Nitor partners with the city of Helsinki to develop more functional culture and leisure related digital services

What digital services is the City of Helsinki’s Culture and Leisure Division developing?
In line with the city’s vision, everyday life in tomorrow’s Helsinki will run more smoothly. Effective digitalisation promotes equality and cooperation and improves the well-being of the residents of Helsinki. One of the City of Helsinki’s key objectives is to prevent digital exclusion and provide easy access to services. The aim is to make digital services accessible to all, improve the flow of information and reduce the need for residents to run from one service point to another.

However, digitalisation in Helsinki does not mean the end of people-to-people encounters, but merely an increase in suitable options for everyone. The Culture and Leisure Division is divided into four sections: culture, sport, youth and library services. The digital services to be developed include various reservation services for city residents as well as application systems for leisure activities. These include, for example, the electronic application and payment for boat places in the city and registering for events with the Culture Kids. The source code and development plans for software developed using agile principles are published openly online.

 “Our team is working on a number of leisure services that are important for the people of Helsinki. Our work gives us the chance to make a difference and improve people’s daily lives and leisure time. We receive a lot of feedback from users and the pandemic, for example, has raised new development needs that are taken into account when prioritising tasks,” says Tatu Arvela, Software Developer at Nitor.

We are taking steps forward by experimenting and learning. The services are developed in a customer-centric way in order to provide the people of Helsinki with digital services that are personalised to their needs and interests. 

“I’m glad that a digital engineering company is involved in developing the City of Helsinki’s digital services for Culture and Leisure. It is easy for us to commit to the programme’s objectives of making access to services easy and preventing digital exclusion. We want to play our role in promoting equal and accessible public services,” says Olli Auvinen, CEO of Nitor.

Read more about the digitalisation programme of the City of Helsinki’s Culture and Leisure Division (in Finnish, PDF).