City of Santander

The city of Santander has 176.064 habitants, and an area of influence between 250.000 and 300.000 habitants. The council relates daily with hundreds of citizens who visit the offices for information or the need for some administrative procedure. Santander City is working to provide a more efficient city management closer to the citizens through the use of the e-administration. Besides, driven by administrative laws, currently Santander is involved in a digitalized process of all administrative procedures. Santander is working in order to change citizen interaction with public Administration transforming long queues of people to the e-administration.

Santander is at the forefront of innovation when talking about smart cities thanks to a combination of research, innovation, knowledge and technology with a range of initiatives designed to further cement this position. Making the city’s systems and services smarter saves costs and increases efficiencies, contributing to a more liveable and sustainable city, boosting an environment for long-term economic growth. Innovation in management and governance provides qualitative improvements to the public services. Santander City Council is improving the current service delivery capabilities by making their services (mobility, transport, street and public lighting, cultural and touristic information, e-government, waste management, irrigation) smarter. The city council has developed an open data portal, http://datos.santander.es/, with a catalogue of 75 data sets, which will allow the interested parties to develop and explore new apps in new businesses, offering new services to the citizens and increasing their welfare and the sustainability of the new city model. Most evident benefits that can be obtained running this initiative are the following:

• Facilitate the transparency and the report delivery. Citizens can understand better how administrations work and how their taxes are used. Definitely, administrations increase credibility.
• Give business added value, in a manner that this could develop services and products, based on this open data. Therefore, it generates new business opportunities.
• Better services for Citizens, as a result of business opportunities created.
• Enable or ease collaboration between administrations, even between different offices of the same administration.

Santander City is involved in initiatives like CLIPS project because it is convinced that high levels of innovation will generate positive results for citizens and for businesses and will contribute to the growth of local economy.

Target services that will form the basis of the CLIPS Pilots

Santander city has already spent a lot of effort in digitalizing city life, however substantial work is still required for the digitalization of all administrative procedures to not only improve customers service but also resource.

The services planned for the pilot part of the CLIPS project in the city of Santander are:

• Census – to get census certificates
• General register – to get licenses and permission
• Traffic – traffic purposes to pay
• Tax collection -to consult taxes pending payment

Prior to the start of the CLIPS project, these services had already an online version and besides these services are among the most demanded by the citizens.

Figure 1 shows the future architecture that will allow the integration of current available digitalized services in the cloud. The key element is the BIP (Business Integrator Platform), which is a combination of SSO (Single Sign On) and micro-proxies for enabling the integration in CLIPS architecture.

Figure 1 Santander Municipality pilot structure

Stakeholders involved

Public Authorities: Public Authorities will select the services that are going to be digitalized and moved to the cloud. They will also assure data privacy and protection based on European, national and local directives.

SME Participation: SMEs will be crucial in the development of new public services based on the CLIPS architecture.

Citizen Participation: As a direct beneficiary of the new approach, Citizens will be provide information including user needs.

Phase 1 Services

The effort during the first stage of the project has led to the provision of a service related to the procurement of official census certificates, which is the most demanded procedure by Santander citizens. This document can be retrieved at http://clips.tst-sistemas.es by each person in possession of a valid digital certificate and a home in the city of Santander.

In addition, another service related to Demographic Analysis has been developed, combining basic citizen information with data extracted from Open Data Santander datasets, thus providing people with interesting data related to their district.

The activities now involve continuing the development of new services to be deployed during Phase 2, making these services known to Santander’s population and encouraging them to use the CLIPS solution to handle their day-to-day procedures.

Phase 2 Services

Given the characteristics of the available and most demanded services, and the possibilities derived from the existing platforms, during the second phase new services relying on open data have been implemented, in order to provide Santander citizens with additional and useful information at the moment they carry out a certain procedure.

Therefore, two brand new services involving the use of open data datasets have been developed, providing citizens and tourists with useful information about transportation in the city or provide them with the ability to easily check Santander’s cultural agenda, linking it all to a specific address as selected by the user.

In order to not restrict these services strictly to Santander citizens and let visitors employ them, an alternate path has been prepared to incorporate some cross border capabilities to the three services based in Open Data.