WeLive – A New Concept of Public Administration Based on Citizen Co-created Mobile Urban Services
- 28 February 2017
- Posted in: Planning & Development, Science & Technology, Energy & Environment
The 2010 edition of the EU eGovernment Benchmark Report states that currently public services are built following an administration-centric approach, driving to a low usage, rather than according to the citizens´ need (user-centric approach).
Therefore, following the European eGovernment Action Plan it can be concluded that there is a clear need to move towards a more open model of design, production and delivery of public services leveraging on the collaboration between citizens, entrepreneurs and civil society. Citizens want to transit from being mere consumers of public services to providers of those services, i.e. prosumers of the open government ecosystem. In essence, there is an urge for the modernisation of public administration to maximize the public service delivered to the citizenship and local economy from their continuously more stringent resources.
The WeLive project (http://www.welive.eu/) is conceived to transform the current approach towards e-government by providing a new open model oriented towards the design, production and deployment of public services based in the collaboration of a quadruple helix, i.e. research organizations, companies, public administrations and citizens.
WeLive will provide a novel We-Government ecosystem of tools (Live) built on the Open Data, Open Services and Open Innovation paradigms that is easily deployable in different public administrations and which promotes co-innovation and co-creation of personalized public services through public-private partnership and the empowerment of all the stakeholders to actively take part in the value-chain of a municipality or a territory.
WeLive approach towards Open Government is centred on fostering active collaboration among all the stakeholders of a city across the public service innovation process. It pursues helping public administrations to move from all controlling and all providing organizations to those that act as facilitators, enablers and orchestrators of public services. The Government provides the datasets and the essential basic services around them which serve as the basis for construction of new services which combine public and private data and are targeted to important urban sectors such as mobility, environment or health or finance.
During the project lifetime two-phase pilots will be conducted in 3 cities (Bilbao, Novi Sad and Trento) and 1 region (Helsinki- Uusimaa) across Europe.
The participating cities are good examples of economic dynamism and social welfare in their respective countries. Each of the participating cities and region have some distinguishing features which make them very suitable to measure the impact which an Open and Collaborative Government solution, as proposed by WeLive, will bring forward. Further, the business feasibility and commercial potential of the WeLive Framework, including its individual assets, will be validated by developing and deploying sustainable business models.
Both pilot phases will be based on the Living Lab concept, promoting the involvement of real users representing different stakeholders in real usage environments and scenarios.
Pilot Phase I (that is recently finished) was focused on the provision of specific city services build on top of the previously implemented building blocks, and the WeLive Player, i.e. the mobile application that can be seen as the common entry point to the WeLive ecosystem that acts as catalyst of the interactions of a citizen with the set of micro-services (urban public service apps) available at their council. Pilot Phase I was also focused on promoting the usage of the WeLive framework components.
Lessons learnt from the Pilot Phase I, i.e. positive and negative aspects will be considered and applied in Pilot Phase II. Pilot Phase II (that will start in April) will be similar to the first one but this trial will not only focus on the provision of new public services but also on the exchanging of services and building blocks among the cities. These new public services will come up from the Ideas Contest executed in Pilot Phase I.
Article by Dr. Dejan Drajić, Impact and Dissemination Manager, WeLive (EU H2020 project).
To hear more about The WeLive project and the work they are doing around Smart Cities, join us at Smart Cities and Communities: Achieving Smart Urban Growth on March 22nd at The Studio, Manchester.
