Evaluation Report on Worldwide City Hotline Services and Governance Effectiveness published in Beijing

The Evaluation Report on Worldwide City Hotline Services and Governance Effectiveness (2024) was released at the 2024 Beijing Forum on Swift Response to Public Complaints held in Beijing.

The report scientifically evaluates 20 representative cities around the world, providing a comprehensive summary of the operational experience and models of worldwide city hotlines from an international perspective.

Industry experts believe that the report provides a systematic analysis of the trajectories and trends of worldwide city hotlines, pioneering a governance-based framework to offer a panoramic assessment of their services and governance effectiveness.

It is learned that after an initial selection of over 200 cities, the report identified 20 representative cities for assessment, taking global influence, population size, regional representativeness, and etc. into consideration.

In terms of governance, the report focuses on four primary indicators, including process governance, collaborative governance, smart governance, and responsive governance, with a total of 10 secondary indicators and 24 tertiary indicators.

In recent years, city hotlines like Beijing's 12345 hotline have deeply integrated into city governance across various fields and scenarios. Since 2019, Beijing's innovative push for swift response to public complaints has created a governance model characterized by comprehensive feedback, wide-ranging services, closed-loop management and broad citizen participation. This initiative has pioneered a uniquely Chinese path to modern urban governance, and contributed a "Beijing model" and "Chinese solution" to the global wave of hotline-driven city governance.

Meanwhile, government service hotlines across the globe have exhibited diverse development trajectories. In cities like New York, San Francisco and Toronto, 311 hotlines consolidate municipal services into unified platforms, thus offering one-stop access to services, alleviating pressure on 911 emergency hotlines and improving service efficiency.

Experts generally agree that the innovative development of worldwide city hotlines is timely, but challenges persist as they entered a new phase of growth. Issues such as unclear role positioning, insufficient data value mining, confusion surrounding intelligent applications, and the need for improved governance effectiveness have emerged as significant challenges. The report responds to these challenges from a global perspective and proposes solutions to address these pressing issues.