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Local government, elected officials and institutions

Digital skills courses for town clerks: acts, the civil register and continuity

In brief

In a small municipality the town clerk keeps the civil register, the electoral roll, planning files, payroll and the electronic filing of official acts, often from a single computer. A breakdown, a ransomware attack or one absence stops the whole municipal public service at once. Skillrung courses for town clerks start from that very desk: what has to keep running, what gets checked, what is demanded of the contractor.

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What we recommend to town clerks

The first four slides of every course are free, with no account and no bank card. From the fifth onwards, a subscription is required.

One person, every service, a single computer

The all-round nature of the town hall office is an administrative strength and a digital weakness. The same hands open the post, enter a birth certificate, prepare a payment mandate and install an update. Access rights pile up on a single account, passwords are passed on out loud so that somebody can step in, and the procedures are written down nowhere because only one person knows them. The courses deal with that set-up without pretending it is about to change: one login per person even when the team is two, a written instruction for critical operations, an up-to-date list of access rights.

When the acts stop going out, the municipality stops

A computer outage in a town hall is not a story told in technical terms: council resolutions no longer reach the legality review, payroll is no longer prepared, civil status certificates are no longer issued. Going back to paper is possible, but it is prepared beforehand, not on the day. The course “Cybersecurity: the fundamentals” builds that continuity plan at the scale of a municipality: a backup kept offline and restored at least once, the contractor's contact details written down somewhere other than the affected computer, and the order in which people are alerted — elected officials, the prefecture, the treasury, the insurer, the supervisory authority.

Civil register, electoral rolls, social welfare: three registers, three regimes

The office handles files that do not obey the same rules, and the requests arriving from outside have no idea of that. A genealogist asks for a certificate, an insurer asks for a confirmation, a resident wants the electoral roll, an elected official would like to consult a welfare file. Each has its own answer, and none is settled in the rush of the front desk. The GDPR courses give the grid: what purpose this file serves, who is entitled to reach it, what may be disclosed, how long the municipality keeps it. The record of processing is built from what already exists.

The IT contractor: what to ask for in writing

The town hall computer is nearly always administered by a third party: a local company, the vendor of the specialist software, sometimes a local government management centre. That delegation is normal, but it does not transfer the municipality's responsibility. The courses turn it into four written questions, asked before the incident: how often backups are taken and when the last restoration was tested, who holds an administrator account and how they connect remotely, the response time in the event of an outage, and what becomes of the data at the end of the contract.

Sources

What the official text says

Every figure or legal statement on this page points to its primary source, with its date. We publish no figure without a verifiable source.

  • The controller implements appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk (Article 32 of the GDPR).

    Source : Règlement (UE) 2016/679 (RGPD), article 32 : Journal officiel de l'Union européenne, 27 avril 2016.

  • A single data protection officer may be designated for several public authorities or bodies, taking account of their organisational structure and their size (Article 37(3) of the GDPR).

    Source : Règlement (UE) 2016/679 (RGPD), article 37 : Journal officiel de l'Union européenne, 27 avril 2016.

Frequently asked questions

What town clerks ask us

I am the only member of staff: what is the point of named accounts?

Precisely because you are on your own. On the day of an absence, a handover or an incident, a named account lets you open a temporary access and close it again without sharing yours. It also establishes who did what, which protects you as much as it protects the municipality if an operation is ever disputed.

The mayor is asking for my password: what do I say?

That they need one of their own. A shared password makes every action indistinguishable: nobody can say any more who approved a payment mandate or opened a file. If the elected official needs access, it is created in their name, with the rights matching their role. This is a question of organisation, not of personal trust.

The backup is on a disk plugged into the server: is that enough?

No. Ransomware encrypts everything reachable from the infected computer, including the backup disk left plugged in. You need at least one copy physically disconnected or held off site, and a restoration that has genuinely been tested: a backup that has never been restored is not a backup, it is a hypothesis.

Does a small municipality need a data protection officer?

Yes: the appointment applies to every public authority whatever its size. It can be shared — a single officer may be designated for several authorities, taking account of their organisational structure and their size, which is what groups of municipalities, joint authorities and local government management centres make possible.

Can I use AI to draft minutes or a letter?

For a template, a rewording or a summary with no resident data in it, yes. For a document containing names, addresses or an individual's circumstances, no: that information must not be dropped into a freely accessible service. The generative AI course shows where the line runs and how to proofread a text before committing the municipality to it.

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The first four slides of every course are free, with no account and no bank card. From the fifth onwards, a subscription is required.

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