Since 4 February 2021 and the first UserCentriCities co-creation session, UCCs’ consortium has been working on ‘translating’ the Tallinn Declaration into adapted and operational recommendations. And now it is out and publicly available!
This document is the output of two co-creation sessions with a variety of cities and regions, and a call to comment online on the first draft of the document, where more than 130 comments were made. The goal was to dissect and comment on each principle from the Tallinn Declaration and extract what it meant for local authorities. The different consultations resulted in an enriched Tallinn Declaration with recommendations from local actors and some challenges that are left to overcome.
With regards to user-centricity, local administrations recommend:
- use of user-adapted language
- inclusiveness by default (by co-designing guidelines)
- focus on all users of digital public services
- transparency in the process
- re-use of already available data
- citizen engagement in deciding municipal digital strategy
- investment in onboarding
Challenges in the delivery of user-centric services for local authorities are:
- multi-channel service delivery
- bridging the digital gap (e-inclusion, digital skills, training)
- vertical and horizontal multi-level and multi-organisational collaboration
- digital transformation in front-office and back-office processes
- investments for replacing legacy systems
- evolution towards decentralised control of personal data
UCCs now has a solid base of specific hurdles and recommendations that are directly linked to each user-centricity principle. These inputs will be very helpful during the rest of the project, namely to produce the gap analysis report and the indicators handbook. Together with the baseline survey report, these two documents will be used as the core of UCCs’ work towards improving user-centricity, based on what it means for local authorities.
You can find the deliverable on the dedicated page here, alongside all other public deliverables.
Eurocities