In order to take a further step towards the "Smart City", an interactive digital community platform is being developed and launched for the city of Winterthur at neighborhood level. The platform aims to expand interaction and participation in the neighborhood as well as bidirectional communication between the neighborhood and the city by adding digital functions, thereby enhancing the quality of life. In order to better exploit the potential of the digital neighborhood platform and to expand its possibilities, the next step will be to optimize it with regard to various aspects:

1. the tool should be better tailored to the needs of the neighborhood residents by optimizing the structure of the tool, integrating new functionalities and better channeling the needs.

2. to make better use of synergies and thus resources, cross-departmental and combinable needs in the tool should be better aligned and coordinated and networked with other platforms.

3. in order to activate social groups that are difficult to reach (hard to reach) and to integrate them into the participation process, the tool is to be optimized in terms of usability and language aspects for these groups.

4. with regard to scaling the tool to other neighborhoods, a concept for networking the individual neighborhood platforms will be developed in the final part of the project. In addition, the tool will be tailored to the specific needs and characteristics of each neighbourhood and will contribute to the further development of Smart City Winterthur.

In summary, this project will develop a concept for the design of the structure and process sequence of a digital, scalable neighborhood platform that allows for a cross-departmental, customized approach to the needs of the neighborhood residents and an efficient exchange between neighborhood residents and the city.