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A year ago, Edge Institute launched the “DigITup” fellowship programme together with the Centre for Independent Journalism, supporting press projects dedicated to digital transformation. In this context, Vlad and Diana, journalists at Dela0, undertook a mapping exercise of digitalisation in Romania’s small towns and municipalities. The article below presents a brief review of a complex journalistic endeavour.
The Dela0 team will return with a more comprehensive version of this mapping exercise in the autumn of this year, when it will assess the digital services offered by all administrative-territorial units with more than 5,000 inhabitants. We will again be their partners in this effort, which is also why we invited them to write this newsletter edition.
Hello! We are Diana Oncioiu and Vlad Stoicescu. At the end of last year, we published an interactive map of digitalisation in Romania’s town halls on Dela0.ro. It was a mammoth documentary effort, at the end of which we wanted to see how much, and what, Romanians had gained from the digitalisation of local public administration.
What We Found in Mapping the Digitalisation of Towns
Starting from the premise that digitalisation is not — or should not be — an end in itself, but a means of reducing the time citizens spend in interactions with public administration, we asked ourselves where we stand with the digitalisation of towns and how coherent local government digital development plans are.
To answer this question, we collected a vast volume of data from 300 urban local authorities (towns and municipalities). We obtained diverse information, ranging from the amount spent on digital equipment and operating systems to the existence and characteristics of digital solutions implemented, whether for citizens (front office) or for civil servants (back office).
In the end, applying a complex scoring system, we produced digitalisation scores for urban local authorities. Some fare better (a few), others fare worse (most). The national average score of 4.57 out of 10 shows that local public administration in Romania’s towns is still failing the digitalisation test.
We do not claim this score represents an absolute truth, but when measured against the hundreds of millions of euros invested in the digitalisation of towns and municipalities over the past three to five years, the results produced by these investments do not point to efficiency or sustainable, long-term development.
What Comes Next: Expanding the Map to Rural Areas
Because every beginning makes a continuation possible, we, at Dela0.ro, have decided not to stop here. Digitalising local administrations means not only digitalising towns but also rural communes. And dozens of Romanian communes are larger than dozens of small towns.
This autumn, we plan to publish a substantial update of the interactive map. First, we will expand it: in addition to urban local authorities, we want to add nearly 350 rural local authorities. Second, we want the digitalisation score to be even clearer, which is why the methodology will be improved with qualitative indicators alongside quantitative ones.
This need also stems from practical observations made during the initial research. We found local authorities that on paper had digital solutions for citizens that simply did not work, and local authorities that had accessed funding to implement solutions that did not appear anywhere on their websites.
There is one more thing. Having online and local tax payment solutions counts for nothing if the overwhelming majority of citizens still choose the physical counter to pay.
A Topic Ignored by the Press, Misunderstood by Politicians
The digitalisation of local administration is an ignored topic in Romania. Ignored by the press, misunderstood by politicians, and an enigma for citizens. When the state talks about digitalisation, it looks exclusively at central systems and large ministerial projects, forgetting that a citizen’s first interaction with public administration takes place at the local authority. And not just the first; the second and third as well.
Not only implementation, but also the monitoring of digitalisation results, is wishful thinking. Very few urban local authorities in the country know where they want to get from point A to point B. Most only know that it looks good to spend some public money on digitalisation. Any digitalisation will do.
Four Unvarnished Results of Digitalisation
Because things stand as they do, here are some of the unvarnished results of digitalisation in Romania’s urban local authorities:
- The absence of a digitalisation strategy is glaring. Only 22 large local authorities in the country have drawn up and approved such specific documents in their local councils, documents that are essential for having a coherent digital development plan.
- Unconnected infrastructure and outdated websites remain the norm for many urban local authorities. Under these conditions, it is almost impossible to find modern digital solutions for citizens in those communities.
- One quarter of urban local authorities offer, as their only front-office digital solutions, the online payment of taxes and local levies (via Ghișeul.ro or other applications).
- 7% of urban local authorities have not implemented any digital internal solutions or workflows for civil servants.
We noted above that the state currently has no clear strategy for the digitalisation of local administration. It is hard to develop one without data. And the state does not have a good view of that data either at this point. The digitalisation map of urban local authorities was a first in this regard. Adding hundreds of rural communes will bring additional value, and superior quality, not only to our journalistic work, but to anyone who wants to understand digital Romania more clearly.
How We Gathered the Data: 325 Requests and 33 Students
We are beginning the collection of new data armed with the lessons learned during the initial research, which spanned three months and involved more than 30 people.
Producing the current interactive map involved, first of all, submitting 325 freedom-of-information requests. They reached their recipients, urban local authorities across the country, because 33 journalism students contributed to the data-collection effort. Under the law, public institutions have up to 30 days to respond to requests filed under Law 544 of 2001 (the law guaranteeing access to public information). In practice, it took nearly two months to gather 299 responses.
Despite persistent follow-ups, 26 local authorities did not respond at all. We are talking about some of the largest municipal structures in the country. Among those that refused to communicate data are Sector 3 City Hall, Sector 4 City Hall, Sector 5 City Hall, Sector 6 City Hall, Sibiu City Hall, Popeşti-Leordeni City Hall, and Buftea City Hall.
A Historic Level of Non-Transparency
At Dela0.ro, we have been submitting freedom-of-information requests under Law 544/2001 for nearly 15 years. This is not the first time we have approached a very large number of institutions simultaneously. But at the start of 2026 we can say without fear of being wrong that, since the pandemic years, public institutions’ contempt for respecting access to public information has grown, reaching a historic level of non-transparency. Only 60% of urban local authorities to which we sent press requests related to the state of digitalisation responded fully and within the legal deadline. With great effort, we managed to bring the percentage of near-complete responses to just over 80%.
For this reason, we decided to introduce a transparency criterion into the digitalisation map. It is an indirect indicator. A local authority that is digitalising, with the ultimate goal of providing modern and efficient public services to citizens, should be telling citizens how it did so, at what cost, and what the results are.
Transparency is not simply a box we tick, whether the local authority responded, or leave unticked if it did not. Each local authority analysed for its digital capacity has an information sheet in the interactive map structure. This sheet also contains the raw data processed; that is, the response submitted by the local authority to our press request.
There is one more thing. Any journalist can start their own investigation using the responses submitted by local authorities to our press request. The journalistic potential behind the raw data is enormous.
It is worth noting that direct interaction with civil servants was sometimes more valuable than the data itself, when it comes to understanding digitalisation.
Stories from the Field: When Digitalisation Sounds Like a Joke
During the research, various civil servants told us they had not sent their response because they had lost the request after “deleting their entire inbox.” Others said they had not responded because they had an old computer on which email loads slowly. Some asked us to resend the request in a different format because the original format meant not all of the content came out when printed. And a few justified their non-response by claiming they had been hit by a cyberattack.
A telling example of what digitalisation can look like at the local level came when we were pressing a local authority to provide the registration number of the press request we had submitted.
We were informed that the internal workflow was as follows: the letter arrives at the local authority’s registry, where it is printed; someone must then take it to the secretariat, where it receives a registration number; someone else brings it back to the registry, where the registration number received is noted in a ledger; finally, the document with the registration number on it is scanned and sent by email to the applicant. Case closed.
We received handwritten responses and manually filled-in expenditure tables. We received hundreds of pages of five-year expenditure data, all scanned. Or links, that we were supposed to follow, embedded in scanned documents.
Beyond these things that amused us, but above all made our data-consolidation work considerably harder, we understood something essential from the documentary effort of autumn 2025. The implementation of digitalisation is a matter of luck, a process carried out without much thought, left to chance. A fundamental public policy depends entirely on the vision, or the lack of vision, of the politicians who temporarily run local authorities.
We believe that exposing this situation can put pressure on the authorities, and on the state, to change things.
Windows 98, XP, and 7 - The Operating Systems of Administrative Romania
Without data and facts, systemic problems simply do not exist. Civil servants tick off requirements with a pen and go back to working on computers running Windows XP and Windows 7. Thirty-two urban local authorities in Romania still use these operating systems.
Constanța City Hall still has 10 computers running Windows 7. Baia Mare City Hall also has 10 workstations with Windows 7 operating systems. At Piatra Neamț City Hall, in the tax and levies directorate, there are still 30 systems running Windows 7.
At Urziceni City Hall, of the 55 computers made available to civil servants, 43 are running Windows 7 and Windows XP. At Iernut City Hall, 70% of the computers used by staff have outdated operating systems. At Babadag City Hall, of the 69 computers, 40 are running Windows XP and Windows 7.
At Aiud City Hall, staff are still working on computers running Windows 98. In their response to Dela0.ro, representatives of the institution provided assurances that these computers are not connected to the internet.
What a relief.