The European Institute of Romania (EIR) organized on Friday, July 9, 2021, between 10:00 and 11:30, a new event in the Dialogues @ IER series, with the theme #digitalization.
Our guests were Mrs. Mirela Mărcuț, PhD, lecturer, University of Oradea, founder of digitalpolicy.ro, Mrs. Veronica Ștefan, founder and coordinator of Digital Citizens Romania, and Mr. Radu Puchiu, CEO of H.appy Cities. The event was moderated by Mrs. Flavia Durach, PhD, lecturer, National University of Political Studies and Administration, Bucharest.
Among the topics addressed, the most important were related to the digital inclusion of young people and / or other age groups, the digitalization of public services, and smart cities. The debate highlighted the following aspects:
- Human capital is the essence of any discussion we have about digitalization, and one of the problems that Romania has in this field is related to the poor understanding of what digital skills mean and how they can be developed among the population;
- It is important to look at the mistakes made during the pandemic, especially in terms of online education (e.g. rudimentary equipment with devices that did not properly facilitate online collaboration, or the lack of personalized content);
- Digital public services are fragmented at local, regional, and national level in Romania; a somewhat ineffective policy has been to bring online a series of traditional bureaucratic procedures that are not, in fact, applicable to the digital environment;
- In Romania, there is still a lot of debate about digitalization (which is just a first step), but in the European Union there is much more emphasis on the digital transition / transformation (which involves a process of changing thinking, automating processes, updating the way in which we interact with civil servants);
- The digital transformation cannot generate long-term changes without a multi-level governance structure that facilitates the process of public policy making (in Romania, many decisions are still made on the top-down model);
- Unlike the central administration, which is more oriented towards maintaining bureaucratic procedures, there are more prerequisites at the city level for the involvement of citizens in the digitization processes, while there is a need for the local administration to be more proactive in this regard;
- Romanian cities 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 on the basis of data) and to involve people (local intelligence to solve problems of the community).