Civic Agency in Public E-service innovation

Office clerk: –“We’re digital by default”
Daniel Blake: – “Yeah? Well I’m pencil by default.”

The above quote from Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or-winning film ‘I, Daniel Blake’ from 2016, eloquently pinpoints how large groups in today’s society experience digitalization of the public sector. The film portrays Daniel Blake’s struggle against bureaucracy, and how he finds himself on the wrong side of the digital divide, hampered by his lack of digital skills, since public e-services is the only available communication channel to the authorities.

A main problem in digital transformation of the public sector that stands clear from public sector research is the lack of user involvement in development of public e-services. This problem is related to a digital divide in e-service use, where marginalised user groups lack digital skills, and it also blocks the potential in innovating future services based on the growing possibilities in open public data.

The CAPE project addresses these issues by collaborating closely with public libraries, helping them embrace more active roles in today’s rapid digitalisation. Public libraries, perceived as Civic Innovation Centres (CICs), can become places where citizens can be engaged in improvement of current e-services, as well as in development of new services. CAPE will initially be collaborating in three project sites: Denmark (Ballerup Library, Ballerup), Finland (Oodi Library, Helsinki) and Sweden (Rosengård Library, Malmö).

The main result from the CAPE project is a model for organising civic agency in the design of public digital services. It is based on two novel concepts, termed ‘buffers services’ and ‘bridge services’. The model was developed as a collaborative effort in the consortium during the spring of 2023, subsequently implemented in case studies in the project sites. There are two project reports describing the model and key findings: one aimed at the academic audience with the title ‘Handbook for Library Innovation’, and one aimed at library staff with the title ‘Libraries bridging the digital divide’. The latter version is also available in Danish, Swedish and Finnish.

DEVELOPING A NEW MODEL FOR CIVIC AGENCY IN PUBLIC E-SERVICE DESIGN
On the Danish site, ITU and AAU have worked with a volunteer-driven IT help-desk as an example of a buffer service, focusing on the digital identification system MitID and the new QR-code functionality. The public citizen offices (‘Borgerservice’) are limited to functional support for MitID, and other needs of e.g. elderly users are referred to the IT help-desk at Ballerup library. In the capacity of buffer service, they offer a qualitatively different kind of support with unlimited time, patience and learning opportunities, bridging the gap between elderlies’ capacities and the support from public citizen offices. Also, the help-desk volunteers accumulate detailed knowledge about the needs of elderly IT users which has high value for the MitID developer, Agency of Digital Governance (ADG), but currently does not reach them. We have run dialogue meetings and workshops with UX-designers from ADG and the help-desk volunteers to develop a bridge service, that communicate user needs from the volunteers to ADG for service improvement, and information about developments and updates from ADG to the volunteers. In 2023, we expanded the bridge service to deliver user needs also to the ADG communication department that design information material about public digital services. The broadened communication through the bridge service thus increases the impact of our new model for organising civic agency in the design of public digital services.

Malmö University, Sweden (MAU), has worked with two libraries, Rosengård and Kirseberg, on protocols for how libraries can identify local needs, engage citizens through interviews and workshops, analyse results thereof, communicate findings to relevant public sector stakeholders and give feedback to citizen participants. MAU worked with a buffer service concept in collaboration with Rosengård Library, Malmö. Previous workshops with unemployed elderly migrant women revealed that their problems of finding employment were rooted in general migration issues, and lack of information from public services. Findings were reported to the unemployment office, and the library arranged a job fair where representatives from the unemployment office and social services, actors from study programs and community actors offered information with translation into Arabic. The library will maintain this work in a continuous series of yearly events, as a step towards a bridge service. The collaboration with the Kirseberg library focused on local urban development, and the challenge to find a new location for the library. The city planning office needed insights on local places of importance and patterns of citizen movements in the district; information no public service could offer. The library, with support from the CAPE project, gathered information through workshops, storytelling activities and follow-up interviews, engaging citizens and hard-to-reach youths. The results was shared with the city architect, who found the information valuable for local development. During 2023, MAU also participated in the service design training for civil servants (including 7 librarians) offered by the City of Malmö. As a result of the project, designers from Malmö university will host this education in -24. Finally, to increase awareness and capacity of citizen-engagement in the public sector MAU also organized and facilitated three workshops in collaboration with the Scania Service Design in the public Sector network.

A CAPABILITY SENSITIVE USABILITY EVALUTATION FRAMEWORK
As part of project evaluation activities, Aalto University (AU) has developed, based on prof Keinonen's (2017) earlier work on acceptability, a collaborative design evaluation framework that combines traditional usability evaluation according to ISO 9241-210 standard process with the principles of Amartya Sen's capability approach. Usability is based on an assumption of predefined user profiles, goals and contexts of use; assumptions not realistic in explorative collaborative design with multiple participants and emergent development goals. The capability approach gives conceptual support underlining the importance of each individuals' freedom to choose their goals and their right to have reasonable means to achieve those goals, balancing joint objectives of a development project with each participant's assessments of the relevance of the evolving achievements, goals and progress. The conceptual groundwork of the framework has been completed and it has been initially tested in a number of CAPE workshops. A conceptual framework is introduced in a submitted journal article (Keinonen & Ehrenberg, submitted).

EVALUATION OF LIBRARIES' CAPABILITIES TO INFRASTRUCTURE DIGITAL INNOVATION
The AU team has been collecting and analyzing data about Our Shared Virtual World project; a collaboration between Aalto University School of Science, University of Oulu, Oulu City Library, and Vantaa and Helsinki Library network. The project has developed a virtual reality environment to recommend literature for various library client segments. We interviewed project participants to identify strengths, challenges and tensions in libraries’ competence to develop and implement digital technologies. Strengths include libraries' commitment to democratizing digitalisation, and flexibility to accommodate collaboration and trust on bottom-up initiative of their personnel. Results are reported in Ylipulli et al., (submitted) and Ylipulli et al., 2023.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE COLLABORATION AT LIBRARIES
Library digital services are often procured or developed together with private and third-sector actors. The AU team explored opportunities and obstacles in collaborations between public libraries and private companies in a series of workshops with librarians and local companies. Based on the workshops, scenarios were developed to elaborate how to support libraries in developing new digital services together with companies. Identified directions for libraries’ role in such collaboration include: enhance their middle-out position by ensuring continued autonomy for bottom-up development initiatives; increase procurement expertise to allow productive collaboration also in explorative innovation processes; reassess collaboration infrastructures to clarify project and outcome ownership; and negotiate boundaries between private service providers’ responsibility and the public service (Ehrenberg, Hergatacorzian & Keinonen, to be submitted).

CONNECTING DESIGN WITH CHANGE
At Aalborg University Copenhagen, The research conducted in the project also contributed to the field of design and service design in the public sector. Using a wider context of a growing role of design and service design (SD) in change processes, AAU investigated a transformation process of public sector organisations – public libraries, showing how service design can be a vehicle of organisational and societal changes. We investigated how design helped to gradually expand the visions, theories of change, mindsets, and new ways of designing in the organisation, helping to achieve more agency in transforming, impacting the organisation and the local community. This work contributes to the growing body of knowledge connecting design with change.

DISSEMINATION OF RESULTS
During the second half of the final project year, we have focused on disseminating the results from the project. We submitted an invited policy brief article to Nordforsk, authored by the project consortium with the title “How can Libraries Foster Civic Engagement in Digital Public Service Development?”, that was accepted and published. The article outlined our model for organising civic agency in the design of public digital services. As a main project result, the model is also presented in the deliverable ‘CIC handbook’, including instructions for how it can be implemented in public libraries. This was a collaborative effort in the consortium, with each chapter written by a group of researchers from different partners in the project to ensure a cross-site perspective. Two dissemination activities gained input from the academic community on our model for organising civic agency in the design of public digital services. First, we arranged a workshop where the model was presented and discussed with international researchers at the conference Communities and Technologies 2023, May 29 – June 02 in Lahti, Finland. Second, the full consortium also presented and discussed the model at a visit to OpenLab at Newcastle University (https://openlab.ncl.ac.uk/), one of the major European institutions in the research area of the CAPE project. This resulted in a joint workshop with OpenLab at the international DIS conference in 2024. Finally, we presented the model in a shorter handbook targeted at public libraries, entitled ‘A Handbook for Library Innovation – Libraries Bridging the Digital Divide’, available for download in 4 languages (English, Danish, Swedish and Finnish) from the project website (https://cape.itu.dk). AAU led the production of the library handbook, and the final editing, translation and printing was financed by the grant received for the policy brief article mentioned above. The handbook was launched at a major dissemination event entitled ‘Libraries, Democracies and Digitalisation: Dialogues about Civic Engagement’ at ITU in Copenhagen on December 7, 2023, where major project results were presented to a wide audience (see https://cape.itu.dk/final-conference/). The event was attended by around 70 people from private companies, public libraries, public offices and universities.

Office clerk: –“We’re digital by default”
Daniel Blake: – “Yeah? Well I’m pencil by default.”

The above quote from Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or-winning film ‘I, Daniel Blake’ from 2016, eloquently pinpoints how large groups in today’s society experience digitalization of the public sector. The film portrays Daniel Blake’s struggle against bureaucracy, and how he finds himself on the wrong side of the digital divide, hampered by his lack of digital skills, since public e-services is the only available communication channel to the authorities.

A main problem in digital transformation of the public sector that stands clear from public sector research is the lack of user involvement in development of public e-services. This problem is related to a digital divide in e-service use, where marginalised user groups lack digital skills, and it also blocks the potential in innovating future services based on the growing possibilities in open public data.

The CAPE project addresses these issues by collaborating closely with public libraries, helping them embrace more active roles in today’s rapid digitalisation. Public libraries, perceived as Civic Innovation Centres (CICs), can become places where citizens can be engaged in improvement of current e-services, as well as in development of new services. CAPE will initially be collaborating in three project sites: Denmark (Ballerup Library, Ballerup), Finland (Oodi Library, Helsinki) and Sweden (Rosengård Library, Malmö).