The local public administration is a highly regulated field, with a pre-defined set of services which need to be provided to the communities at a certain degree of quality. Nevertheless, within the governance system, the local administration enjoys a certain level of autonomy, the relevant actors having the possibility to design and organize their activity within the general framework (regulatory and financial) imposed at national level. Using this autonomy, five municipalities from Romania and Hungary (Alesd, Sinteu, Marghita from Romania, and Szarvas, Berettyoujfalu from Hungary) decided to continue and increase the intensity of their previous cooperations in order to improve the quality of the public services they provide to their communities. These efforts will build on the competitive advantage represented by the cross-border environment which allows a cross-fertilization process in between the solutions and procedures applied on the two sides of the border.The partner institutions are small and medium sized municipalities, sharing similar needs and challenges. While larger urban agglomerations are performing well economically, the smaller urban and rural areas are experiencing difficulties in attracting and maintaining a vivid economic activity, which in turn can sustain the social and cultural life of the local communities. Moreover, their capacity to develop and implement innovative solutions is limited by the scarcity of resources the municipalities are facing. Thus, one possibility to support the improvement of the quality of the public services they are providing is to establish cooperation mechanisms which shall facilitate the process of putting together their available resources and thus to increase their capacity for innovation.During the project development process, the partner insitutions identified those fields and topics of interest which they would like to focus upon during project implementation. These were choosen in such a manner that all of the selected topics are reflecting the needs of the involved partners. These topics are: the management of the local public budget, the policies which promote the modern communication technologies, the improvement of data management capacity, the increase of transparency of the public administration activities and the promotion of participatory processes in decision making.In their efforts to find better solutions in these fields, the partners started from the fact that globalization and digitalization represent some of the main characteristics of the modern-day world, where information is generated and processed fast and precisely. Hence, the digital agenda is a driving direction of the modern administrations, therefore one of the main direction in project implementation will be the identification of IT solutions which fit the needs of small and medium communities.The representative democracy is the basic form of governance all-around Europe. In the fast-changing modern world, it became more and more difficult to identify solutions to the ever-more complicated and diverse problems which affect the life of the communities. The involvement of the local population in the decision making process is thus increasingly important, since the solutions must be validated on community level in order to ensure their acceptance and successful implementation. And while the communication channels evolved and offer extraordinary opportunities for digital consultations of the large audience, the participatory processes are still based on direct, physical presence especially in the rural areas. The project is therefore aiming at developing instruments which shall facilitate the access of the local communities to modern communication tools, and to encourage the participation in the decision making processes. As part of thee efforts, the project also includes activities which shall increase the awareness of the local represenAs part of the project approach, the partners will jointly analyze the state-of-the-art in the topics addressed. The analysis will involve knowledge available outside the partnership as well, which will be collected through comprehensive studies on different subjects. Based on this analysis, the partners will test new processes and procedures to reduce the administrative burden for people, enterprises and other organizations, especially by aplying modern IT solutions. The testing will take into consideration the suggestions coming from the partners from the other side of the border, contributing to the harmonization of the local public administration services. This will contribute to the development of the capacities of the local administrations which will be able to provide services of similar quality on both sides of the border. Therefore, the project will create the administrative support which can stimulate the cross-border cooperation in various fields of activity.By the proposed objectives and activities, the project fits with the Investment Priority 11/b and the related thematic objective, having as final goal to enhance the joint institutional capacity for providing better services in the cross-border area.