The Erasmus+ “DCEx -Digital City Experts – making administrative staff drivers for the digital era” project involves 7 partners from 5 different European countries and aims at increasing the general understanding of the smart and digital innovations and exchanging experiences, with particular attention to small and medium-sized municipalities.

Despite the strong pressure exerted during this phase of digitization of the Municipalities, the level of digital knowledge of employees of municipal administrations, the real implementers of digitization process, does not seem adequate. In Germany and Italy, for example, municipal administrations have decision-making power in the development of digital projects, but they are not sufficiently qualified for these strategic tasks and are therefore less able to achieve concrete results.

To offer a solution to this problem, the “Digital City Experts – DCEx” project aims at setting up a European online training and knowledge exchange platform that makes the digitization of towns more concrete for the target group of administrative employees and assistants as well as for stakeholders and citizens. Furthermore, the partners will create a training curriculum to qualify relevant actors in municipal administrations to become “Digital City Experts” and thus build up in-house knowledge on the topic Smart City. The curriculum strengthens a specific training course, which will see the development of training materials (Smart education kit) to be used within innovative learning paths (MOOCs) on the topics of the project. Finally, among the intellectual outputs of the project, a manual (Smart City Handbook) will be created to guide and convince sceptics within municipal administrations and traditional trainers on the advantages of Smart Cities. Furthermore, this manual will be a complementary training for professionals in this sector. Smart City Bootcamps events will be organized in order to allow the exchange of knowledge and increase awareness and interest on the topic of Smart Cities. During Smart City Bootcamps the administrators and municipal employees of the different countries involved will discuss on the topic of “future city” and will exchange experiences and best practices on the common platform.