ioPartecipo+An e-participation case, a co-design process

Sabrina Franceschini

Context

Since 2004 Emilia-Romagna Region has promoted projects about e-democracy; in particular the first project was Partecipa.net and the further was Io Partecipo. The above mentioned project experimented solutions for the citizens involvement and participation in the development regional and local policies. Recently it was necessary to think over the tools and methodologies adoped because of both the profound political and social changes and the evolution of dynamics, habits and consumption patterns of the new communication means since the changed legal situation (i.e. Law n. 3/2000 which affects both European and regional level).

Project goals

• Build a digital-by-default, shared, web

space to promote the participation of

Emilia Romagna’s citizens

• Better communicate the regional policies

• Be compliant with RER official portal leveraging the existing features and digital services.

Intent: Design for peopleMethodology: collaborative-design with users and stakeholders1. Start from people real needs2. Design, Build and Evaluate iteratively… … to learn where and how to improve

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/start

Plan user engagement activities

Invest time and resources to listen to peoplePlan meetings, focus groups, tools to collect user feedbacks

1° MarCom workers, community managers, journalists;2° Local and Regional Public Administration workers;3° citizens and associations. 4° Emilia-Romagna Region internal employees

50+ people involved

Allow people to participate…

Focus Groups

100 users involved 150 comments 30 unique authors 25 surveys completed

…brings ideas, feedback and confirmations

#5Remote feedback

Design for people, facing constraints

Start designing on paper with users at your table

Build prototypes and share them with domain experts

Change, refine, implement and test … and don’t take IT-guys too seriously

Something we learned

Involve colleagues first in the design process to quickly collect their constructive criticisms and warnings about existing constraints

(tecnical, editorial, organizational…)

Do not be afraid to find out that citizens look to the public institutions differently from internal

Highlight positive feedbacks from people

1: translation = you did a good job, but would you please also fix that…

ioPartecipo+ is online!

http://partecipazione.regione.emilia-romagna.it/iopartecipo

Thank you.