Taking place on 21 September 2021, the Kick-off event of SEE digitalisation working group gathered 29 urban practitioners from all over the region, coming together to embark on a journey of capacity building, peer-to-peer exchange and project development on various topics of digitalisation.  Participants from 19 municipalities from 7 countries – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, North Macedonia, Serbia and Ukraine – are targeted as main participants of the group.

This initiative, that is part of Connective Cities COVID-19 Programme, is dedicated to supporting cities’ resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing capacity-building activities in the directions of Digitalization.  For this objective several primary aims have been designed in collaboration Ms. Yulia Besplemennova, International Expert, who will be guiding participants on the journey of capacity development.

This working group will allow participants to learn from each other and build network of peers with similar initiatives, giving space for potential future collaborations, while focusing mainly on several prime goals:

•  Improving cities’ ability to envision and design public digital services with a design-driven approach applying both human-centred and systemic lenses.
• Learning the principles of stakeholders and user’s engagement in design and validation processes and of co-design practices.
• Stimulating peer-to-peer exchange and hands-on learning dynamics.

Programme

During the session, Action plan of the group, upcoming activities, general methodology and tools were introduced to be used during working process of the group.

Along with presenting theoretical outline of the Action Plan, participating urban practitioners were introduced to one another, highlighting their interest and motivation for participating in the process.

Dates and themes of upcoming workshops were settled among the members of the group. These workshops (in the form of presenting ideas, ideations and breakout sessions) will be used for identifying the citizens needs and their profiles, mapping stakeholder and system maps and analysing the problematics involved, developing co-design initiatives to actively engage users for the delivery of the better digital services. Recording of the Kick-off event can be found here.

In the following weeks, the following workshops have already been held (a short review will be published soon):

Workshop I: Ideation

Workshop 2: Consolidation

Workshop III: Solutions & Opportunities

Impressions