Digitalization in Germany is not only advancing in Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. Digital applications are also becoming established in rural areas in various areas such as mobility, energy, business and social participation. As an equivalent to smart cities, so-called digital villages are emerging here that connect residents with each other, provide information about current events, digitize administration and strengthen the local economy. One of these digital villages is located in the Altenkirchen district of Rhineland-Palatinate on the border between the Siegerland and Westerwald regions: the municipality of Betzdorf-Gebhardshain.
The joint Digital Villages project between the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE Kaiserslautern, the Ministry of the Interior and Sport and the Rhineland-Palatinate Development Agency was launched in March 2015. Following an ideas competition in Rhineland-Palatinate municipalities, the two municipalities of Betzdorf-Gebhardshain and Eisenberg and Göllheim were selected. “Digitalization opens up new opportunities,” says Sarah Brühl, project coordinator of “Betzdorf digital”, a local campaign as part of the Digital Villages project. Rural areas are increasingly becoming a place to work and live for residents and newcomers alike. “The digital transformation is overcoming spatial and temporal restrictions so that modern work processes can combine working from home, office and living close to nature, as well as family and career.”
Following the first phase of the joint Digital Villages project, which combined local supply with volunteer citizens, phase 2 was launched in January 2017 and focused on the topics of communication and mobility. Digital solutions are currently being designed and tested, which were developed in workshops with citizens from the municipality.
Digital applications connect the residents of the municipality
The Digital Villages project essentially comprises four digital applications:
- DorfFunk is to become the communication center for the region, where citizens can offer their help, post requests, inform about events or point out shortcomings such as overfilled public garbage bins.
- BestellBar is an online marketplace where local retailers can present their products and accept online orders.
- With the DeliveryBar, parishioners can see which orders from the OrderBar, for example for their neighbor, are still waiting to be delivered and take them with them to hand them over to the recipient.
The two services BestellBar and LieferBar were tested in the first phase of the project in the municipality of Betzdorf-Gebhardshain with 16 local retailers. All municipalities in Rhineland-Palatinate can now buy them.
- Betzdorf-Gebhardshain residents can find daily news from the municipality, for example on cultural events, reports, sporting events, opening times or the current traffic situation, on a website called DorfNews. The reports come from the official gazette, newsletters or have been written by the citizens of the municipality with its 26,000 inhabitants themselves.
“Older people in particular appreciate the new communication options offered by the digital applications DorfNews and DorfFunk,” says Sarah Brühl.
The municipality goes digital thanks to high-speed internet
In addition to the Digital Villages project, the municipality of Betzdorf-Gebhardshain has presented other relevant fields of action in this area in a digital working paper. In addition to the expansion of the necessary infrastructure, these include the economy, energy, demographic change, work, administration, consumer protection and social participation and culture. The area of education and youth care includes IT information training and special programming courses. The integrated comprehensive school in Betzdorf-Kirchen has been awarded the title of STEM-friendly (STEM = subjects from the fields of mathematics, information technology, natural sciences and technology) and digital school. It has been participating in the state program “Medienkompetenz macht Schule” since 2011.
IGS Betzdorf-Kirchen will be connected to the high-speed Internet as part of an application for funding from the district of Altenkirchen for the federal broadband funding program of the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure(BMVI). The district will receive 6.6 million euros in federal funding and 5.3 million euros in funding from the state of Rhineland-Palatinate for the expansion of the broadband network in the local and association municipalities. In addition, 1.3 million euros in own funds are being raised for the district-wide infrastructure project. The subsidized broadband expansion will connect over 14,000 households, over 2,500 companies and 102 institutional users, including 55 schools and other educational institutions, 40 administrative buildings and seven rescue service control centers, to high-speed Internet. To this end, 160 kilometers of civil engineering work is to be carried out.
Broadband expansion in rural areas forms the basis for many digital services that municipalities and communities are developing. According to Bernd Brato, mayor of the municipality of Betzdorf-Gebhardshain, digitalization is much more than just broadband expansion: “Once broadband is available, politicians need to consider how they can use the existing infrastructure to strengthen rural areas.”
Sarah Brühl is certain that there will be more and more data-intensive applications in the future that will require a fast internet connection: “High-speed internet should be as commonplace in the area of public services as water and electricity,” she says.
Young and old alike benefit from digitalization
With the help of digitalization, rural areas are also becoming more attractive to young people. This can counteract the demographic change affecting many of these regions. With the digital solutions from projects such as “Digital Villages”, residents are better informed about their municipality and its services, have easy access to the right contacts in the administration and can better share resources, for example in the area of mobility, with their fellow residents and help each other. The municipality of Betzdorf-Gebhardshain will start operating a volunteer-run citizens’ bus that will take passengers to their destination free of charge.
The creative ideas of the districts and municipalities also make it easier for older people to access digital services that make everyday life easier. In Betzdorf, senior citizens are shown how to use tablets in training sessions. This is intended to lower the inhibition threshold that often exists for the use of technical devices. A central platform where all citizens of a community can come together is very popular with villagers from all age groups and increases the quality of life in the village community.
A key aim of the Digital Villages project is to enable other municipalities and districts to use the applications. In this specific case, the district of Giessen, which also benefits from the federal broadband funding program, has already been able to see for itself. District Administrator Anita Schneider visited the municipality of Betzdorf-Gebhardshain and noted that the project is providing new impetus in areas where neighbourly help is on the decline: “If we can use the possibilities of the digital world to modernize the villages in the Giessen region, we should do so because we can expand cooperation in the region.”
Photo top: The town hall of Betzdorf.
Photo credit: Marc Rosenkranz
Photos center: Digital villages (Fraunhofer IESE); children learn about digital applications through play (Felix Garcia-Diaz); Barbaraturm (Marc Rosenkranz); view of the local community of Steinebach (Marc Rosenkranz).