Sofia has entered the Beta phase of its participation in the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Digital Innovation Initiative and as part of the regular consultations with the experts from the UK FutureGov, we held the first international meeting during this stage of the project.

Ana Georgieva and Velko Velkov from the team of Innovative Sofia, and Antonia Shalamanova and Desislava Todorova from Green Sofia, participated in the online work meeting. The two organisations, on behalf of the Sofia Municipality, manage the participation of Sofia in the international project, and the sphere we are currently working in is ‘administrative services, based on life events’.

Currently, we have focused on the event “moving to Sofia or within Sofia”, taking into account the various potential occasions behind this – finding a job, starting a business, education, marriage. There is also a difference depending on whether the person is from another Bulgarian city, comes from a country in or outside the EU, or is relocating from one district of Sofia to another.

At the meeting (the so-called Show & Tell) we presented our vision of the “ideal” fully automated user journey, related to the overall experience of individual users – owners, landlords, and tenants when seeking city administration’s services for changing their permanent or current address.

The teams from Tallinn, Vilnius, Helsinki, Dublin, Prague, and Bratislava also took part in the meeting. We are having separate independent monthly meetings with our colleagues from the capital of Slovakia as part of the Initiative, as the case their team chose to work on is the closest to that of Sofia – optimisation of city services for taxes and fees. Tallinn is working on the transformation of urban planning services, Helsinki on employment services, Prague on waste collection and disposal.

Stay tuned for more information on our next steps during the Beta phase of the initiative in our upcoming blogs!