European E-Ciy Award also called The First European Benchmark Study for City Portals studied all European cities with more than 200.000 citizens with a benchmark catalogue including an amazing 1.078 single criteria (indeed, this is a German study). The resulting ranking:
1. Copenhagen
2. Berlin
3. Stuttgart
4. Bremen
5. Hamburg
6. Århus
7. Köln
8. Helsiniki
9. Vienna
10. Barcelona
11. Odense
Denmark’s only three large cities are among these 11 best ranked cities.
As a citizen of Copenhagen, I must admit that I rarely visit the city’s website. I did however do so when I recently moved home, and wanted to register my new address in the civil register. That is indeed possible to do via Copenhagen’s website, but one here needs a special access code, which they send in a postal letter, to your registred address. I went to the website after I’d moved, so that little feature rendered the service useless for me, because even though the access code is a general code for all self-services, that was the first time I needed it, and hadn’t ordered it in advance. So much for life situations as a model …
On interoperability of systems, my moving address also taught me how things can go wrong, when systems do not interoperate. Since I couldn’t use the online service, I went to the Civil Registration Office to register. Good, friendly sevice. No queues. Perfect service. I asked the kind civil servant who served me, by her screen, whether my new data was now “in the system”, so I could now order an access code for future use of the website. She said, “yes, sure, your data is in our system now”. Later that afternoon, I went to the municipality’s website and registred for an access code, which should now be sent to my new address.
But no, I never got the code. Two weeks after, I talked with the person who’d moved into my old flat. He had a few letters for me. Among them a letter from the municipality …