Citadel on the Move

Description of the issue and proposed service/solution

On November 18, 2009, EU Ministers signed the Malmö Ministerial Declaration outlining a forward-looking eGovernment vision to be achieved by 2015. A key platform of the Malmo Declaration was to empower businesses and citizens through 1) eGovernment services designed around users' needs, 2) better access to information and 3) active citizen involvement in policy making. At the same time, Malmo also aimed to facilitate mobility in the single market.

In most European countries, local government has the greatest contact with citizens and businesses, and is at the forefront of service delivery to them. Despite numerous policy documents and ‘how to’ manuals on local eGovernment, over one year on, the ‘Malmö Vision’ is still not being translated down to the local level. Smaller communities in particular are finding it difficult to implement innovative ICT projects that will enable them to ‘work smarter’.

Citadel on the Move is intentionally designed to advance the Citadel Statement which was launched in December 2010 with the support of 64 organisations – including every major local government association in Europe – from over 200 cities across five continents and called upon EU and national decision makers to provide tangible support for local eGovernment in three key areas:

Building on the Citadel Statement, Citadel on the Move will unite Europe’s leading local government organizations with Living Lab experts, ICT specialists and researchers and expert SMEs in a common effort to harness the power of ‘Open Data’ and User-Driven Innovation Systems to develop ‘high speed’ Mobile Applications that can be shared by citizens across Europe. In so doing, Citadel on the Move aims to help deliver on the key objectives of both Malmo and the Citadel Statement by empowering (3) citizens to use (2) open data to create ‘smart’ mobile applications that can be potentially (1) shared across Europe cities – large and small.

Nowadays, portable personal devices such as PDAs or mobile phones are widely used across Europe, and hold the key to ensuring e-inclusion of every European citizen. They provide European citizens on the move with access to the Internet, and the resulting potential to access any service, anywhere. At the same time Social Media and the Open Data Movement are rapidly joining together to unleash the tremendous innovation potential of citizens to build the type of mobile services they want and need.
Three major gaps must be filled to realise this potential:
1) TECHNOLOGY: there is a need for standard mobile applications that citizens will ultimately be able to access easily and use anywhere,
2) INNOVATION: there is a need to create a specific link between the Living Labs methodology (which harnesses the collective power of citizens and SMEs in the co-creation of services), the Open Data movement and the Mobile world and
3) OPEN DATA: there is a need for standard templates to aggregate data from various government sources and transform it into a publicly useable format – or, in other words, to move beyond ‘open data’ towards ‘open access’.

The goal of Citadel on the Move is to demonstrate that it is possible to combine 1) Open Access Data and 2) Mobile Application tools to create ‘smart,’ innovative citizen-generated services that can be used in differing European Cities. Ultimately, Citadel on the Move seeks to advance nothing less than digital materialisation of European integration through the creation of ‘smart’ mobile Services that, in conjunction with high speed broadband access, can potentially be shared and used anywhere. This vision lies at the heart of the Citadel Statement and is in line with the objectives of the Smart City call which aims to accelerate ‘the uptake of innovative ‘ultrafast Internet’ based technologies and services in cities, based on shared platform’.