Co-creating digital citizenship: Considering the reconfiguration of participation in digital public service design

Abstract

Citizen-driven service development and the delivery of digital public services has become a central focus of policy makers at European and national level for the past decade. Across policy documents and funding calls, is the importance of user-centricity in service design repeated by referring to user involvement, empowerment, collaboration or personalisation [e.g. 1]. In particular, participatory design projects haven taken empowerment to be one of the their key objectives and claim that “participatory design methods themselves can be regarded as empowering” [9:6]. Hence, not surprisingly have policy makers and other public sector stakeholders started to promote civic participation in digital public sector innovation. Such participatory approaches go by labels such as co-production of public services [12], co-design [8] or civic technology [10]. Recently the term co-creation has gained attention and is now considered “a cornerstone for social innovation” in the public sector [12:1346]. For example, cocreation has become an approach promoted by organisations such as the European Commission (in the H2020 framework programme there are 76 calls on co-creation across a variety of topic areas) or associations such as the Open Government Partnership (which has recently published their own toolbox and good practice guide to co-creation in open government). However, there is not one definition of co-creation but rather there exists a multitude of understandings of the term within and beyond its use in public sector innovation [3]. There is a broad understanding that within the context of eGovernment, co-creation is meant to bring together government agencies, NGOs, citizens and/or businesses to spur innovation and lead to services that better fit the needs of its users. In the context of Open Government, it is meant to allow for new forms of collaboration and participation, in particular with respect to the re-use of open government data by civil society. Such initiatives place “numerous demands upon the digital conduct of citizens” [7:78] and enact “an imaginary of citizens as data analysts equipped with the skills necessary to [...] analyse the transactions of governments and thus hold them to account” (p.82). It demands the active involvement and engagement in such activities and hence further advances imaginaries of civic collectivity in a digital age. This leads to what Isin and Ruppert [7] have called “digital citizenship”. Importantly, there remains a question about how citizen participation is configured in the design of digital public services. Vines et al. [11] rightly point out that we need to consider “who initiates, directs and benefits from user participation in design” (p.1) and how control is shared. This relates to a number of choices made in co-creation projects such as a project’s pre-conditions (openness, purpose, scope), its participants (diversity in knowledge, differences in interests, distribution of power), its results (outputs and outcomes) and process (types of activities/methods and setting) [5]. In my contribution to the MuC workshop, I would like to focus on the process dimension. That methods are not neutral but performative has long been argued in fields such Science and Technology Studies (STS) [e.g. 4,6]. The choice of methods in cocreation projects translates individual citizens into explorers, designers, data curators, users, and/or service providers. Cocreation methods stem from co-design and participatory design approaches (e.g. prototyping, probes, user testing) to civic open data use (e.g. data walks, hackathons) to co-production of services (e.g. partnerships between government and civil society organisations) and each come with their own construction and configuration of design participation and users. My reflection is based on a three-year EU-funded project in which we developed and evaluated methods for co-creating digital public services with older adults. I will draw on three co-creation processes that we conducted in two European cities: Bremen and Zaragoza. I will argue that depending on the problem focus, scoping and governance structures of the projects, methods were adopted differently and enabled older adults to assume differing roles in and control over the process and its results. For example, data walkshops in Bremen and Zaragoza facilitated different roleshifts for the participating older and allowed for different types of knowledge to be articulated [for an account of the German walks see 2]. This led to the enactment of different imaginaries of digital citizenship. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). MuC’19 Workshops, Hamburg, Deutschland © Proceedings of the Mensch und Computer 2019 Workshop on Partizipative und Sozialverantwortliche Technikentwicklung. Copyright held by the owner/author(s) http://doi.org/10.18420/muc2019-ws-607