Periodic Reporting for period 2 - UserCentriCities (Towards common digital government indicators and support for European cities)
Reporting period: 2021-12-01 to 2023-05-31
Over the last twenty years, digital government has made substantial progress. However, there is still a gap between the needs of citizens and the services offered to them. While high-quality digital services can potentially extend opportunities, protect the vulnerable, improve everyone's quality of life, digital public service design still follows the traditional one-size-fits-all offering typically focused on pre-defined services or support. At the political level, this gap has been addressed by the 32 ministers of the EU and EFTA countries who jointly committed to The 2017 Tallinn Declaration on Digital Government and to its user-centricity principles for the design and delivery of digital public services. However, in practice what still remains is the adaptation of the user-centricity principles by all levels of governance and especially by local authorities. While there is broad consensus about its importance, it is impossible to compare the performance of local authorities in user-centricity. To address this challenge, UserCentricities has released the UserCentriCities Dashboard, a unique benchmark of user-centricity performance in Europe. The goal is not to compete but to learn from each other, motivate and highlight best practises. In addition, there is a lack of support on how local authorities can become more user-centric. To address this, the project published an online toolkit on fostered knowledge-sharing and peer-to-peer learning and built a best-practice repository that draws on real life experiences with user-centric digital services. Finally, it is difficult to involve and communicate with numerous local authorities around the topic of user-centricity at once. To fill this gap, UserCentriCities provides a unique platform of exchange and collaboration, for policy debates and research as well as multiple and effective tools and channels for communicating progress, results and activities.
UserCentriCities has delivered the planned outputs on time. In addition to the project meetings and high-level summits, a series of monthly meetings have been held. Website and communication activities are up and running and all outputs have been successfully taken over by bigger networks fostering municipal digitalisation ensuring the project legacy. As first step, the project published the baseline survey, a thorough assessment of existing approaches in measuring user-centricity. Later, the project published the gap analysis that identified a total of eighteen specific needs that should be considered in the development of indicators. At the same time, a comprehensive adoption of the Tallinn Declaration principles to the needs of local and regional administrations was published based on a broad co-creation process with regions and cities. Building on this basis, a set of 63 indicators (refined, after two iterations, to 41 in the final version) to measure user-centricity was developed through a co-creation process. Additionally, the UserCentriCities Toolkit and Services Repository were successfully launched and provide a solid basis for best examples in Europe. The project convened five peer-to-peer learning workshop on tools to design, develop, deliver and evaluate user-centric digital services. To move the issue of user-centricity higher in the political agenda, the project convened three annual UserCentriCities Summits (2021, 2022, 2023) to discuss the way a renewed focus on users could help deliver better public services – and to share real-world experience with advanced public administrations, with a high-level VIP participation. It also published three policy briefs focusing on specific applications of user-centricity: the first one addressed the state of the art in local municipalities in Europe, the second focused on the delivery of proactive services and the third showcased best examples of interoperability applied in the public sector. The project has its own website: https://www.usercentricities.eu/(opens in new window) and published +40 articles and interviews with local leaders and experts. The project also created a visual identity and set up a LinkedIn group and Youtube channel. UserCentriCities also forged synergies with EU institutions, projects, networks and private companies. The project established a weekly meeting among WP leaders; convened four progress meetings with all partners; set up mailing lists for smoother internal communication, video conferencing tools and an internal documents repository. A decentralised management structure, with clear responsibilities was established and described in detail in the Project’s Handbook. The partners also established a quality management plan and made sure it was applied to all project deliverables as well as a risk management process that defined the risks and proposed mitigation measures and defined the impact targets of the project. The project’s Data Management Plan offered a summary of the data collected and reused and how it is stored and managed. To ensure ethics compliance, the project produced H-Requirement No 3. and the ensuing H-Requirement No 1.
From all perspectives, UserCentriCities has surpassed expectations and went beyond what it pledged to deliver. Starting from a consortium of six cities and regions, upon completion it grew to 26 cities and regions - 20 new cities have joined the project. The level of participation has been exceptionally high throughout the whole process. The events have attracted many participants: the latest summit gathered over 200 attendees and featured keynotes from Commissioner Hahn and Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister in Ukraine travelling form Kyiv in unprecedented times for the first time in Brussels for a powerful presentation. The interest proved so high that upon request of cities partners have launched an additional activity not included in the planning, a monthly UserCentriCafé, where practitioners met and shared knowledge. Debate was concrete, as frontline practitioners brought real world problems and solutions. Online comments provided improvements to the deliverables. The speakers involved in the events were extremely high level: startup CEOs, ministers holding the presidency of the EU, city CIOs, directors from the European Commission, senior national administrators and more. The project has also been impactful in policy terms. It has established a strong collaboration with the Slovenian presidency, culminating in a powerful keynote by Boštjan Koritnik, minister for public administration of Slovenia at The 2021 UserCentriCities Summit and a request for UserCentriCities to organise the cities-dedicated session at the E-Government Conference organised by the presidency. Additionally, the project has had promising meetings with the OECD (resulted in the collaboration with the OECD - OPSI toolkit navigator and fruitful discussions around the UserCentriCities Service Toolkit), the Committee of the Regions, The Living.inEU initiative, which inherited the Dashboard and will continue to run it for European municipalities, the ESPON initiative and the European Commission. The community was merged with the Dutch municipalities network on User Needs First. All this has set the basis for stronger sustainability and secured the preservation of the results and impacts achieved throughout the project. it. The partners continuously collaborated and proactively contacted potential reusers of these services.