Open Espoo - Finland (Espoo)

Open Espoo -service is a highly innovative, user friendly and easy-to-use web service aimed at to strenghten the participation of the residents of the city of Espoo and other interested parties to the planning processes concerning various development of the city of Espoo, ie. city plans, developmental plans of services of the city etc. Open Espoo service function also as providing everybody with open access to city decision making process, and thus supporting the principle of open government and easy access to official documents.

Main results, benefits and impacts

Following city affairs is easier when the information available is guaranteed to be up-to-date. The service makes providing people with accurate information easy. This means that planners can concentrate on planning and customer services can be centralized. For the Internet user, information is available any time of day, not just during office hours. Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Because of more up-to-date information, citizens have been able to participate in right time, and so it has been also possible to shorten the planning processes. Citizens are taking an increased interest in their environment. Since services often end up looking like bureaucrats built them for other bureaucrats, the Open Espoo project group has invested a lot of time and effort in using user surveys to gauge what kind of service it is that the community really wants. Ideas for developing the service were solicited from various regional associations and from individual citizens. A number of indicators for the service were defined and they are closely followed. Use statistics is one. A separate statistics program is used to monitor the amount and nature of the traffic in the service and the statistics are discussed at the project group?s monthly meetings. Traffic is constantly increasing. 68 state, municipal and public administration web services took part in the first web service quality competition organized in Finland for the field in 2004. The services were judged using a set of quality criteria published that summer. The competition tries to highlight web services that are functional and useful, especially from a citizen?s point of view. Improving the ease of use and quality of public web services will increase the public?s willingness to use these services, which, in turn, will increase service production efficiency in the public sector. Open Espoo won in its series in the competition. The service has also done well in external evaluations. Telecities has given the Open Espoo service an honorable mention two years in a row (2003 and 2004).

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

The Open Espoo project has had a beneficial effect on public participation. The Open Espoo glossary helps people learn the necessary terminology and offers insight into the municipal organization. The employees? areas of responsibility are clearly delineated, so it?s easy to tell whom to contact for more information. Content pages always display a date when the information was last updated.