The paper introduces the concept of digital city and discusses how to assess a particular project, concerning its success in connecting the real city with its virtual counterpart. The Gaia Global project is a three-year digital cities project within the Portugal Digital Initiative, a program related with the Information Society operation program framework. It provides a digital city counterpart for Vila Nova de Gaia, with around 288000 inhabitants, considering 2001 figures. The Gaia Global project is focused in offering an environment to involve as much as possible both the local population and other people interacting with Gaia related and/or based activities. A central issue to the success of the project is bringing together people to use and adopt Gaia Global features in their day to day life. This paper argues that beyond the definition of traditional project indicators related with digital cities projects, the use and potential project dissemination counting people involved is a ...