Citizen-centric public services in local and regional administrations

For user-centric digital public services, the proposed action will:

1. support the implementation of the 'User-centricity principles for design and delivery of digital public services' laid down in the Tallinn Declaration putting citizens truly at the heart of governments' digital transformation at cities and regions level;
2. encourage and recognise cities and regions that are taking policies steps to become more user-centric;
3. promote capacity building, best practices and experience exchange, solutions reuse, training, awareness raising through a community building approach;
4. ensure that the mechanism for recognising user-centric cities and regions and the community will become self-sustainable beyond the H2020 funding.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU in the order of 1.5M€ would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

With the adoption of the Tallinn Declaration, the ministers in charge of policy and coordination of digital public services in the countries of the EU and EFTA, recognise the needs and expectations of the citizens and businesses when interacting with public administrations and commit that the design and delivery of their services will be guided by the principles of user-centricity[[See Annex to the Tallinn Declaration,]]

The digital transformation of the public administration shall be implemented at national, regional and local levels.

The action will show the social and human dimension of digitalisation, in particular that all citizens can be better served by their public administrations while moving into the digital age, and will strengthen European citizens’ sense of belonging to the European Union.

By developing a framework that will determine the conditions by which cities and regions will be recognised in their commitment to become more user centric the belief is that across Europe public administrations will be inspired to accelerate their journey to design and deliver more user-centric digital public services for the benefit of their citizens and businesses.

The action should emphasise the movement of local and regional administrations towards citizen centric, secure, high quality and burden free public services and towards more inclusive and participative decision and policy-making. At the same time cities and regions will gain visibility and benefit from being part of the community through exchange of good and bad practices, solutions and know how among all cities and regions experiencing the same journey.