Supporting citizen participation in the design of public services

Mydex CIC is working with the Office of the Chief Designer in Scotland and Connecting Scotland to find better ways to give people a say in what public services are like to use.

We want to give people a chance to improve their experience of using these services, and to do so we need to involve them in ways they find easy and satisfying. So we’re using the technology we’ve built, especially our citizen engagement platform Inclued, to help people get involved with projects that interest them and where they want to improve specific services — and for researchers to find, invite and communicate with these interested individuals.

The technology allows people to gather information about themselves and to keep it safe and secure in their own personal data store. They can let service providers see details about them — for example their age, the area they live in, if they have a disability and so on — without the service provider knowing who they actually are.

Service providers can then send secure messages to the sorts of people whose input they need to make their services better, asking them if they would like to take part.

As part of this work, we will also ask people about their motivations for taking part. For example, is it because they have felt particularly frustrated about an experience, because of a general desire to contribute, because it’s interesting, or perhaps because they can earn some extra cash?

By getting the right insights and improving the way information is shared — in a way which protects people’s privacy and puts them in control — we believe more people will want to get involved in shaping the services they use to improve the quality of these services. At the same time it will cut the cost of finding people who want to take part: especially people whose needs or views don’t fit into the pattern of the majority of ‘mainstream’ service users.

The initial work for this was funded as part of delivering a CivTech sprint challenge, which responded to the published challenge: “How can technology be used to engage citizens in designing Digital Public Services?” This next step brings these tools fully to life and makes them available to user researchers and service designers across the Scottish Government working on public services and the citizens they engage with.

What the tools do

Specifically, the tools help citizens:

• List details about themselves, including their preferences, so that these details are kept private and under their control, but can also be shared with others if the person wants to,
• Apply for and connect to services without having to fill in forms,
• Re-use information about themselves many times over in different circumstances, so they don’t have to keep repeating themselves when dealing with a different service,
• Review projects they have been invited to and request participation in projects that they would like to take part in,
• Provide safe and secure messaging between themselves and service providers.

Meanwhile, subscribers can:

• Create projects,
• Invite citizens to participate,
• Streamline and make consistent a lot of routine administration,
• recruit citizens based on the criteria needed without citizens needing to reveal these often protected characteristics,
• gain an overview of all design projects, including metrics like participants’ feedback,
• view a showcase of present and past projects in the same organisation, so they can better maintain and share best practice and past learning.

We are really excited to be contributing to this project, which takes us another step towards our mission of putting citizens at the centre of services that genuinely work for them.