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Joining the collaboration

Is your municipality interested in joining the collaboration? Or would you like to know more about how to take part? We describe the 7 steps by which you join the collaboration. And you are never on your own.

  1. Gathering information. You have already started by visiting this website. But there is much more we can tell and show you about our experiences and expertise in deploying the virtual assistant. And we are happy to do so. Free of charge and without obligation. We are municipal colleagues for municipal colleagues.

  2. Presentation of Gem for you and your colleagues. We arrange for a colleague from an already participating municipality to give a presentation to you and your relevant colleagues. That way you get the experiences first-hand and can ask anything you want to know about the virtual municipal assistant.

  3. Internal decision-making in your municipality. You will no doubt want to consult your stakeholders on whether your municipality wants to take part. And funnily enough, the first collaboration already begins here: several municipalities have gone before you and are happy to share their approach and memos, so you can draw on them to ease your internal decision-making.

  4. Signing the collaboration agreement. The authorised signatory of your municipality signs an addendum for participation in the collaboration with the Gem municipalities. This addendum is then also signed by VNG, in its role as supporter of the collaboration. With that, your municipality officially joins the Gem community. You then receive Gem as-is: all content, functionality and technology that the municipalities have developed over the past years is immediately available to your municipality.

  5. Start onboarding together with a buddy municipality. In this phase we set up Gem for your municipality together: - We share relevant documentation, such as the DPIA and the processing agreement. You also have the latter signed by the authorised signatory and by the hosting party. - Colleagues who will work with Gem create accounts for the systems and platforms used to manage the assistant and for the collaboration. - The widget code is added to your municipal website's code. You partly determine the look and feel yourself. - We set up the 'back end' of the virtual municipal assistant for your municipality. You then add the local information yourself. - You start a short test period with the widget and, if desired, the link to the live-chat platform your municipality uses. - For implementation in your local work process, you are supported by a buddy municipality from the community. - You can choose to hire an implementation manager to guide the above process. Contacts for this run via other municipalities.

  6. Going live. At a moment of your choosing, you go live with the virtual municipal assistant. Municipalities are live within 4 to 6 weeks on average.

  7. Collaborating. Your colleagues join the meetings that fit their role on a structural basis. Think of the content team, for colleagues working on the Gem content and/or your website content. And they join the portfolio meetings where, together with all participants, we discuss the progress of ongoing developments and where new initiatives can be introduced and discussed.

Interested in joining the collaboration?

How we work together

Even though the virtual municipal assistant runs on technology, the effort is and remains human work. Municipalities work together at the following levels:

Content development (content team). Together we improve the content:

  • We share insights on better setting up the municipal website for conversational AI.
  • We share insights about our residents' questions and about how we can improve the technology, so that answer quality increases.

Developing new wishes and questions (portfolio meeting). Together we set the course:

  • We share the considerations for using open source technology, with a preference for sovereign solutions.
  • We jointly contribute to the roadmap for the further development of the virtual municipal assistant.

Joint policy agreements and documentation. Together we record what we learn:

  • We jointly commit to sharing existing expertise in areas such as information security, privacy, sustainability, ethics and legal matters.
  • We record our choices in shared documentation and documents relevant to all municipalities, such as the vision on virtual assistance in services.

Interested in joining the collaboration?

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