When is the next train to Parchim? How can I tell town officials that the swing at the playground is broken? Where can I book an appointment for the town hall? What’s going on in the town center today? And when is the paper waste actually collected? For some time now, the citizens of Hagenow have been able to find answers to questions like these in the town’s own app. With HageNow! around one in four households in the town in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern can now find out about various local and regional topics or use the digital services. The app was created as part of the implementation of the city of Hagenow’s digital agenda, which aconium GmbH supported from the outset.
In 2019, the city of Hagenow’s economic development committee decided to develop a digital agenda for the location. A regional network of city and district representatives, local and regional stakeholders from the administration, business, initiatives and associations as well as the scientific community identified specific measures with the expert support of aconium GmbH to exploit the opportunities of digitalization for the municipality. Tailor-made projects were identified in the key areas of administration, education, mobility, tourism, trade and retail. The “Digital Agenda Hagenow” was presented in February 2020.
One of the goals of the Digital Agenda was to create a central communication platform for the administration and the various social groups in Hagenow. The friendly municipality of Bad Belzig was able to point to the right solution here. Together with the agency Smart Village Solutions, the Brandenburg town developed a modular solution for its own needs.
The Smart Village app is available as open source software and is customized according to the modular principle. Municipalities select the functions that are actually needed locally and adapt the appearance with their own colors and logos.
Very different aspects of municipal life benefit from the app. For example, it connects digital administrative services, can issue national warnings and offers practical everyday helpers such as waste calendars, deadline and defect notifiers or informs citizens about news through multimodal news on the start page of all users or via push notifications. Companies can also present themselves in a business directory and offer services or publish job advertisements. Civic and local political engagement can be increased through the integration of council information systems or citizen participation tools such as surveys. Modules such as the digital bulletin board or group-based forums promote exchange and bring people together in their home town.
The Smart Village app can automatically integrate a wide range of content via interfaces. The major advantage of this individualized app implementation is that each time the app is implemented, new ideas and functions are potentially available to everyone else in the app toolbox as open source modules. Municipalities therefore constantly benefit from the exchange with other users.
The Smart Village app is now being used in almost 40 towns, villages and districts as the basis for their own apps. Numerous additional functions are planned for HageNow! this year. In the town of Hagenow, the Smart Village app is already a complete success and a direct contribution to digitalization.