Join the User­CentriCities (UCC) community!

UserCentriCities is a community of colleagues from local authorities in Europe. Community members come together to compare their performance with their peers and exchange knowledge and ideas on how to deliver user-centric government services. It’s the international community of the User Needs First initiative.

Bringing together local authorities in Europe

Local authorities play a fundamental role in digital government service delivery. They are the front office of government as a whole and the first way citizens experience digital services. However, the role of local authorities in implementing user-centricity principles, design thinking, and co-creation is not sufficiently recognised, and they lack the fundamental tools to implement user-centricity at scale.  Coming together in a network, helps colleagues from around Europe to learn from each other and exchange and acquire knowledge to push user-centric services forward. Because a user-oriented government is vital to being an inclusive government.

History of the UCC community

The principles for user-centricity, agreed upon in The 2017 Tallinn Declaration on Digital Government, remain quite generic and there is  no guidance on what they mean in practice. Additionally, local authorities often lack the necessary data to compare their performance against that of others. 

UserCentriCities was a Horizon 2020 project that started in December 2020. Led by the Lisbon Council in partnership with Eurocities and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, it brings together 26 European municipalities and regions; the founding partners – Espoo, Milan, Murcia, Rotterdam, Tallinn and Emilia Romagna – and participating cities and regions: Arezzo, Barcelona, Catalonia Region, Brussels Capital Region, Ghent, Glasgow, Gothenburg, Helsinki, Kronoberg Region, Kyiv, Lisbon, Ljubljana, Madrid, Mataró, Odesa de Montserrat, Paris, Porto, Riga, Terrassa and Utrecht.  

As of May 2023, the Horizon project has ended and the UserCentriCities network has become part of the ‘User Needs First’ communities. User Needs First, known as Gebruiker Centraal, is a programme run in the Netherlands focused on user centricity in inclusive and accessible governmental services. Read more about User Needs First here. 

What to expect from the community

UserCentriCities is a platform for local authorities to help them assess and compare their performance with their peers. It is a European community of decision-makers that share experience, knowledge and lessons learnt about how to implement user-centricity. At the same time, the community serves to confirm and recognise the importance of local government in delivering digital government. 

Concretely the community: 

1. reinforces local-EU collaboration through the operationalisation of the Tallinn Declaration to fit the needs and challenges of the local government and citizens and the preparation of high-level policy briefs and events bringing together EU and local decision-makers, 
2. supports local authorities in delivering user-centricity through the provision of a support toolkit and mutual learning service for bench learning from others,
3. reaches out to a large number of local entities in order to achieve a durable impact over time beyond the duration of the project, and
4. comes together monthly during online meetups (our UCC cafés) to share best practices and open dialogue on important topics surrounding user-centricity.

Sign up for UCC

Our goal is to continue growing the community. With more professionals from local governments spread across Europe, we can further develop knowledge and tools on user-centricity in inclusive, accessible and understandable government (digital) services. Join us in our mission and sign up via the form below!