On Tuesday, 21 October 2021, UserCentriCities convened the second edition of the UserCentriCafé, the project's monthly gathering on user-centric services in European cities.
During the café, partners meet up and engage informally around real-life examples of user-centric services. Each month, the café sheds light on one UserCentriCities partner-city. The city presents its experience with digital services and projects that are either in the development or operational phase. Participants exchange experiences and best practice.
This month, Veera Vihula, development consultant at the mayor's office at the City of Espoo, presented the My Espoo, a single portal for the city's digital services that is in development since December 2020.
The portal's goal is to collect all eServices from the city in one single platform, replicating a virtual service centre that is easily accessible by all. Citizens can fill in and send application forms, make reservations, view their open cases and their status, participate in the service development, follow topics they showed interest in, get guidance and information through a chatbot, and send and receive messages from the city. The service covers all branches of the city organisation. All in all, through the portal, the city is trying to teach its citizens to be more independent with the user-centric services offered by Espoo. Nevertheless, all the services will still remain accessible in person, providing citizens the possibility to reach out to the city in whichever manner they feel the most comfortable with.
To develop My Espoo, the city's team took an iterative and participatory approach. Citizens are still encouraged to provide feedback whenever they want to.
After Ms Vihula's intervention, participants exchanged views on the portal, and Espoo's team sought advice from the crowd and feedback on the model they presented. The official release is planned for 2023 or 2024.
Feel free to contact UserCentriCities (manon.ghislain@eurocities.eu) if you have more questions.
Eurocities