Gava

Digital transition

GAVIUS - From reactive to proactive public administrations

"We have a very important challenge ahead, with a very clear objective: to make life easier for our citizens. We have to place the center of the project in the people who have more needs and from there apply this model of relation and provision of services to the citizens in other uses that allow to improve the relation of the administration with the citizenship.
In a globalized and digitalizes world, from the public administration we have to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented to us to establish a relationship with the citizen that is closer, more qualitative, more comfortable and that allows us to provide a better service."

Raquel Sánchez Jiménez, Mayor of Gavà

The project in numbers

8 -10 %

of the budgetary resources of city council are allocated to social services (almost € 17 million)

48.3%

of their inhabitants in Gavà use social networks

31.8%

use them to find out what happens in the town

4,276,073.24

Total ERDF budget granted

Challenge addressed

We want to change the relationship between citizenship and administration, from a reactive to a proactive administration, which offers services to citizens in a more personalized and close way, by knowing their needs through the use of data. In this way, we propose the creation of a digital tool that facilitates citizens to obtain the subsidies and social aids to which they are entitled in an agile and easy way, through systems assisted by artificial intelligence using the data, which is already available to a large extent. This new vision will help to better understand what happens at the collective level and at the individual level.

Solution proposed

Gavius is an innovative project that aims to create a virtual assistant in the local administration, with the use of Artificial Intelligence, for communicating to the citizens the social welfare that they can use, process, grant, and receive it comfortably, fast and simply through a phone application. The potential beneficiaries will identify themselves through their biometric data, and they will be able to request and manage the social welfare platform.
The City Hall of Gavà, according to its well-known position as an open and transparent administration, proposes to make a step forward and to become a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence and big data for the improvement of its management.
Gavius project is expected to be a more intelligent administration, which is a modern, accessible, and adapted to the digital transformation that we are nowadays experiencing, and always oriented to the citizenship. Because technology is already an indispensable aspect when it refers to address the social challenges and re-think the public management.
Gavius is a tool that will provide solutions at different levels:
1.   Citizenship: simplify and accelerate the bureaucratic processes with the City Hall.
2.   Govern teams: to assist in decision making from the interpretation of data (municipality data driven).
3.   Municipal teams: improvement of productivity, speed and efficiency when it comes to the management of citizens’ procedures.
4.   Other administrations: Testing of the model based on the machine learning and Artificial Intelligence for the modernization of the public sector.

Partnership

Gava City Council, together with Mataro City Council
Polytechnical University of Catalonia
Institut for Democratic Culture in the Digital Era (Xnet) - NGO
Open Administration of Catalonia Consortium (AOC Consortium) - regional public authority
Grupo Corporativo Gfi Informática - enterprise
ERNST & YOUNG - enterprise
International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) - research organisation

Expected results

We expect a real change in relationship between citizens and administration, more agile, more transparent and more efficient.

We want to improve the citizens’ satisfaction and experience in their relationship with local administration, increasing digital interactions by 15% (web, apps, etc.)
Facilitate the work of municipal workers when interacting with citizens, reducing the time spent on administrative work by 10%
Generate knowledge about public services, allowing faster, more convenient and more agile access to citizen services and improving their efficiency and effectiveness
Create a new methodology, with methods and tools based on AI that can be used by other public administrations to create new apps before the end of the project. Deploy and test tools to assist municipal workers, citizens and municipal managers and politicians
Ensure the use of non-discriminatory and unbiased algorithms, drafting an ethical code for AI, co-created with citizens and defining tools for the mitigation of risks of bias, before creating applications for citizen services

Promote transparency on the use of AIs, adopting the state of the art in transparency protocols before creating apps for citizen services

Main milestones

November 2019: Official presentation of GAVIUS project in Gavà and signature of agreement between partners
February 2020: Engaging citizenship and focus groups with Design Thinking techniques. Co-creation between citizens, municipal workers and politicians
September 2020: Definition of the architecture of the digital services for social aids management
December 2021: Prototype generation
July 2022: Implementation of pilot system: bot for citizens, planning system and assistance for municipal staff
August 2022: Conclusions of strategies, impacts, cost / benefit analysis and handbook of legal, ethics, culture and transparency