Questions/Answers

In the age of the digitalisation, new technologies offer tremendous opportunities for innovative city management, but also lead to uncertainty among the population. This is why in 2014, when its information and communication technology (ICT) strategy was up for renewal, the City of Vienna decided to develop a new strategy using a participatory approach. The Digital Agenda Vienna (DAV) aimed to collect different viewpoints and opinions for the new ICT requirements of the City of Vienna from citizens, businesses and employees, and to develop a single vision that the municipal departments, the ICT department, politicians and citizens could all agree on. To do so, an online platform was set up on which the city administration published relevant questions. At stage one, participation was open to everyone. Participants were asked to propose ideas on the platform, and vote and comment on the ideas of others. The process was actively managed and promoted by the city administration. In the second phase, the ideas were discussed and elaborated in workshops, by experts from academia, ICT companies and consultants, but also “volunteers” that already participated online. This input was then incorporated by municipal workgroups into a draft strategy document, which was published online again for further discussion. The resulting agenda can be seen as a ‘to-do list’ for the city administration. It contains both guiding principles for the city’s digitalisation and specific projects and activities in the area of ICT, some of which have already been successfully implemented. The DAV views itself as a contribution to achieving Vienna’s Smart City-goals. The “Smart City Framework Strategy” focuses on ensuring a high quality of life for the population, the protection of resources, and the added value of innovation. The DAV places the needs of people at its centre and ensures that new technologies are optimally utilised.

The general objective of the project was the crafting of a digital agenda for Vienna that incorporates the needs of all stakeholders and that utilises the latest technological possibilities. Several specific objectives follow from this overall goal: • to develop the ICT strategy for the City of Vienna for the period 2015-2018 • to collect the ICT requirements for the new strategy from different perspectives; • to get commitment from the stakeholders for innovative actions in the ICT strategy; • to integrate inside and outside viewpoints; • to develop a single vision that the municipal departments, the ICT department, politicians and citizens can all agree on; and • to develop a dynamic strategy for a rapidly growing city, hence the process strategy. The political requirements for the Digital Agenda all evolved around 'digital democracy': • civil participation and transparency are key; • ubiquitous access to all, including widely available wireless access; • useful: new government apps; • participatory: the city administration uses crowdsourcing; • visible: information accessible through QR codes; and • information-driven.

Digital change is a major challenge for political institutions, public management, the economy, and the entire population. The City of Vienna wants to ensure that no one is left behind, and that services remain accessible to all people of the city – regardless of education, background, and income. Therefore people, rather than the use of technology per se, are the Digital Agenda’s main priority. Their concerns, needs and interests have been the guiding principles for setting priorities, implementing projects and designing new services. Nobody should be excluded from the Agenda, as a “digital divide” – i.e. disparities in technical expertise between citizens – must be prevented. Hence, the Digital Agenda Vienna was elaborated with the participation of hundreds of interested people, enabling them to participate in creating a strategy that ultimately affects all citizens. This unique approach ensures that the opportunities and potential of digital development benefit all Viennese citizens. The Digital Agenda not only produced an innovative strategy and creative solutions, but also contributed to the democratisation of knowledge, setting a standard for the active involvement of citizens in future projects. More than ever, the City of Vienna is developing from a closed bureaucratic model to an open and participatory city administration.

The Digital Agenda project aimed to collect different viewpoints and opinions for Vienna’s new ICT requirements. All citizens of Vienna, as well as businesses and civil servants, were invited to contribute their ideas. In addition, they were asked to review existing ideas, providing the administration with direct and immediate feedback from its stakeholders. By employing a participatory process, the creative potential of Vienna’s citizens and business was utilised. The participants invested much time and showed high levels of engagement, generating valuable and innovative ideas. The resulting agenda provided the City of Vienna with an overview of their current needs and already led to the launch of various public services and initiatives. The matching of citizens’ ideas with expert knowledge substantially enlarged the “action space” and led to a proposal that would have been neither developed by citizens alone, nor experts working in isolation. Involving all citizens through a transparent and open process like the DAV not only produced a high-quality strategy and a vast number of new ideas for innovative services, but also resulted in a high acceptance of the digitalisation strategy and the services developed.

From the city administration’s point of view, there were a number of challenges related to public service delivery and the use of ICT to deal with: • Reform of the administration, increasing its efficiency and effectiveness • Need for an ongoing evolution of the administration in line with economic and societal developments • Demand for increased transparency and participation • Government 4.0 - developing from a closed bureaucratic model to an open and participatory city administration • Increasing importance of participation, collaboration and direct feedback, partly through social media • Mobility • Consideration of external viewpoints to be anchored in the administration’s culture • Public services designed based on user needs • Taking into account the dynamics of digitalization; not producing a rigid stratgey, but a living process • Innovation through learning The DAV aimed to respond to these issues. It addressed how new technologies can benefit the citizens of Vienna, and how the city administration can take advantage while minimising the associated risks. Therefore, the DAV is a logical addition to existing strategic documents in the area of research, technology and location policy. However, it encompasses far more, as technologies play a decisive role in all key aspects of city life – from healthcare to municipal waste management.

The DAV affects all people of Vienna. Therefore, social inclusion was important both as a design principle and a guideline for the ICT strategy. In order to keep the barriers of entry low, the platform was publicly accessible and designed according to barrier-free guidelines. A valid email address was the only prerequisite for participation. The most positive impact is made by the DAV’s results though: Participants were asked to contribute their thoughts in areas such as education and infrastructure, resulting in innovative ideas for decreasing the digital divide and fostering social inclusion, such as IT-classes for senior citizens, coding in schools, or audio information for blind people. Some of these flagship projects clearly contribute to the SDGs, such as the initiatives “Smart Kids” and “Code Studio”, which are both designed to encourage youth, especially children with deprived or migration background and girls, to acquire competencies in programming, ensuring quality education for all and increasing the number of young adults who have relevant technical skills to ensure employability. In addition, the DAV fosters public democracy by making the administration more accessible for all citizens through the launch of new, accessible services, equipping bureaus with QR codes and providing secure public WLAN.

The objective of integrating diverse sources of dispersed knowledge demanded a number of novel approaches to project organisation and the technology used. The most important innovation was the project’s three-step process design, where traditional offline working groups were complemented by online idea generation. To ensure that all ideas were taken into account, their originators were invited to the working groups, and all ideas were referenced in the strategy draft. To encourage participation in its periodic updating, the public was again invited to discuss the draft online. In order to keep the community engaged throughout the process, it was important that members only had to interact with one, easy-to-use software platform. The platform www.digitaleagenda.wien was therefore designed using a similar pattern for voting and commenting on ideas as many well-known social media platforms, making it easy to understand. As top management sponsorship is an important motivation for citizens to participate, the administration’s top management made an effort by taking an active role in the interaction with the citizens. The project sponsors, including the Mayor of Vienna, the town councillor and Vienna´s CIO, hosted events specifically designed to foster community building, and the CIO even personally invited citizens to participate.

Already previously, the City of Vienna had great experiences in using participatory processes, for example with the Vienna Charter, which was introduced in 2012 in order to work out principles and rules for good neighbourly relations in the city. The Vienna Charter is a mutual agreement between all people living in the city. The Viennese themselves chose the topics and participated actively in the development of the charter. The process took place offline in the form of charter talks, where good neighbourly living was discussed. In addition, online contributions could be submitted. However, the Digital Agenda took the idea one step further, but involving citizens in the development of a strategic document that shapes the future of the city. In addition, the three-step process was developed in order to allow for multiple rounds of feedback and a merger of expert and stakeholder knowledge.

The project was managed by the CIO of Vienna, who allocated half of her time over a three-month period for project steering and communication. One employee of the office of the CIO managed the project, supported by CSC Austria consultants. Implementing the DAV using an online platform kept the cost of participation low. The portal was designed and maintained by cbased, an Austrian Start-up that provides online tools for participative decision-making processes. Project management was done by its CEO who worked full time on the project for three months. For programming, one full time employee was deployed over the same period. The costs for the online platform were about 30,000 Euro. The project steering committee consisted of 15 members delegated by the CIO and other administrative units of Vienna, cbased and CSC. It convened four times for three hours on average. In addition, 564 participants spent about 1.5 hours on average on idea generation and review, which amounts to 846 hours. Five working groups were installed to compose the first draft of the agenda. No media budget was needed, as the city administration’s own mailing lists and social media channels were used, while other media covered the project for free.

Yes

The project methodology has already been transferred within the City of Vienna. During the test phase for www.digitaleagenda.wien, other municipal departments were already inspired to initiate their own projects. The housing department used the participation platform to develop its mission statement, while the ICT department used it to involve its staff into an ideation process about a new department name. As the participatory process was very successful and well received within the city administration, the decision was made to make the platform available to all departments. Consequently, they are able to involve all citizens, or just a selected group pf people, in their decision processes - quickly and without technical consultation. All of Vienna’s public e-participation projects can be found online at https://www.partizipation.wien.at. Moreover, the project already inspired projects outside of the City of Vienna’s administration. The German Ministry of the Interior used the same process design and platform for developing an Open Government Data Action Plan together with its citizens (see https://www.open-data-aktionsplan.de/). These cases provide strong evidence that the practice is transferable to all situations where a public institution wants to harness the dispersed knowledge of citizens and organisational members to get ideas and feedback on its policies.

The DAV project is fostering sustainability in a number of ways. Contributions to sustainability are mainly made through the outcome of the project. For example, ideas for services that help preserve energy and water, or inform about environmental pollution, were generated. In this way, the DAV supports environmental sustainability. Economic sustainability is supported through ideas in the area Work and Economy, which for example cover ways to support Viennese ICT start-ups, maker spaces and open data provision. The by far largest number of ideas generated relates to social sustainability. These cover topics such as increased citizen participation through digital channels, integration of socially disadvantaged groups or the improvement of public services. Moreover, the project itself contributes to social sustainability by building a community of ICT-affine citizens that are linked to the City of Vienna and share knowledge and common goals. What is more, through the participatory approach of the project, the trust of the citizens in government is increased, and social cohesion is fostered.

Inherently, the project is not a one-time undertaking. Rather, it is set up as a sustained effort in drafting and implementing a high-quality ICT strategy for the City of Vienna. Therefore, regularly a progress report is published on www.digitaleagenda.wien and a new idea generation and consultation process is initiated, so that DAV becomes a living document. Contrary to the traditional way of freezing a strategy for several years, this agile and participatory way of updating enables an adequate integration of the rapid technological progress and the resulting social changes into Vienna´s ICT strategy. This implies that the DAV does not consist of a rigid set of rules, but is a working document – an overview that will continuously develop and improve. How the City of Vienna can deal with the constantly evolving demands of its citizens and the technical possibilities, is a question that the DAV ultimately aims to answer.

Yes

The quantitative performance of the initiative was documented. When the DAV was implemented in 2014, 622 citizens took part in the idea generation. 172 ideas, 609 comments and 5450 votes were provided. Five working groups then produced a strategy draft, which included eight flagship projects and additional focus areas for the following years, referencing all user-generated ideas. Moreover, nine general principles that emerged from the DAV were added, serving as guidelines for the city’s digitalisation. All ideas produced in the first round were published on the Vienna open data portal. John May, a British participation researcher subsequently applied his ENI (“effective number of issues”) measure to the DAV. Its purpose is to measure the amount of information that flows from the participants to the hosting institution of a participatory event, thereby determining its efficiency. Based on May’s analysis, the ENI typically varies from 1.7 to 65.6. However, the DAV’s value is 145.9, suggesting that the Digital Agenda was by far the most efficient participatory project analysed (See May, Leo & Taudes 2015). The Digital Agenda Vienna was continued in 2015, asking citizens to contribute ideas regarding mobile applications. This time, 870 users generated 106 ideas, 1303 votes and 320 comments.

The DAV acts as a guideline that the city administration uses to lead the development of new technological opportunities. It is consistent with the “Viennese principles” that have emerged in the course of the process. In addition to transparency, openness, and participation, these guiding principles include trust and security, inclusion and social sustainability, gender equality, citizen orientation, the strengthening of Vienna as a business location, consolidation, innovation, as well as flexibility and learning. In line with these guidelines, flagship projects and other focus areas were chosen based on the ideas developed in the DAV. By now, a number of projects have already been realised, such as free WLAN access in 400 public places, access to e-media in public libraries, the “Vienna Calling” App (inform the city administration about issues in less than 30 seconds), and the publication of open government data, to name but a few. Moreover, short and medium term priorities were formulated. Many more ideas were discussed by the working groups, extending beyond the contents of the DAV. These projects can be understood as impulses for the City of Vienna and should be discussed and gradually implemented, provided that a consensus and the necessary financial resources are available.

The DAV views itself as a contribution to achieving Vienna’s Smart City-goals, by ensuring that new technologies are optimally utilised. The Smart City Framework Strategy, on the other hand, provides indicators to monitor the activities conducted as part of the strategy, as well as its achievements. The performance indicators defined in the Smart City project can also be applied to the DAV, making sure that the city’s digitalisation contributes to ensuring a high quality of life and the protection of resources, among other things. What is more, the DAV also provides its own set of guidelines. The “Viennese principles” mentioned before are both a result of the first participatory process, and a guideline that the city administration now uses to lead the development of new technological opportunities. Finally, the best indicator for the success of the City of Vienna’s endeavours is its exceptional quality of life, which was confirmed by the city’s eightfold appointment as the most liveable city in the world in the Mercer city ranking.

Project sponsors provided funding and contributed to the marketing of the project. Project sponsors were the city councillor in charge of ICT at the time, Sandra Frauenberger, the vice-head of the magistrate, Wolfgang Müller and Vienna´s CIO Ulrike Huemer. They gave speeches during events, discussed the project with citizens and working group members and promoted the project in the media. They were informed by the project management about the progress of the project and took part in all major decisions. They also consolidated the drafts for the various parts to the first version of the overall document. The project was managed by the Office of the CIO. The project manager, Mrs. Huemer, was assisted by a number of other employees and consultants from CSC Austria. The platform was created by cbased, an Austrian Start-up company. Cbased was in charge of hosting the website and managing the process together with Mrs. Huemer. This project team was complemented by Mr. Parycek from University Krems as scientific adviser. Project planning and control decisions were made by the project team. The task of the working groups was to write drafts of parts of the DAV, based on the ideas gathered. At first, the ideas were clustered according to area of life and attributed to working groups. These were lead by members of the project management team. The rest of the group members were representatives of Viennese ICT companies, citizens who contributed ideas, city officials in charge of the respective area and other specialists. The task of the online community of Viennese citizens was to contribute ideas and to comment and vote on the ideas of others, as well as to comment on the strategy draft. It was therefore a collective effort, involving city servants, politicians, citizens, businesses, experts from different fields, and the media.

The DAV was never meant to be set in stone, but to be constantly improved with the help of the community. Even though the participatory process was very open, it became apparent that it is helpful to ask precise questions, as those lead to well-founded and practicable ideas. Simultaneously, the questions also set a definitive frame, leaving little space for other ideas, leading to a trade-off between the quality of the results and the number of topics that can be discussed. Moreover, as the outcome depends strongly on the number of participants, a lot of time and effort had to be invested in promoting the initiative when it first started. Events, public relations, and personal invitations were necessary to create sufficient attention in the media. On the downside, the broad promotion also attracted people who tried to exploit the platform’s outreach for their own purpose by posting spam messages. Therefore, the platform’s spam filter had to be improved while the DAV was online. This unwarranted use was also a reason to keep up the registration process. Even though it sets a very low barrier for entry, there might still have been even more participants, if no registration was necessary.