Eurocities Digital Forum Lab meeting 2025
The City of Brussels participated in the annual Eurocities Digital Forum Lab meeting that took part from 2nd to the 4th of April in order to share best practices with other European Cities.
This year’s theme was “Digital Rights at the heart of the cities”. The City could therefore follow several presentations but also follow workshops in order to share best practices with other cities regarding digital rights. The focus was not only put on digital inclusion but also on transparency and digital wellbeing.
- The presentation on the best practices of the implementation of the European Declaration of the Digital rights was inspiring for the City as its digital rights charter is based on it but every shared initiative by other cities are always a nice source of inspiration. Rotterdam shared for example its Teatime initiative while Eindhoven shared that more than 800 algorithms were made transparent via their algorithm register and Porto shared more about its city’s digital system information platform and sign communication linked to it. Transparency was this session’s key word.
- During the Digital Divide taskforce group and Cities Coalition for Digital rights presentations, the feedback from all the launched initiatives on the Digital Rights Day in December was shared. Leipzig also shared several best practices among which a pilot project to use an AI chatbot to foster Accessibility of Maps and a sign language avatar for the municipality while Manchester shared about their digital inclusion toolkit. Amsterdam also shared their work on their Young Netcitizen program where the focus on digital wellbeing as the impact of the online environment is much bigger than just a few well known negative impacts such as cyber bullying, etc. It has also an impact on the decrease in language and reading skills, sleep issues, etc. They tackle several issues linked to digital in a transversal way in order to improve young people’s wellbeing.
- The State of the digital decade and the next steps and recommendations were also discussed, such as AI and other technological trends, with a focus on the fast evolutions and the possible synergies within the current geopolitical context. EU’s Digital Objectives have been presented and debated, all speakers agreeing that technological leadership is key for a competitive, sovereign and resilient EU.
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The Digital Forum lab pitched the work they have been working on the last months :
- The Cities of Eindhoven, Lisbon and Leipzig shared their whitepaper about Sensing, the responsible use of sensors and sensor data, including direct use cases of cities so that this can be directly applied in other cities.
- Barcelona presented the guidelines for developing Local Digital Twins to which the City has been contributing abundantly. They include a commonly agreed definition of the Local Digital Twins, governance and interoperability recommendations, as well as the Citizen perspective insights to take into account, with a focus on ethical and security challenges. The Guidelines are exploring all angles, at a high level and are meant to be used by city managers as well as the political leadership.
- Ethics Board for Emerging Technologies was presented by the city of Torino together with their joint cooperation with the cities of Eindhoven, Helsinki and Köln. They insisted on the opportunities and the challenges faced by European cities with regards to emerging technologies, such as AI. Their findings, with a human-centric approach, on the knowledge, tools, use cases and recommendations have been shared with the audience, providing a path for other committed cities to follow.
Pictures: © Bordeaux Métropole – JB Mengès
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