Challenge

How can the public administration facilitate the lives of people with social needs?

Current issue

The basic areas of social services have a catalog of benefits aimed at people with specific needs, but these aids are not always well known by the beneficiaries and are often difficult to apply for; in addition, the lack of agility in the response time of the administration causes a lot of anxiety in people, especially when they are in a situation of risk and vulnerability.

On the other hand, the social welfare technical staff who attend to the people who come to the offices are overwhelmed and complain that they have to spend a lot of time on administrative tasks and processing support, instead of dedicating in a more comprehensive way to focus on people and to work on other aspects of empowerment, job guidance and personal support.

The continuous use of ICT and the strong digitization that has taken place in the field of citizen care as a result of the covid-19 pandemic provides daily a lot of basic data that the municipal services do not know how to manage ( tidy up, standardize and systematize) to be able to profit from it.

So, we have a little-known catalog of social assistance, with complicated and slow application processes that urgently need to be simplified and streamlined, and reactive social services, with limited resources.

To solve the problem posed, we have the big data that is being accumulated in the social services of the local administration and the artificial intelligence algorithms that, well used, should allow us to design a digital service, proactive and personalized, to communicate citizens the social benefits they have available, to apply for and receive them in a convenient, quick and simple way.

Proposed solution

A virtual tool (or system of tools) to facilitate the obtaining of aid to people with social needs, with the ability to anticipate present and future scenarios in an environment of limited resources, while taking advantage of the opportunities of BigData that is being generated in social services and the use of artificial intelligence algorithms.

We call this complex system Gàvius.

What is Gavius?

Gàvius is an innovative project of the local administration to create a virtual assistant that, with the use of artificial intelligence, is able to communicate, process and grant citizens the social aid available to them. Thus, people who have identified themselves privately and securely will be able to apply for and manage aid on the spot, conveniently, quickly and easily, from a mobile application.

Gàvius will allow citizens to process and receive social assistance in a convenient, fast, simple and privacy-friendly way through a mobile application. Today this is a necessity because other services such as private banking have already arrived on the mobile and the administration must join this technology to facilitate and speed up the processing, until now slower, of these types of management .

However, Gàvius will not only benefit citizens by simplifying and streamlining the bureaucratic processes with the town hall, but will also provide solutions to:

  • Municipal social services workers/res. As a tool to improve productivity, speed and efficiency when attending to and allocating aid to people/families with social needs.
  • Government teams. As a tool for planning, forecasting social resources and help in making decisions based on the correct interpretation of the data (DataDriven)
  • Other administrations. A model based on the is tested machine learning algorithm and artificial intelligence for the modernization of the public sector that can be transferred/replicated in other areas and administrations.

In this way, the aim is to change the relationship between the administration and the citizens, moving from a reactive administration to a proactive administration, which offers services to the citizens in a more personalized and closer way. The new “AP-citizenship” relationship must allow us to resolve aspects such as speed, transparència, sustainability and promote real organizational change for greater effectiveness and efficiency of public resources, ensuring that there is no discrimination on grounds of ethnicity, gender, economic or social status, and that the system is easily accessible, flexible and transparent.

"In a globalized and digitized world, from the public administration we must take advantage of the opportunities presented to us to establish a relationship with the citizen that is closer, of higher quality, more comfortable and that allows us to provide a better service"

Raquel Sánchez, Mayor of Gavà (2014-2021) and current Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda

Why hasn't an existing solution been replicated?

Because it doesn't exist. When Gavà City Council, promoter of the project, presented the idea to Mataró City Council, the AOC Consortium and other external agents from the business world, civil society and the university environment, a market study was carried out and it was verified that there was no similar solution already in place.

It was therefore an innovative idea that met the criteria established by the European initiative Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) of innovation, participation, quality, measurability and transfer. That is why it was presented as an urban innovation project to the UIA so that it could be subsidized. that resources were requested in the 4th call for grants from the UIA.

The partners of the project

The complexity of urban challenges means that public administrations often cannot act alone. To design and implement effective and innovative solutions, it is necessary to involve all actors in society.

For this reason, Gàvius has representants of citizenship, public administration, business and research. It is the so-called quadruple helix.

What does each sector contribute?

  • Company, representafrom for inetum i EY: experts in technologies for digital transition/transformation and analysis of the legislative challenge in relation to data protection (RGPD): assumptions in which users' data can be accessederesholy, with or without consent, right to information, data processing for profiling, etc.)
  • Research and university, representafrom by UPC i CIMNE : application of artificial intelligence and numerical calculation power.
  • Civil society, representafrom for XNET- activists for digital rights: make a usable application, with ethical content and that preserves (safeguards) people's privacy.
  • Public administration, representafrom for City Council of Gavà, City of Mataró i AOC Consortium: implementation of the solution in the two municipalities studying how to transfer it to other European municipalities.

What else does the AOC bring?

The task of the AOC is to promote the digital transformation of Catalan public administrations and to promote the development and use of digital public services aimed at citizens. It is precisely in this area that we can contribute a great deal of knowledge and transfer our experience to other municipalities.

The participation of the AOC is concrete, therefore, in supporting the partners of the project in the following activities:

  • Identification and collection of relevant information from available databases related to the purpose of the project
  • Definition of the data governance framework and preparation of the data models (extraction, cleaning and transformation)
  • Planning of co-creation and co-design processes with citizens and municipal staff
  • Design and construction of a bot integrated with authentication systems via web and mobile devices, which allows citizens to make inquiries and requests
  • Implementation of the solution, standardization and pilot tests
  • Drawing conclusions for the possible replicability of the solution in other European municipalities

In addition, the AOC provides:

  • The digital identity solutions with which citizens can access the application reinforced with facial and image recognition techniques (VALID) and the self-managed digital identity pilot using blockchain,
  • The interoperability platform Via Oberta to access the data consultation of the social records within the framework of the procedures authorized by the transferors of the data (AEAT, TGSS, DGP, etc.)
  • El Meu Espai, the inter-administrative citizen folder.

And he is responsible for ensuring the reuse and standardization of the final result from the very beginning.eres phases of the system design and, especially, so that the Gàvius architecture is aligned with the Catalan Interoperability and Digital Identity Model.

The AOC led the Reflection and Risk Analysis Workshop that took place on 14/2/2020 at the AOC headquarters.

Objectives of the workshop:

  • Reflect and discuss together the nature of the Gàvius project. It is done with the Canvas tool, which facilitates and speeds up the process of sharing and agree on the value proposition and the key aspects of a project.
  • Explore the possible risk scenarios that may threaten the viability of the Gàvius project, as well as study the impact and the probability of these happening.

With the results obtained in the workshop, the "action plan" was drawn up which has served to detect in time and/or anticipate the various eventualities that have been emerging throughout the development of the project.

The financing of the project

This project is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund through the Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) initiative

The total budget of the project is 5,3 million euros of which the European fund UIA will finance 80%, with an aid of 4,2 million euros, and one million is contributed by the partners

Status of the project

The Gavius ​​service is terminated. A solution was developed, but it is waiting to be activated in a productive environment of the promoting municipalities. The reuse of the result by the AOC is not planned.

The Gàvius project started on 1/9/2019 and ended on 28/2/2024.

The co-creation sessions with citizens and thestaff municipal were carried out during the months of May and June 2021.

The final product of the co-creation process was a virtual assistant prototype that was tested during the month of October 2022:

More information