EUKN - European Urban Knowledge Network - Virtual City Council

Virtual City Council - Girona, ES

Introduction

The City Council of Girona intends to improve the interaction with its citizens by offering better online services.

Description

The development of the Girona Virtual City Council has two main objectives: a) Identifying the services with added value for the city; b) improving the interaction between the City Council and the citizens.

The actions are organised in three main lines:

Improvement of the Content Management System of the website of the City Hall, in order to provide updated information easily.
Prepare the software needed to enable on-line procedures.
Create new software for network management.

The main goal is to address to a growing collective, beginning with public workers but progressively widening the scope to include citizens, enterprises and associations.

Approach

The project was developed in cooperation with the University of Girona, and has opened several interesting collaboration fields between the public administration, university and enterprises. The database engine is Oracle, which was already in use in the main municipal applications, but most of the simpler applications have been developed using free software.

Results

The first phase of the project was dedicated to prepare the hardware and software necessary, as well as guaranteeing the security in the transactions.
The next issue addressed was to attract supporters in the local administration, who would promote a culture of innovation and efficiency around them.
Convincing workers to share methods and semi-elaborated information was also hard to achieve.
The last phase involves increasing citizens' participation, working with social groups to promote the use of Information Technologies and sharing knowledge.

Contact info

Girona City Council
Plaça del Vi, 1
17004 Girona
Spain
Phone: +34 972 419 000

Project start date

28/11/2006

Links

Navarra Regional Government. Best Practices (in Spanish)Girona City Council (in Spanish)

Document type

case

Themes

Urban Policy > Social inclusion & integration > Community development

Keywords

Community websites