrastructure

The database we built for the website combines two sources of openly available data: (1) a register of Swiss federal MPs' interest ties, maintained by Lobbywatch.ch, an association dedicated to the monitoring of Swiss politicians' interest ties [2], and (2) the individual votes results in the Swiss Federal Parliament, made available through a web-service provided by the parliamentary service of the Swiss government itself [1] The interest ties database was provided by the Lobbywatch association in an SQL format. Since then, this data was also made available through a JSON interface directly from their website. The Lobbywatch dataset is maintained by volunteer journalists and used as a high-quality source of information by the Swiss media. It has to be noted that this dataset differs from the one used in the research by [START_REF] Puddu | Dangerous Liaisons: Interests groups and politicians' votes. A Swiss perspective[END_REF], released later by the same authors [START_REF] Péclat | Swiss Politicians' Ties: A Comprehensive Dataset[END_REF]. Reasons for this choice are twofold. First, the Lobbywatch dataset is published as open data and readily available through a JSON interface. Second, the dataset by [START_REF] Péclat | Swiss Politicians' Ties: A Comprehensive Dataset[END_REF] only covers the politicians active in the 49th legislature and not the current one. The Lobbywatch dataset contains all 200 MPs from the vote dataset and a total of 137 different interest groups (e.g. Pharma, Patients, Pro-Nuclear, Pro-Environment, see also Table 1) that are distributed in 14 general domains or "branches" (e.g. Health, Energy). A total of 5040 interest ties connecting politicians with interest groups are documented in the database.

We downloaded the vote data directly from the web-service of the Swiss Parliament in a JSON format. The vote data covers the first 14 months of the current (50th) legislature, from November 31, 2015 to March 7, 2017 in the National Council. The National Council is the lower house of the bicameral The two datasets presented above were converted and merged into an SQL database. The server-side application was created in node.js and visualization templates have been implemented using the declarative languages Vega and Vega-Lite [START_REF] Satyanarayan | Reactive Vega: A Streaming Dataflow Architecture for Declarative Interactive Visualization[END_REF].

Platform Design

The prototype platform that we propose allows users to explore the following perspectives of the data: (1) general information about lobbies (e.g. size, domains), (2) individual votes results, with a drill-down by lobby that shows the distribution of votes in each interest group for each specific vote, and (3) overall (dis)agreement of individual MPs with their party and lobbies across all considered votes. In the remainder of this section, we discuss these three perspectives.

General information about lobbies

The 'Lobbies' page depicted in Figure 1a shows a visualization of all lobbies in a circle-packing layout. Each colored circle is a specific interest group. Interest groups of a specific branch are grouped in a white circle and share the same color. The size of a circle maps to the number of members in the corresponding lobby. Users can interact with the visualization to see details of specific interest groups (name, members, size) by hovering over circles or clicking on them. Underneath the visualization, a table shows the detailed membership list of all lobbies. Users can sort it by columns or search for a specific name. The menu bar on top gives quick links to the other pages of the website. An information text explaining the meaning of the visualization is also given, though it is not visible on that screenshot. The page 'Branches' contains the same visualization, but aggregated by branch / domain.

This overview visualization allows user to understand some general trends, such as the respective size of lobbies and branches, the amount of interest groups in a given branch and the size of each interest group. Details are available ondemand.

Individual vote results

The pages 'Lobbies & Votes' and 'Branches & Votes' detail the result of each parliamentary vote and puts them into perspective with the interest ties of voters. In the page 'Lobbies and Votes', the full list of votes is initially presented in a searchable, sortable and filterable table. Upon selection of a specific vote, the individual vote results are shown. Figure 1b depicts the page after a vote has been selected. Under the vote title and general information, the overall vote result is displayed as a bar chart with 'Yes' votes in green, 'No' votes in red and 'Other' votes in white (both blank votes and abstentions are counted as 'Other' votes) with the title 'Moyenne générale sur tous les lobbies' -'Average over all lobbies'. Underneath that overall result, a drill-down by lobby is presented. For each lobby, we aggregated the votes of the lobby members, computed the proportion of Yes-No-Other votes in that lobby, and created a bar chart using the same visual encoding as the overall result. Therefore, the detailed vote result for each lobby can be viewed in a glimpse. We have chosen to visually distribute the drilled-down lobby results in two columns underneath the overall result. Lobbies that voted mainly 'Yes' are shown in the left column, and lobbies that voted mainly 'No' are shown in the right column. They are sorted in decreasing order of the proportion of 'Yes' or 'No' votes, depending on the column. Finally, the display of results can be limited to only one lobby by selecting it in the interface. Also, the individual results of the vote showing how each MP voted is displayed in a table underneath the dashboard. This allows users to quickly spot the decision of specific lobby members for a given vote.

Overall (dis)agreement of individual MPs with their party and lobbies

The last perspective explored in our platform is the overall agreement level of individual MPs with their party and lobbies across all considered votes. Political parties are known to take position on certain topics and give voting instructions to their representatives in the parliament. These instructions will be followed with more or less discipline by individual MPs across the political spectrum. Interest groups are suspected to exhibit a similar behavior, though it remains largely hidden. In order to explore it, we computed the agreement of MPs with their interest groups and parties, taking inspiration from the work of [START_REF] Puddu | Dangerous Liaisons: Interests groups and politicians' votes. A Swiss perspective[END_REF].

We first computed the agreement between each MP and their respective lobbies by counting the proportion of votes in which that MP casted the same vote as the majority of members of the same lobby. This gives the proportion of votes in which the MP "agreed" or "disagreed" with that lobby. Then, to compute the overall agreement between each individual MP and all interest groups they belong to, we summed individual measures computed in the previous step across all relevant interest groups. A further aggregation step allows us to compute the overall agreement of all MPs with all the lobbies they belong to. Additionally, we computed the same measures for the political parties instead of the lobbies.

The results of those metrics are displayed on two pages of the platform. The first one shows the (dis)agreement of MPs with their party and the second one the (dis)agreement with their lobbies. This latter axis is certainly the most interesting and the most decisive in the analysis of the influence of lobbies in Swiss Federal politics. The visualization dashboards presented in those pages helps in assessing whether a MP is more influenced by her party or lobbies, and which lobbies in particular.

Figure 2 shows the visualization dashboards that depict the (dis)agreement of MPs with their respective lobbies. Turquoise bars represent the proportion of votes in agreement with the majority of the lobbies. Orange bars represent proportion of votes in disagreement. As in other pages, a detailed table is provided below those aggregated statistics, which allow users to search for specific votes. A drill-down by MP to explore the loyalty of their votes with regards to their respective lobbies is shown in Figure 3. As explained above, although not depicted here, similar visualizations are provided for the political parties as well, therefore allowing users to inspect in detail the influence of both political party and interest group affiliations on the votes of individual MPs.

Evaluation and Potential Impact

We evaluated the platform qualitatively with 7 persons (2 female, 5 male). As we envisioned that this platform would particularly appeal to journalists but also to politicians themselves and the general public, we contacted 2 editors-inchief of Swiss newspapers, 3 journalists specializing in Swiss politics, 1 member of the Federal Parliament and 1 person from the general public. We met them individually. The evaluation was conducted in the form of a small controlled use of the platform followed by semi-directed interviews. We first introduced the context of the project and we let them familiarize with the platform for 10 minutes. Then we asked them to perform three lookup tasks: (1) find a lobby in which there is only one member and name that member; (2) in the vote on the repeal of the anti-racism law, find the proportion of yes and no in the Anti-EU lobby; (3) find a vote for which Bastien Girod disagrees with the majority of his party. Next, we asked them to rate on a 10-point Likert scale their perception of the usability and usefulness the platform. Finally, we conducted a semi-directed interview about the potential impact of the platform by prompting them with the following questions: (1) Does the publication of this information make the Parliament more transparent? Why?; (2) Does such a platform increase the accountability of the elected representatives towards the people. Why?; (3) Does such a platform improve citizens' trust in their elected representatives? Why? Following a semi-directed approach, we encouraged people to elaborate their points of view and asked follow-up questions. Interviews were recorded.

All the participants succeeded in the 3 lookup tasks. They rated the usability of the platform as good (mean=7.4/10) and the perceived usefulness as rather good (mean=6.8/10). One editor-in-chief rated 4/10 the usefulness of the platform, arguing that the information it contains is too complex for the general public to understand and explore effectively and is only useful to specialists. Without his mark, the mean interest would have been 7.3/10. The analysis of the data collected during the semi-directed interviews sheds light on the potential impact of the platform. According to all participants, this platform can make the parliament more transparent, because "it shows whether MPs defend the interest of their party or lobbies and everybody can see it". However, the politician we interviewed noted that lobby affiliation was not sufficiently detailed on the platform (i.e. he did not understand why he was affiliated to one specific lobby) and that this information should be more complete for a better transparency. A journalist noted that official registers are incomplete anyway and that this platform bridges the gap. Four participants think that the platform can increase the accountability of MPs because "it facilitates the explanation of voting behavior of representatives" and "because MPs will feel more surveilled", but only "if there is a good media coverage of it". Three participants think that it will not increase their accountability because "the information is already public" though not aggregated, or because the majority of "citizens are interested in personal values defended by politicians" rather than their behavior when elected, and finally because "some information is missing" like "the coherence of votes on a specific topic", which would facilitate the analysis of the results. Five people think that this platform will impact citizens' trust in their elected representatives, but not necessarily or immediately improve it: "they will understand who votes what and who is influenced by whom"; "anybody can understand who they really defend". Two political journalists think that such a platform will rather not impact the trust of citizen as "people trust speeches more than acts" and "the interest ties are already known".

Participants also provided useful comments and recommendations for the evolution of the platform. Overall, the pages displaying the proportion of votes in (dis)agreement with the majority of parties or lobbies were the most praised by our participants. They advised us to also take into account the canton represented by each MP as this can also have a strong influence on votes (i.e. MPs defending their regions and voters' interests). A link to the institutional Parliament's website which shows the vote result as a dashboard would also ease exploring the details of a particular vote. They also commented on the inter-action and wished that charts were interactive, pictures of MPs were provided, or that the readability were better in some parts of the platform (text size too small and wording sometimes unclear).

Limitations and Perspectives

Our approach has limitations in several aspects. First, the influence of lobbies during pre-parliamentary work, consultative procedures and privately-held parliamentary commission remains opaque to an analysis of parliamentary votes such as ours. One might argue that the vote is a too late stage in the parliamentary process and that the negotiation has been done before parliamentary work, therefore effectively hiding the influence of lobbies. However, previous research has shown that parliamentary work has actually strengthened in Switzerland in recent years. In particular, the number of amendments to government proposals issued by the Swiss parliament has been on the rise [START_REF] Gava | Interests groups in Parliament: Exploring MPs' interest affiliations (2000-2011)[END_REF]. This suggests that lobbies might still be very active during that phase of the law-making process and that the vote might be a valid proxy for the influence of lobbies on that process.

Moreover, in our approach, all lobbies are represented in votes results. Therefore, even if an interest group does not have any preference in the matter of a given vote, it will nonetheless appear in the results page, which creates unnecessary noise in the presentation of the results. On a more general note, with the high number of votes and the lack of a proper classification of vote issues and relevance to lobbies, it can be difficult to identify the role of a specific lobby in influencing a vote. Furthermore, the visualization of lobbies votes does not take into account the size of the lobbies and only represents the relative proportion of voters. A lobby with 3 members will appear as equally important as a larger 80-persons lobby. Finally, another limitation of our platform is that the votes of the second House of the Swiss Parliament (the Council of States) is not available as open data. The voting behavior of important MP in that House can therefore not be explored.

The platform could be improved in several ways, some of which were suggested by our study participants and stated in the previous section. Also, an analysis of the composition of lobbies (e.g. measuring the diversity of cantons and political parties represented in the lobby) and its impact on cohesiveness of lobby votes would help shed light on interest groups practices.

Perspectives for further research are manifolds. For example, it could be relevant to identify trends that go beyond a vote per vote analysis, e.g. which lobbies have the most influence in general, even more influence than political parties, on which topics. Developing metrics to measure it, as done by [START_REF] Puddu | Dangerous Liaisons: Interests groups and politicians' votes. A Swiss perspective[END_REF], could be a step in that direction. Although, doing this requires a more detailed vote dataset, informed of the topics of votes in such a way that it can be automatically connected to the interest of lobbies. One could try to identify automatically this connection and track evidence of vote instructions by specific lobbies, e.g. exhibited by a cohesive vote behavior of the MPs affiliated with them. Another approach would be to manually label the votes topics and connect them to lobbies (i.e. identify which vote decision is in the interest of which lobby). This could be done using crowd-sourced approaches based on services designed with a gamification approach [START_REF] Dargan | Designing engaging e-government services by combining user-centered design and gamification: a use-case[END_REF].

Conclusion

Interest groups, or 'lobbies' are thought to play a key role in shaping public policies in modern democracies. However, identifying their actual influence in legislative work remains difficult. We proposed an approach that combines votes of the members of parliament and their affiliation with interest groups as a way to systematically explore the influence of lobbies in the law-making process and the loyalty of lobby members. We introduced a prototype platform that enables this exploration and applied it to the use case of 14 months of legislative work in the Swiss Federal Parliament. The initial reception of the platform prototype among a group of 7 people including a politician, journalists and members of the general public was good. We believe our platform introduces a novel perspective on the interweaving of interest ties, political parties and voting behavior of MPs. Furthermore, we think that our general approach and the design of our platform can inspire similar realizations in other countries, which could bring more transparency and accountability in politics.

  Fig. 1. (a) 'Lobbies' page presenting a visualization of all lobbies depicted as circles. Their color and position relate to the lobby branch (e.g. lobbies in Finance or Energy, etc.) and their size corresponds to the number of members in the lobby. A detailed list of lobby members is available as a sortable and searchable table underneath the visualization. (b) Detailed vote results drilled-down by lobbies. The affair title 'Accord de Paris sur le climat' is displayed along with meaning of 'Yes' and 'No' votes. The first chart on top shows the overall vote results. Green means 'Yes', red means 'No', white is 'Other vote'. Below the first chart, the left column contains detailed results for the 'Lobbies who voted Yes' ('Lobbies du oui') while the right column shows the 'Lobbies who voted No' ('Lobbies du non') sorted by decreasing score.

Fig. 2 .Fig. 3 .

 23 Fig. 2. (Dis)agreement of MPs with their respective lobbies. Turquoise bars represent the proportion of votes in agreement with the majority of the lobbies. Orange bars represent proportion of votes in disagreement. (a) The first chart on top shows the overall rate of (dis)agreement over all MPs and all lobbies. Below it, each chart represents the detailed (dis)agreement rate of each individual MP with their lobbies, sorted in decreasing order of agreement. (b) Detailed (dis)agreement continued: a view at the MPs that disagree the most with their lobbies. Christa Markwalder, who disagrees the most with her lobbies, was the president of the Parliament during the period and therefore abstained from most votes, which explains her score.

Table 1 .

 1 Some interest groups of Swiss Parliament members, French and English (excerpt).

	Lobby name (French)	Lobby name (English)
	Pharmaceutique	Pharmaceutical
	Caisses maladie	Health insurance
	Médecine	Medicine
	Hôpitaux	Hospitals
	Patients	Patients
	Santé publique	Public health
	Techniques médicales	Medical techniques
	Musique	Music
	Cantons/Régions	Cantons / Regions
	Villes	Cities
	Handicap	Handicap
	Banques	Banks
	Commerce de matières premières Trade in raw materials
	Immobilier et propriétaires fonciers Real estate and landowners
	Economie en général	Economy in general
	Immigration	Immigration

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by HES-SO Valais-Wallis. An extensive discussion of the technical aspects as well as detailed results are available (in French) in [5]. The platform can be accessed online at the following URL: http://www.evequoz.name/lobbyandvotes/


Gregorio Robles
email: gregorio.robles@his.se

Jonas Gamalielsson
email: jonas.gamalielsson@his.se

Björn Lundell
email: bjorn.lundell@his.se

Setting up Government 3.0 solutions based on Open Source Software: The Case of X-Road

Keywords: eGovernment, Government 3.0, Open Source Software, Platform, Interoperability, Community

Government 3.0, which builds on openness and transparency, sharing, increased communication and collaboration, government reorganization through integration and interoperability, and use of new technologies, is an emerging concept in eGovernance. However, few systems that qualify as Government 3.0 have been described in detail so far. And there is a lack of research on how governments can put in place such systems. This study investigates and characterizes an innovative eGovernment project, based on Open Source Software (OSS), that could be considered as an example of a Government 3.0 project. Therefore, we report from a case study of X-Road, an originally Estonian eGovernment project for creating a data sharing infrastructure, which today is also used in other countries. We present the main characteristics of X-Road from the point of view of Government 3.0, how the X-Road project is organized, compare its organization to other OSS projects, identify who contributes to the project, and point out what challenges are perceived by their stakeholders. We conclude offering some reflections on how X-Road and other Government 3.0 projects can benefit from OSS.

1 Introduction Government 3.0 has been proposed recently as a concept to describe the next generation of services and solutions offered by governments [START_REF] Nam | Government 3.0 in korea: fad or fashion?[END_REF]. Although there is no widely agreed definition of what Government 3.0 means and supposes, there is agreement that it is based on openness and transparency, sharing, increased communication and collaboration, government reorganization through integration and interoperability, and use of new technologies [START_REF] Nielsen | Governance failure in light of Government 3.0: Foundations for building next generation eGovernment maturity models[END_REF].

Although there are few examples of what could be considered a Government 3.0 solution, there is some previous research that has already offered and discussed one, the Finnish Suomi.fi platform [START_REF] Yli-Huumo | Suomi.fi -Towards Government 3.0 with a national service platform[END_REF]. In this paper, we report on an investigation of how Governments can set up Government 3.0 solutions through the analysis of the X-Road project. X-Road comprises a data exchange layer solution which empowers different organizations to exchange data and information over the Internet and ensures confidentiality, integrity and interoperability between data exchange parties. X-Road is a central part of the Estonian eGovernment services and has been so for more than 15 years [START_REF] Kalja | The X-Road project. A project to modernize Estonia's national databases[END_REF][START_REF] Kalvet | The Estonian information society developments since the 1990s[END_REF]. It offers the main infrastructure for the Estonian e-Residency [START_REF] Kotka | Estonian e-residency: Redefining the nation-state in the digital era[END_REF] and is being used, among others, in health-care [START_REF] Tiik | Patient opportunities in the Estonian electronic health record system[END_REF] and e-voting [START_REF] Tsahkna | E-voting: lessons from Estonia[END_REF]. The Finnish Suomi.fi initiative mentioned above is also backed by X-Road [START_REF] Yli-Huumo | Suomi.fi -Towards Government 3.0 with a national service platform[END_REF].

An important characteristic of X-Road is that it has been conceived to be widely adopted, mainly by other states. So, together with the Finnish government, Estonians merged efforts in the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) to foster X-road and related technologies. X-Road is provided as Open Source Software (OSS) 3 , first under the European Union Public License and more recently under the MIT open source license 4 . While the involvement of governments in OSS is not new, X-Road can be considered as a new scenario, given that the requirements for Government 3.0 solutions require a different approach by Governments. For these reasons, we find that X-Road constitutes an interesting, and somewhat unique, initiative which motivates investigations and detailed scrutiny.

In particular, the overarching research goal pursued in this study is to characterize how a Government 3.0 solution can be (and is being) implemented through the deployment of the X-Road OSS project.

The study investigates four specific research questions (RQs):

-RQ1: What are the main characteristics of X-Road? -RQ2: How is the organizational structure of X-Road and how does it differ from other OSS projects? -RQ3: Who are the contributors to X-Road and what are their roles? -RQ4: What challenges do different stakeholders of the X-Road project perceive?

The structure of this paper is as follows: In Section 2 we offer related research. Next, in Section 3, we present the research approach used in this study. Section 4 reports on the results of answering the four research questions. Finally, Section 5 discusses our results and contributions, and concludes the paper.

Related research

Governments have led many initiatives regarding OSS in the past. Among these, we can point out the creation of infrastructure to enable sharing among different public institutions [START_REF] Hollmann | Examining success factors of open source software repositories: the case of OSOR.eu portal[END_REF] or a wide legislative effort to adopt and sometimes embrace OSS [START_REF] Maldonado | The process of introducing FLOSS in the public administration: the case of Venezuela[END_REF]. Governments have had interest in the adoption and use of OSS solutions [START_REF] Rossi | A study on the introduction of Open Source Software in the Public Administration[END_REF][START_REF] Van Loon | Adopting open source software in public administration: The importance of boundary spanners and political commitment[END_REF]. Notably, there are many papers on the advantages of adopting OSS in governments [START_REF] Kovács | Open source software for the public administration[END_REF][START_REF] Huysmans | Reasons for the non-adoption of OpenOffice.org in a data-intensive public administration[END_REF] and how OSS technologies can be used to restructure the Public Sector [START_REF] Hautamäki | Digital platforms for restructuring the public sector[END_REF] and develop new eGovernment services [START_REF] Kalja | eGovernment services: How to develop them, how to manage them?[END_REF]. Other actions related to OSS by governments are OSOR.eu (an OSS sharing system for e-government solutions in the EU [START_REF] Hollmann | OSOR.eu: an open source sharing system for e-Government solutions in the EU[END_REF]) or the many OSS observatories [START_REF] Davini | Open Source Software in Public Administration. A real example OSS for e-Government observatories[END_REF]. The use of OSS in the public sector is not without its challenges. ICT procurement still is a burden to the use of OSS and open standards [START_REF] Lundell | e-Governance in public sector ICT procurement: what is shaping practice in Sweden?[END_REF], and not infrequently the adoption of OSS in the public sector comes after difficult negotiations and the fulfillment of special conditions [START_REF] Shaikh | Negotiating open source software adoption in the UK public sector[END_REF].

The nature of OSS projects contributes to the formation of communities around them. Several scholars have studied their social structure. One of the models that has been widely used for describing the roles of OSS participants is the so called "onion" model [START_REF] Crowston | The social structure of open source software development teams[END_REF]: the most contributing developers are in the center of the project (the "core" developers), surrounded by a new layer of occasional contributors. In an outer layer, we can find the end users. The further away from the center, the less contributions and influence a person has in the project. For large OSS projects, the outer layers outnumber in orders of magnitude the inner ones. Projects are then considered to have a surrounding community of users and developers, which has many positive effects on the project [START_REF] Robles | A comprehensive study of software forks: Dates, reasons and outcomes[END_REF].

X-Road has been a matter of study, or at least referenced, in several works in the research literature. The functional structure and economic advantages of the X-Road project were early emphasized in an effort to modernize the national databases of Estonia [START_REF] Kalja | The X-Road project. A project to modernize Estonia's national databases[END_REF]. Paide et al. recently studied the systematic exploitation of the X-Road for strengthening Public-Private partnership, and specifically, in light of the limited private sector interest in X-Road so far, how to "make a platform more acceptable for both public as well as private entities" [START_REF] Paide | On the systematic exploitation of the Estonian data exchange layer X-Road for strengthening public-private partnerships[END_REF]. X-Road fosters interoperability. The importance of interoperability in a eGovernment context has been highlighted since many years ago [START_REF] Guijarro | Interoperability frameworks and enterprise architectures in egovernment initiatives in europe and the united states[END_REF], showing it to be a crucial aspect of the services that many governments want to offer [START_REF] Mondorf | Requirements for an architecture framework for paneuropean e-government services[END_REF][START_REF] Klievink | Interconnecting governments, businesses and citizens-a comparison of two digital infrastructures[END_REF]. A recent report by Inera with a focus on national interoperability has analysed how existing solutions in Sweden relate to X-Road and elaborates on challenges and issues that need to be addressed prior to adoption of a national IT solution for data exchange in Sweden [START_REF] Inera | En kunskaps PM om nationell interoperabilitet Hur befintliga lsningar i Sverige idag frhller sig till X-Road[END_REF].

Research Approach

To pursue our research goal and address the RQs, we report from a case study on the X-Road project. Benbasat et al. consider that "[a] case study examines a phenomenon in its natural setting, employing multiple data collection methods to gather information from a few entities. The boundaries of the phenomenon are not clearly evident at the outset of the research and no experimental control or manipulation is used" [START_REF] Benbasat | The case research strategy in studies of information systems[END_REF]. Therefore, a mixed-methods approach has been used in this research [START_REF] Creswell | Advanced mixed methods research designs. Handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioral[END_REF], combining qualitative and quantitative data sources to offer a more complete perspective of the project, based on the analysis of publicly available sources and by means of interviewing relevant stakeholders of the X-Road project.

Analysis of publicly available sources

Two different types of publicly available sources were analyzed.

-Public documents: We collected secondary data from the NIIS web news articles and blog posts that were written about X-Road. The number of collected secondary data was more than 100 items. -Publicly available Open Source project and related artifacts: X-Road's source code can be obtained from an open collaborative platform5 since mid-2015.

We have analyzed the version control system where the history of the sources are stored with the help of a tool called Perceval [START_REF] Dueñas | Perceval: Software project data at your will[END_REF], in order to obtain the individuals who have contributed code to the project.

Interviews

In order to gain first-hand insight from the project participants on the project, we performed a number of interviews. We decided to perform open interviews based on a set of questions prepared in advance, which were supplemented with additional questions as the interview progressed. According to Walsham, "[i]nterviews should be supplemented by other forms of field data in an interpretive study, and these may include press, media and other publications on the sectoral context of the organizations being studied. Internal documents, if made available, may include strategies, plans and evaluations. Direct observation or participant observation of action is a further data source." [START_REF] Walsham | Doing interpretive research[END_REF] The goals of the interviews are i) to validate our previous observations gathered from documents, web pages and videos, and ii) to obtain additional, relevant information on X-Road and its organization in order to supplement already collected data, to thereby further enrich the analysis.

Therefore, we designed questions that helped to achieve these goals. In particular, the questions were related to the following areas: i) participant's role, aim and experience, ii) aims of the project, iii) roles in the project, iv) organizational structure of the project, and v) perceived challenges of the project.

Given the nature of the interviews, not all questions that where prepared in advance were asked, as the natural flow of the conversation resulted in the interviewee addressing at once more than one question. Also, related to some questions, follow-up questions were asked in order to probe further as the interview session progressed.

We have performed purposeful sampling when inviting interviewees, based on the results of RQ2 and RQ3. So, we first classify the different groups of stakeholders in X-Road (RQ2: How is X-Road organized?), and then we identify for each of the groups interview candidates (RQ3: Who are the contributors to X-Road?). As a result, we have interviewed one stakeholder working at NIIS, another one being contractor of NIIS, and 4 among the rest of stakeholders (three former software engineers affiliated to companies offering services based on X-Read, and one end user). The rationale for this selection will become clear when we present the results of RQ2 and RQ3, and is related to the fact that the source of the 'official' information on web and documents is NIIS (and its contractors), so the amount of new information and the additional insight we gain from interviewing them is lower than for the rest of the stakeholders.

The interviews were performed over confcall (Skype or Google Hangout). Interviews were recorded and transcribed in order to aid analysis.

Results

The results to the RQs are presented in the following four subsections.

Characterizing X-Road

Figure 1 presents an overview of the X-Road data exchange framework and its purpose. Instead of building a centralized, very big database with all data (a very complex, risky and costly alternative), Estonians chose for creating a framework to support and facilitate data exchange between databases over the Internet. X-Road serves as a data exchange bus between many databases that implements a set of common features to support and facilitate data exchange. All data exchange is secure, as all outgoing data from X-Road is digitally signed and encrypted, and all incoming data is authenticated and logged. The transversal nature of X-Road makes it possible to not only offer services from Governments, but invites as well participants from the private sector [START_REF] Paide | On the systematic exploitation of the Estonian data exchange layer X-Road for strengthening public-private partnerships[END_REF].

The purpose of NIIS is to be "both a network and cooperation platform, and executioner of IT developments in members common interests. This is probably the first time in the world when a joint special purpose organization of two countries develops a OSS using agile software development methods." NIIS does not offer consultation services nor support for deploying independent X-Road instances. The X-Road website lists at this time five companies (three Finnish and two Estonian) who can be contacted on these matters.

As a result, we have observed that X-Road aims mainly to be an interoperability solution, that goes beyond just the public sector, and involves as well the private sector. To increase the adoption of such a solution, the X-Road project is released under a OSS license, so that use and reuse can be maximized. This way, the project addresses the problem of deployments being different in every country. This is because countries usually have a different usage context, as data and regulations are different from country to country.

Organizational structure of X-Road

X-Road is a growing community 6 . It has been reported that X-Road in Estonia currently has 671 institutions and enterprises, 516 public sector institutions, 52,000 organizations are indirect users of X-Road services, 1620 interfaced information systems, 2706 services that can be used via X-Road, and 372 security servers installed by members7 . X-Road is also implemented in Azerbaijan, Namibia and Faroe Islands8 .

The Department of State Information Systems of the Ministry of Transport and Communications in Estonia was initially governing the development of X-Road (known as "X-tee" in the Estonian context). A new governance regime was initiated in 2017 when the Estonian and Finnish governments established the Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions (NIIS) in a joint effort for further development of the X-Road project. The purpose of NIIS is to be "both a network and cooperation platform, and executioner of IT developments in members common interests"9 . This may be the first time in history that a joint special purpose organization involving two countries governs an OSS project. Iceland became a partner of NIIS in September 2018.

Concerning NIIS, its highest body is "the General Meeting of its Members. The Members of NIIS are the Ministry of Finance on behalf of the Republic of Finland and the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communication on behalf of the Republic of Estonia." and it "is managed and represented by the Management Board" 10 . The Management Board is elected for three years and may have one to three members. The members of NIIS have agreed that the Management Board shall comprise a single member who shall act as the Chief Executive Officer of the Institute. The CEO is in charge of the day-to-day management of the Institute. Further, NIIS has an advisory group which "is formed for the purpose of supporting the Chief Executive Officer and relaying information and instruction between the operative level and the General Meeting. For clarity, the Advisory Group is not a formal organ of the Institute and has no decision-making power on its own".

The technical requirements in X-Road stem from the NIIS members (currently Finland and Estonia), as NIIS is based on them. The technological decisions are taken by NIIS, as well. When it comes to strategic decisions, the CTO is the one responsible for them, although they are discussed internally at NIIS (and consulted with the Finish and Estonian governments).

All in all, from our analysis of the X-Road project we conceptualize three layers in the organization of X-Road. In the center, being in charge of the strategic decisions and of the funding of the project, we have NIIS with its member states. A second layer is formed by contractors, who develop the system and/or deploy it in the different contexts. Contractors depend financially from NIIS, although they can offer services to the private sector as well. Finally, a third layer is composed by users and external developers, usually affiliated to companies who offer services around X-Road, some of these being former contractors.

A first difference to other forms of organization found in OSS projects is that their members are usually individuals or organizations/companies -in the case of X-Road, only countries can be members, although partnership is offered to private companies. Iceland is partner at the moment, although NIIS hopes that it will become a member in the near future. The aim in the near future is to find new countries to join NIIS and participate.

A second difference lies in the fact that in OSS projects, a central group of developers (known as the core) is the one responsible for a large majority of the actions -in the case of contributions to the code, the share of the core group usually ranges from 80 to 90% [START_REF] Robles | Evolution of the core team of developers in libre software projects[END_REF]. In X-Road, the central role is played by NIIS. But its contribution to the code is very limited, as this is mainly done by contractors.

A third difference is who takes the decisions. In X-Road, although there is no strict control in place of the development as stated by one of the contractors, the final decision -be it technical or not-is taken by NIIS. In comparison, in other OSS projects these type of decisions are taken by the developers (e.g., in GNOME [START_REF] German | The evolution of the GNOME Project[END_REF]) or by low-level committees (e.g., Apache [START_REF] Fielding | Shared leadership in the Apache project[END_REF]). One of the external consultants interviewed, deepened in this situation. He stated that his company had launched a proprietary product that reimplemented X-Road from scratch, based on their experience of designing and implementing X-Road for years. This could be seen as a fork, an independent branch of the software that evolves independently (i.e., the developer teams and those who take decisions differ) [START_REF] Robles | A comprehensive study of software forks: Dates, reasons and outcomes[END_REF].

Forks are intrinsic to the OSS licensing model, so they are not illegal. However, they are seen usually negatively as they duplicate efforts and often produce unnecessary tensions. In the opinion of this interviewee, their fork -even if it has a proprietary license-is more open to participation and is making progress in building a community than the X-Road project.

All in all, we see that X-Road deviates from the classical onion model found in OSS projects. The economic, decisional and strategic power resides in the center (NIIS and its members), but in comparison to what we find in OSS projects, it is not the main driver of (development) activity of the project. The development activity is mainly performed by an outer layer, contractors who financially depend on NIIS. Other stakeholders (including users) are in the outer layers, and have few control and decision power, even concerning minor decisions.

X-Road Contributors and their Roles

X-Road and associated components are hosted on an open collaborative platform 11 to allow for world wide contributions from individuals and organizations. In total, 32 individuals have contributed to X-Road core from 2014 (based on analysis of author identifiers) until December 2018 (whereof 26 authors have made more than a single contribution). The five most active contributing individuals are Ilkka Seppl (Gofore Oy, 305 contributions), Jarkko Hyty (Gofore Oy, 230 contributions), Toomas Mölder (Republic of Estonia Information System Authority, 108 contributions), Joni Laurila (Gofore Oy, 107 contributions), and Tatu Repo (Gofore Oy, 96 contributions). There are 11 different organizational affiliations for committers (based on assessment of author email domains). The five most active contributing organizations are Gofore Oy (923 contributions), Cybernetica (133 contributions), Republic of Estonia Information System Authority (122 contributions), NIIS (56 contributions), and Qautomate Oy (42 contributions).

We asked interviewees the different roles that exist in the X-Road community. This does not only allow to compare their point of view with the roles that we had identified previously, but we also hypothesized that it could offer insight into how they perceive the community. To our surprise, we obtained a variety of responses. Interestingly enough, the organization who leads X-Road and the end-user offered a simpler model of the community, with less roles. So, according to NIIS, there are three different types of roles:

1. NIIS members: currently Estonia and Finland (with operator organizations responsible of running X-Road at the national level) 2. NIIS partners: currently Iceland and other organizations exchanging data (public bodies, private companies) 3. Citizens: those using servers, anyone can be member of that community (informally)

For end users, the picture is similar, although the differentiation is between public bodies, the private sector and citizens. This is understandable as end-users are not that much aware of the organization and participation in the community, and simplify these matters. For them, the prominent aspects are that the technology works, that it is free and gratis (not necessarily in that order).

It is other developers and external consultants who offer a much diverse community, much more in line with the identification of roles that we had performed. They see X-Road as a project with more actors, a sign that they see more opportunities in the X-Road project.

Challenges

Several challenges have been identified from the analysis of the interview responses.

We find that the current onboarding process is complex based on the analysis of the responses. New developers who want to contribute have to face a steady learning curve. In addition, very few vendors have experience and knowledge on X-Road and its technologies.

According to NIIS, the private sector is involved, primarily in Estonia. Several companies provide services (development, support, deployment, consulting, maintenance). However, no source code contribution so far has been received from the private sector. External developers and consultants have pointed out other initiatives where companies have used X-Road in their business strategy in many countries, far beyond Estonia and Finland.

Even if there is interest in many countries, the pace at which Governments move forward is slower than other organizations. The interviewees note that there is a lot of political wheel, and that a lot of explanations and consultations are to be expected for any new member to join.

From the point of view of strategic challenges, the nature of NIIS makes the project heavily dependent on its member countries. It has to be said that at the moment, all interviewees see a strong political support and do not expect this to be affected by a change in government in the near future. All respondents perceive that the support is so strong that this is independent of the political party that will be in the government.

Discussion and Conclusions

X-Road is an important project to investigate, not only because of its technological innovation, but as well because of its organizational structure. The fact that the members of the project are countries is novel in OSS. This also influences the type of organization that drives the project, how the strategy is considered and decisions are taken.

From the public documents and information that we have analyzed, and based on our analysis of observations, experiences and insights we have obtained from the interviewees, we have reflected on the goals that the X-Road project pursues. Thus, we have identified following goals: (i) to set up an interoperability solution, ready for being used by the public and private sector (the X-Road framework), (ii) to offer an OSS software that implements the aforementioned solution (the X-Road project), and (iii) to create a community of stakeholders, from the public and private sector, but as well final users/citizens.

In comparison to other OSS organizations, we find that X-Road has a more rigid structure. In addition, although other organizations try to have a structure that is more flat, in X-Road we note that strategy and decisions are mostly topdown. This makes sense and is aligned with the (political) priorities, and can be seen by the project structure. However, it has as well its potential drawbacks, as the creation of a community is not promoted in such a way as other OSS projects do, including those that are driven by a single company or a consortium of companies [START_REF] Gonzalez-Barahona | Understanding how companies interact with free software communities[END_REF]. We acknowledge that NIIS has taken various initiatives for online training in order to promote the broader X-Road community.

We have found that different experiences and views emerged from the interviews. So, while for NIIS, the organization in charge of its development and promotion, see X-Road as a project, the companies that are active in the project (as a subcontractor of NIIS or as external consultants) see X-Road as a more complex structure, with elements that make X-Road be conceived as a software ecosystem [START_REF] Messerschmitt | Software ecosystem: understanding an indispensable technology and industry[END_REF] (i.e., initiatives around X-Road beyond the official one exist). Further research should address the fact that Governments may want to create not only technology infrastructure, but how to offer opportunities for the private sector to embrace the effort. In this sense, we see forking as a less sensitive issue, if interoperability and a healthy ecosystem (probably with all software being OSS) is maintained.

It is noteworthy to see that one of these initiatives has resulted in a derivative project -with the intention to become a fork. The permissive license of X-Road allows for further creation of proprietary solutions from vendors. It is our understanding that the current organizational structure of the project would have benefited from a copyleft license, as this would imply that third party vendors (basically companies) have to distribute their enhancements under the same license. In this regard, based on the analysis and prior experience from implementation of specifications for data exchange in other domains [START_REF] Lundell | Open source software as open innovation: experiences from the medical domain[END_REF], we conjecture that the LGPL license would have been a feasible alternative [START_REF] Colazo | Impact of license choice on open source software development activity[END_REF], and we consider that appropriate license choice for X-Road needs further investigations.

In this study we have conducted a single case study, with its particularities and peculiarities. Rich insights and experiences from those involved with X-Road and NIIS provide valuable findings which can be transferred to other similar contexts. However, we cannot claim that our results can be generalized to all contexts.

In conclusion, we have investigated the X-Road project, an OSS project that is led by an organization created by two countries. The nature of X-Road is of interest because of its organizational structure. By means of six interviews to several stakeholders holding different roles in X-Road we have gained some insight into the nature of the project.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. X-Road data exchange framework (Adapted-Original: World Bankbit.ly/2WcIDB5)

Software provided under the terms of an OSS license allows use, modification and redistribution.

https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT -Accessed 2019-03-15

https://github.com/nordic-institute/X-Road -Accessed 2019-03-15

X-Road community portal: https://x-road.global/ -Accessed 2019-03-15

https://www.ria.ee/en/calendar/anniversary-x-tee-2018.html, Accessed 2019-03-15

http://e-estonia.com/solutions/interoperability-services/x-road, Accessed 19-03-15

https://www.niis.org/data-exchange-layer-x-road/, Accessed 2019-03-15.

https://github.com/nordic-institute/X-Road, https://github.com/jointxroad -Accessed 2019-03-15