UserCentriCitie’s kick-off meeting took place on 03 December 2020. The meeting, hosted by the Lisbon Council on WebEx, joined over 30 participants from Eurocities, the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT), the municipalities of Rotterdam, Espoo, Tallinn, Murcia, and Milan, the Emilia-Romagna region and the European Commission.
It was an honor to welcome Serge Novaretti, policy officer for smart mobility and living and Christine Redecker, policy officer for eGovernment and trust at the European Commission’s Directorate‑General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, who embedded the project in the current policy context.
The meeting’s highlight were short presentations given by the project’s participating cities and regions which gave them the opportunity to present themselves and their efforts, current state and success stories with regards to user-centric and digital public services. The examples presented by the cities and regions Rotterdam, Milan, Espoo, Murcia, and Emilia Romagna included, but were not limited to projects supporting grassroots innovative solutions and ideas to address local challenges, video calls merged with a digitalised public service desk, WhatsApp chatbots, apps to report damages in the city to the administration, digital culture platforms, and tools to collect health information of patients.
Over the course of the coming 30 months, UserCentriCities will involve local authorities in digital government policy debate at European level, provide a measurement tool to support local decision makers and incentivize progress, provide advice and facilitate peer to peer learning between cities and build a European community of decision makers that share experience, knowledge and lessons learnt about how to implement user-centricity.
The Lisbon Council