Digital Villages Lower Saxony – Digital infrastructure for rural areas in Lower Saxony
Project
The project Digital Villages Lower Saxony is being carried out as a cooperative project of the Digital Opportunities Foundation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) and is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Federal and European Affairs and Regional Development. The Digital Villages Platform consists of various offerings and concepts, called solutions in the project context, that demonstrate the opportunities of a holistic approach to the topic of digitization in the sense of a digital ecosystem.
Aim of the project
The Digital Villages Platform supports municipalities in digitization in rural areas as a low-threshold and high-performance service in terms of data protection. The Digital Villages Platform enables proactive communication and direct exchange on a wide range of topics (nationwide, regional and local). The platform reaches a broad target group and appeals to both digitally affine and potentially less digitally affine people.
Avoiding a digital divide between town and country starts locally: Where the Digital Villages platform is established, local government can pass on its information directly and digitally to its citizens, and neighbors can network with each other digitally. This strengthens social cohesion with and through digitization.
For the three-year project period until 2025, the offerings of the Digital Villages platform are free of charge for the participating municipalities due to project funding by the Lower Saxony Ministry for Federal and European Affairs and Regional Development.
The Digital Villages applications expand communicative exchange in rural areas through digital services. To this end, the Digital Villages platform provides (1) services such as DorfFunk, which promote communication among citizens. With access to the (2) Lower Saxony LandNews, different actors* can publish information and announcements online and also play them out to the users of DorfFunk. The (3) DorfFunk Integration Plugin enables municipalities to use their existing websites as a source for announcements in DorfFunk. Thus, information from different sources such as administration and civil society can also be bundled locally or regionally in the
DorfFunk or the (4) digital showcase. Finally, (5) the LösBar allows the intensification of the exchange between the population and the local administration.
The Digital Opportunities Foundation is committed to getting more people interested in the possibilities of the Internet and supporting them in using it, as well as strengthening media literacy in all population groups. In cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE, the foundation has been implementing the Digital Villages Lower Saxony project since February 2021.
Project partner
Fraunhofer IESE / Digital Villages