Digitization is playing an ever-increasing role in our society and our everyday lives. The City of Leipzig has set itself the goal of shaping the digital transformation in the interests of urban society and strengthening the local economy in this process. To accompany and structure this process, the City of Leipzig is currently developing a digital strategy. With this development, the municipal family is forming the strategic foundation for the next years. The focus lays on making the best possible use of the municipal opportunities in order to shape the digital transformation and to use digital technologies and social innovations in the sense of integrated, sustainable urban development.

To this end, the administration, municipal companies and municipal enterprises are building on the shared wealth of experience from digital projects, existing structures, formats and collaborations in the municipal family, with the urban community, business and science. The public participation process offers the opportunity to reduce concerns about the topic of digitization among the population and to promote an awareness of the opportunities for co-designing digitization.

Already existing approaches towards transparency and openness in digital administration form the base of the future digital strategy for the City of Leipzig. The "Digitization and Change Management" office of the City of Leipzig assumes the task of accompanying the digitization projects of the city administration. They integrate the affected stakeholders and bundle the requirements for new digitization projects, taking into account the city-wide goals and managing them in a targeted and holistic manner. The Digital City Unit acts as an interface between the city administration and city society, companies and science, as well as the municipal utilities. It deals with the fundamental issues of digital transformation and develops and manages innovative projects with various players in the urban system, for example in the areas of energy and digital infrastructure.

Multiple initiatives of the City of Leipzig aim to improve the digital services offered by the City. As the first municipality in Saxony, the City of Leipzig has been offering administrative services via the Free State of Saxony's new service portal since the beginning of 2019. At Amt24, citizens, companies and associations have uniform, digital access to the administration. The City of Leipzig and the Free State of Saxony are working together with their partners to rapidly expand the functions around the service portal in order to be able to offer further services. With the establishment of the "Digitale Werkstatt" in 2019, the City of Leipzig and the municipal IT service provider Lecos GmbH jointly created a creative laboratory for digital and organizational innovation. With the goal to quickly test innovative ideas in the city context, “Digitale Werkstatt” develops prototypes in interdisciplinary teams in cooperation with offices, citizens, as well as organizations and companies.

The Open Data Portal of the City of Leipzig provides access to hundreds of administrative data sets. Besides the overall commitment by the City of Leipzig towards Digital Rights, specific projects such as the new "Hardware for Future" program aim at enabling universal and equal access to the internet. Within “Hardware for Future”, companies and private individuals offer IT equipment that has been written off or discarded. This equipment is then refurbished and offered for reuse. The aim is to enable children from low-income families to participate digitally and to conserve valuable resources through the multiple use of functioning computer technology. The current homeschooling situation in particular has significantly increased the need for IT technology. In addition to the Digital City Unit, the project partners are the "dezentrale e. V." association and Lecos GmbH.

The City of Leipzig, with the explicit support of the City Council, is joining the Cities Coalition for Digital Rights and is looking forward to active exchange within the network, extensive collaboration and knowledge sharing on Digital Rights.