Both the Tallinn Declaration and the Berlin Declaration on eGovernment had members states agree on significant priorities towards ensuring high-quality, user-centric digital public services for citizens and seamless cross-border service provision for businesses. Although cities are at the forefront of delivering digital government in Europe, they are not sufficiently involved in the policy debate and do not encounter sufficient support and comparison tools. UserCentriCities is therefore committed to extend the reach of the Tallinn declaration priorities to city-level and support local authorities in delivering digital and user-centric services.
UserCentriCities will push the boundaries of both research and practice by:
- Identifying existing approaches for designing, procuring and delivering user-centric digital services to citizens and translating the Tallinn Declaration principles into operational recommendations specific to local governance.
- Creating a benchmarking dashboard that measures user-centricity effectively, robustly and sustainably based on a checklist of indicators. The benchmarking will be co-created with cities, not imposed top down and will provide measurement tools to compare the performance of cities on user-centricity, with a combination of quantitative and qualitative content. The goal is not ranking, but learning.
- Supporting local authorities in adopting a user-centricity approach with the use of a best-practice repository, a web-based service-design toolkit and interactive workshops.
- Reaching out to a large number of local authorities, with the fundamental collaboration of European regions, to achieve
durable impact over time beyond the duration of the project.
The project will place citizens truly at the centre and involve them throughout the project activities.