City of Bremerhaven

bremerhaven

Bremerhaven, with its 120.000 inhabitants and 4.500 civil servants is the largest city on the German North Sea coast. Over the past 5 years in particular, the municipality of Bremerhaven has placed a significant level of time and resource on improving IT based services for the benefit of both its citizens and visitors. The CLIPS project and its potential for a cloud centred approach achieves this goal with the further benefit of supporting the optimisation of public resources and enhancing the efficiency of administrative procedures.

Target services that will form the basis of the CLIPS Pilots

  • Registration for Kindergarten
  • Registration with the administration: Every citizen moving to Bremerhaven has to register with the administration. The online form is now prepared and modified to comply with the SOAP/REST interface required by the CLIPS cloud.
  • Making an appointment with the citizen attention centre. An online form for making an appointment with the citizen attention centre will be modified to use the SOAP / REST interfaces required by CLIPS. In combination with the online registration this offers the citizen a much quicker way to register with the administration. The online appointment tool allows for reducing the waiting time in a queue to nearly zero.
  • Registering a dog
  • De-registering with the administration (aimed at seasonal workers)
  • Access to open data covering a range of public support services, networks, societies and institutions including schools, kindergartens, sport clubs, cultural institutions, playgrounds, administrative departments. In all cases a full description of services will be provided.

Stakeholders involved

Public authorities: Will provide access to appropriate administrative documents, open data sets and will process the data collected.

SME Participation: BIT as an SME will be responsible for adapting the forms and for making them ready for the CLIPS cloud. BIT will also use the mash-up editor to provide new services to Bremerhaven citizens and people moving to Bremerhaven.

Citizen engagement: Citizens will be invited to the use the new cloud based services with feedback recorded and analysed through online surveys.

The services deployed in the CLIPS Bremerhaven pilot are Register (or De-register) with the Administration, Register a Dog, Request a Place at Kindergarten and make an Appointment with the Administration, most of which have performed as planned and reached the targeted user numbers. The service Register with the Administration is also deployed in the refugee centre of Bremerhaven and is used to register the refugees, a process until now done by fax.

The five district conferences of Bremerhaven were contacted to have focus points where citizen feedback can be gathered. This direct contact to these citizen forums was quite valuable and yielded the best feedback.

In phase 2 of CLIPS Bremerhaven pilot the services were expanded with OpenData, so that for example the user can look up all Kindergartens in the vicinity of an address they are moving to in Bremerhaven.