Report on the performance of Municipalities in the area of communication with citizens Prishtina Recommendations The recommendations shown in this document are based on the data collected from the questionnaire. These are general recommendations for the municipalities and there are some municipalities that have adopted these recommendations. Impro­vement of the communication and effective cooperation between municipalities would help in the tackling of the problems through lessons learned, since most of the problems are of the same nature. The key recommendations from this document are the following: - Develop online platforms that would enable information for the citizens and would help the communication between the muni­cipalities and the citizens about public consultations, public hearings and the offering of services for the issuing of personal documents, e-banking payments, and checking of the bills. Currently, municipality of Prishtina offers a good basis for such a platform and this can be adapted for every municipality. - The proactive use of social media. Most of the existing municipalities have opened their pages in social networks which are managed by municipal officials. But, most of them lack the proactivity in the updating of these pages with information for citizens, and also currently are focused in one platform only(in this case, Facebook). - Creation of platforms or the use of the existing platforms for discussing with citizens. Transforming the physically present discussion into an online one should be considered by the municipalities with low participation of citizens in public debates, and in budgetary hearings. Even so, the municipalities have to develop awareness raising campaigns for the citizens, so that their participation is increased in the consultations and public and budgetary hearings, etc. - The use of visual methods for presenting the information. Lack of citizens' participation may be due to the lack of displaying the information in a simple and understandable way. Therefore, the municipalities should invest in the use of audio and visual methods when displaying the information. - The municipal annual work plans should have measurable indicators, so that at a later stage could be placed online in order to be monitored by the citizens. This method would help in the increase of responsibility of the municipalities towards their citizens, increase of trust, and the improvement of communication between the citizens and the municipalities. - Access to public documents should be facilitated for the citizens. Currently, only 4 out of 38 municipalities have online systems for filing of requests for access to public documents and that allow for the monitoring of the status of their requests. 10