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.
