06.03.2024
Digital communication platform to support community life
Digital pilot platform LENIE ready for communication support in community life
Organizing aid campaigns, interest groups, or events? LENIE offers digital support for organizing village and community life. Citizens can become more involved in community life and engage in direct and time-saving communication on specific topics of daily community life.
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LENIE*
Would you have known that your neighbor was giving away the old hedge trimmers you could really use, and that your child's elementary school teacher was offering sewing workshops in her free time, when you've long wanted to give your old fabric scraps a new lease of life? Probably not. And how often have you wished to quickly and easily access neighborly help and share your own ideas with like-minded people in your area? The new digital pilot platform LENIE – Living in Lower Austria aims to provide support for all of these needs.
The idea and its implementation
The state of Lower Austria wanted its citizens to benefit from digital innovations with socially relevant benefits and to help them participate in their implementation. The starting point for this was a sandpit workshop in the summer of 2021, where digital solutions for successful village and community life were discussed and fleshed out. Four ideas developed during the workshops form the basis of the LENIE project. This was followed by the initiation and implementation of the project, from its launch in January 2022 until the launch of the pilot platform in autumn 2023.
In close collaboration with five pilot municipalities in Lower Austria, the application's functions were continuously developed, expanded, and revised. FOTEC (along with NÖ.Regional and DIH-OST) played a key role in implementing the ideas coordinated by the Office for Technology and Digitalization under the direction of Bernhard Gerhardter.
"The particular challenges of this project were reconciling the requirements of the pilot municipalities, because they were so diverse," reports Michael Kollegger from FOTEC about the collaboration. "We look forward to further projects with the State of Lower Austria."
Specific Functions
Every citizen using the platform can submit or comment on ideas and concerns under the "Do & Help" tab. Possible ideas for use include organizing events and community activities, announcing projects, and forming interest groups. The app features a chat function designed to further simplify communication. Managing goods can be done by giving them away and exchanging them, thus promoting sustainability in the sense of reuse and now, with modern means, connecting with things that were more commonplace in earlier times: neighborly assistance or the free exchange of goods.
Outlook
Gemdat Lower Austria is the first company to use this platform. "LENIE is the perfect complement to our GEM2GO app, with which we already directly reach registered citizens in 365 Lower Austrian municipalities. Over 13 million app accesses in 2023 demonstrate the reach the GEM2GO app now has in Lower Austria. We hope that with LENIE's functionality, we can make our service offerings even more attractive to municipalities in the medium term and thus contribute to a functioning social life," explains gemdat Lower Austria Managing Director Leopold Kitir.
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