Tysvær municipality has a goal of creating good information flow, making the dialogue with it’s inhabitants easy.
What started as a municipal investment in 2020 where the municipality could gather information and send push notifications about important news and developments (such as COVID-19) has developed into a citizen app with ‘all’ information gathered in the same place.
News was collected automatically from the website of the municipality, from Facebook, and other relevant sources. Now the municipality has broadened its scope and collects information from the cultural centre, the local newspaper, and has gathered different projects in the same place as well as links to relevant services for the inhabitant/user. Also, local teams and associations are being added to the app – creatinga platform with all the activities and events happening in the area.
One of the goals was to make the information more accessible to the inhabitants, by gathering the information in the same place. At the same time it can function as an important dissemination platform for the municipality- they can send out push notifications when they have important municipal updates.
Smarter future
The information in the app is presented in an easy and understandable way. The user can choose what geographical areas s/he wants information about, as well as which themes s/he is interested in. In that way the app is also customized to the individual citizens preferences.
Tysvær is in the front of rethinking citizen dialogue, making it fit for the digital age, and is in good company with other municipalities and cities. Innocode, the company that made the app could in august 2022 boast that more than 15 Nordic municipalities and cities had chosen to use applications to reach their citizens. Applications such as these can make the interactions between municipalities, associations, businesses, and the individual citizen easier, as well as our societies smarter.
Screenshot of the citizens’ application.
Photo in heading by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash