Event report

The European Institute of Romania (EIR) organised on Friday, 9 July 2021, from 10 a.m. to 11.30 p.m., a new event in the series of Dialogues@IER, with the theme of gid://decidim-dife/Decidim::Hashtag/2344/digitalizarea. Our guests to the dialogue were lecturer Mirela Mărcuț, University of Oradea, founder of digitalpolicy.ro, Mrs. Veronica Stefan, founder and coordinator of Digital Citizens Romania and Radu Puchiu, CEO H.appy Cities. Moderation of the event was provided by dr. Flavia Durach lecturer, National School of Political and Administrative Studies, Bucharest. The digital inclusion of young people and/or other age groups, the digitalisation of public services, smart cities were among the topics addressed, highlighting the following issues in the debate: Human capital is the essence of any discussion we have about digitalisation, and one of the problems Romania has in this area is related to the poor understanding of what digital skills mean and how to develop it among the population; It is important to look at where mistakes were made during the pandemic, especially with regard to online education (e.g. rudimentary equipment with devices that did not properly facilitate online collaboration, did not have personalised content); Digital public services are fragmented at local, regional and national level in Romania; a somewhat ineffective policy has been bringing a number of traditional bureaucratic procedures online that are not in fact applicable to the digital environment; In Romania, there is still much talk about digitalisation (which is just a first step), but in the European Union there is a discussion about digital transition/transformation (which involves a process of changing thinking, automating processes, updating the way civil servants interact with each other); Digital transformation cannot generate long-term change without a multi-level governance structure facilitating public policy-making (in Romania, many decisions are still taken on the top-down model); In contrast to central government, which is more geared towards maintaining bureaucratic procedures, more conditions exist in cities for involving citizens in digitalisation processes and there is a need for local government to be more proactive in this regard; Cities in Romania aim to become smart cities, but without using data (not necessarily at the level of public policies, but in terms of simple decisions that are not made based on data) and involve people (local intelligence to solve community problems).