City Deal ‘E-Inclusion by Design’

Together with the City of Ghent, 13 Flemish cities and the Commision for the Flemish Community in Brussels, District09 is working on developing ways to make digital services more user-friendly.

All local governments are convinced that their digital services should be as user-friendly as possible. They want the end user to be central to their digital services. We see various good examples, but few to no structured approaches and methods to do this fundamentally. This is where the challenge of the City Deal ‘E-Inclusion by Design’ begins.

In this City Deal, we focus on developing methods for local governments to place end users as centrally as possible in the development and implementation of digital services. Through training and experimentation, a concrete toolbox tailored to local governments is developed.

The digital transformation is progressing rapidly, and not everyone is keeping up. If we do not want these people to be excluded, we need to make our services more user-friendly. Together with our digital partner District09, we are happy to support this project.

We are working with 13 central cities from Flanders on this challenge: Aalst, Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, Genk, Hasselt, Kortrijk, Leuven, Mechelen, Ostend, Roeselare, Sint-Niklaas, Turnhout, and the VGC Brussels.

Each partner sets up 2 experiments where the end user is placed at the center during the development or implementation phase of a digital service to improve the user-friendliness of the digital service. This learning process is coached by external content partners Knight Moves & Twisted Studio. Lessons learned are converted into usable material, which is bundled into a usable toolbox for local governments. The translation to small and medium-sized governments is made and disseminated to all local governments through partners such as INTER, Mediawijs, and VVSG.

District09 shapes and coordinates this City Deal from the City of Ghent. The Knowledge Center for Flemish Cities and the Agency for Home Affairs created the policy context for this City Deal. This City Deal is subsidized with an amount of 2.89 million euros within the action plan Everyone Digital, through recovery funds deployed by Flemish Minister of Home Affairs, Governance, Integration, and Equal Opportunities, Bart Somers, for local e-inclusion.

More info or a short demo @SCWEC Barcelona: 
Joris Voets
📞+32 485 02 48 16
📨 joris.voets@kenniscentrumvlaamsesteden.be