Last month, during the 2021 Digital Government Summit, Co-VAL together with the Lisbon Council launched the new Policy Brief ‘The 2021 State of Co-Creation: Delivering Services Together’, an in-depth analysis of the state of co-creation in the 27 European Union member states, the United Kingdom and six leading cities (Amsterdam, Athens, Madrid, Milan, Paris and Turin).
In specific, the 27-member Co-VAL Stakeholder Panel, Charlotte van Ooijen, senior research fellow, and Francesco Mureddu, director at the Lisbon Council, analysed the findings of the Co-Creation Dashboard, a unique online tool for collating and mapping key initiatives on digital government and co-creation across EU member states, the United Kingdom and leading municipalities. Among the key findings are:
- Regarding “policy,” a strategic approach to digitalisation with explicit consideration of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) has become mainstream across Europe, but the same cannot be said for co-creation.
- When it comes to “interoperability and reuse,” countries have made impressive strides on making base registries more widely available and developing national eID systems and other transversal key services, such as ePayment and digital mail.
- Looking at “collaboration practices,” we see that while co-creation may not be mainstream in national digital plans every country has adopted some form of co-creation in practice.
- In the area of “skills,” only a handful of countries and cities claims to have leveraged private sector knowledge and competences by hiring managers with such experience.
- “Monitoring” turns out to be a transversal challenge, since there is a lack of available data on important actions in all aforementioned key areas, such as formal requirements for co-creation (policy), the actual use of available application programming interfaces (APIs) and service modules adoption by local authorities (interoperability and reuse), the uptake of eID and the number of co-creation exercises (collaboration) and the number of digitally skilled public servants (skills).
You can download the ‘The 2021 State of Co-Creation: Delivering Services Together’ Policy Brief here.