Observatory of the City

The Observatory of the City case study describes how the municipality of Madrid embarked in a radically new form of citizens’ participation: the citizens’ jury or assembly or as they called it “The Observatory of the City”. This case explores this Observatory as a services design example aiming to capture the general interests of the citizenry of Madrid through the individual opinions of a permanent group of randomly selected citizens that meet regularly.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

After the national government passed the law 39/2015, and most specially, due to its article 133, developing article 23 of the Spanish Constitution, any new norm in Spain is subject to public scrutiny by the citizens. Expanding this requirement, the municipality of Madrid embarked in a radically new form of citizens’ participation: the citizens’ jury or assembly or as they called it “The Observatory of the City”. This case explores this Observatory as a services design example aiming to capture the general interests of the citizenry of Madrid through the individual opinions of a permanent group of randomly selected citizens that meet regularly.

Co-creation process

This complex case is representative of two different levels of co-design of public services: 1) public and private agents got together to co-design the format of this citizens’ jury aiming at proposing public services and policy, mandatory for the government of the city; and 2) the jury’s members – 49 randomly-selected citizens – co-design public services and policy aided by city officials, outside experts and other citizens in working sessions, mediated by specially trained facilitators. We address both levels to enrich the view of this relevant case of value co-creation in the public sector.

Digital Transformation Process

Not applicable.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

The Observatory performs three functions: Analysing and approving – rejecting – the most voted citizen proposals for new services on the Decide Madrid participation digital platform; reviewing municipal decisions and public policies and suggesting related actions; and calling for public consultations and proposing any type of new public service or policy. Summarising the innovative outputs of the Observatory case, we identify the following:

“The city of Madrid had no experience in putting up a random, lottery-like selection and a deliberative process. It was through MediaLab and the involvement of NewDemocracy that both became real. Without the two processes, Decide Madrid would have stayed as the individual participation digital platform it already was.”
The stages of design and development of the Observatory probably have been innovative from day 0: The idea in the Area of Participation and how the team in the government formed; the design and prototyping in the Collective Intelligence for Democracy workshop and the interaction with the Area; the design of the logistics of the Observatory; the design and implementation of the facilitation of the sessions; and the processes the members of the Observatory are following to reach agreements. All have been examples of innovative processes and finally public services in Madrid.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

The main problems we identified in the set-up of the Observatory and work of the participants seem derived from a very initial stage of this municipal organ:

“As far as the operational part, the potential issue that we can see is the lack of diverse information for citizens to make decisions. We tend to think that the Council would give citizens just limited information from limited sources.”
“Another potential problem is related to the selection process: We have not seen a properly diverse room. In Australia, we diversify based on education level and things like earnings, but that was difficult in Madrid; they allocated quotas to certain parts of Madrid trying to cover the economic certification in the room. People who are more educated and better off are more inclined to participate in this process, and they tend to group together in the decisions.” Coincidentally, “after the first draw and election of the members of the Observatory, we realised that certain groups of people have voluntarily declined participation (blacks and other ethnic minorities). We have spotted people that are not feeling part of the city, and we would like to know if this is something we could facilitate. Being aware of the potential biases influencing the decisions, we in the municipality government needed to be trained in how to prevent them.”

Transferability & Replicability

We might highlight the following as the most transferable outcomes of the Observatory case when confronting the reality of collaboration with citizens for service design:

“After testing and validating our design methodology for experimentation, we have four big projects (ParticipaLab among them) that could have their autonomy and start an ecology or network of labs to reach a larger population and transform it. They could even propose new ideas and adapted methods.”
The most evident outcome of the processes described here is the Observatory itself – Madrid has now the first permanent citizens’ jury with the aim of reviewing citizens’ proposals, public policies and any topic they choose. “The process went really well. There was a confluence of interests and desires and they all fitted well (once in a lifetime this thing happens): from a prototype in a Lab, it went all the way to being implemented as a service development and public policy instrument. Some things we would have changed, but the final Observatory is part of a new way of negotiating by the public officials. Also, making it happen and in this short time was a big success. Ideally, this will continue and improve over time, since a design of this magnitude cannot have everything right from the outset.”
Other complementary outcomes, some more subtle, are related to the new relationships the government has established with the experimentation practices of MediaLab (Madrid’s government-owned living lab), the internal shortcuts they have designed to establish participation in the municipality, and the learning they have got from the actual jury meetings.

Success Factors

The complexity of the Observatory case is mostly based on its reach. As a complementary “chamber” to the elected members of the municipality council, the Observatory was made possible by merging several initiatives. As of January 2018, the Area of Participation began to work on a new regulation for the Observatory; in parallel, ParticipaLab (a living lab) began to collaborate with external experts in participatory processes and juries and co-designed the final draft of the Observatory. Both the design and the regulatory processes fed each other for several months. The co-design process, which had started with the Collective Intelligence for Democracy workshop (also a living lab) months earlier, concluded with the presentation of a final proposal or advice (https://www.newdemocracy.com.au/2018/11/15/the-city-of-madrid-citizens-council/) to the Area of Participation. It significantly influenced the final design of the Observatory (mostly, composition and times of the deliberation process). On January 29, 2019, the city council passed the new regulation and the new Observatory format had its legal framework as the first permanent deliberative chamber of citizen participants in any European local government – and definitely a pioneering experience worldwide. On the one hand, it regulated a lottery-elected citizens’ jury, with annual rotation. On the other, using a digital platform, it connected citizens’ initiatives for new services (collected through Decide Madrid) with citizens’ deliberative practices (the Observatory) which produces a double representation system for citizenry decision making. Complementary, the deliberations of the citizens’ jury are also connected with the entire population (through the Decide Madrid platform).

Lessons learned

Being this a complex project, with such relevance for the city and government of Madrid, we have experienced certain disconnections in the representatives of each agent we have talked to. Although everyone knew what the others were doing, their connections with the public agent were not always clear. The language barrier might play a role here, not only because of different actual languages, but because of different uses of the same language. A participatory process like the Observatory, both in the design and the operational parts, would initially be thought of as plagued with statistical assurances for getting the right quotas, segmentations, and the like. But it is not. The statistical significance is probably less relevant and what really matters is to have the right distribution of citizens that actually participate and show up for each session. The goal then is to avoid spontaneous groupings by economic or education achievements that can bias decisions. On the other side, there are no control groups to check whether the actual selection makes significantly different decisions than a proper statistical selection of citizens. An interesting point is the confusion of participating citizens. Probably, we must understand that we face different degrees of maturity or readiness in those willing to contribute through participation. A first stage might be participation as a means to have their voices heard – whether they are complaining, requesting or merely criticising; a second stage might be the realisation of participation as interaction with other peers, with equal voices but different intents; a third stage might be the confirmation of the need for consensus or agreement, which might imply knowledge acquisition, sharing, prioritising and decision-taking; a final fourth stage might be the setting of certain control tools and processes to ascertain their agreements are met and differences or deviations are understood and acted upon. It would be interesting to understand the transition from one stage to the other, as results certainly emerge in stages three and, specially, in fourth, and the time involved in maturing from the early stages to the latest.

Stakeholders & Beneficiaries

Stakeholders include:

Consejería de Educación, Formación y Empleo (the Department of Education, Training and Employment)
The unions (UGT, CCOO)
The regional association of enterprises (FER)
Other relevant social stakeholders in the region (Asociación Promotora de personas con Discapacidad intelectual Adultas, ASPRODEMA, Consejo Estatal de Representantes de Minusválidos, CERMI, and the political parties)

Beneficiaries include:

The citizens of La Rioja

Co-creation process

This was a project that aimed at providing citizens with services, co-designed and co-produced with them (through the unions and most representative companies’ association in the region). This is demonstrated in the 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 (out of 6) objectives stated by the working group for this Plan: (2) To set specific priority objectives in terms of PE and employment to guide the development of skills through-out space and time along the current office term, and promote them among citizens. (3) To lead the strategic approach of all the actors involved in PE and active employment policy in La Rioja, seeking to link their actions to the proposed objectives. (4) To integrate and coordinate the available resources in terms of PE and employability, both in the educational and employment markets, so that they support the objectives more effectively and efficiently. (5) To improve the interrelation between the different PE-providing subsystems and modes and, essentially, between all of them and actual employment. A greater involvement of the regional production system is essential. (6) To reach the highest degree of consensus in the formulation of the Plan from the technical, social and political points of view, so that public and private actions are mainly oriented towards shared strategic objectives.

Digital Transformation Process

Not applicable.

Results, Outcomes & Impacts

The general guidelines that grouped the results of this project aimed at improving employment qualification of human resources were:

To reduce structural unemployment and to promote employment of quality;
To achieve a qualified active population through lifelong learning;
To improve the quality and results of education and training systems at all levels;
To promote social inclusion and to alleviate poverty reinforcing social protection systems, lifelong learning and active and comprehensive inclusion policies, with special attention to women.

Additionally, the EU 2020 Strategy helped identify other results along the objective of smart, sustainable and inclusive growth:

Smart growth, through the development of an economy based on knowledge and innovation;
Sustainable growth, by promoting an economy that uses resources more efficiently, that is green and more competitive;
Inclusive growth, through the promotion of an economy with a high level of employment that results in economic, social and territorial cohesion.

Challenges & Bottlenecks

Regarding R&D and innovation investment, La Rioja presented certain weaknesses. According to Eurostat data, it reaches 0.87% of regional GDP. This is lower than the national average (1.33%) or that of the European Union (2.02%) and far from the 3% target of the Europe 2020 Strategy. La Rioja had 23,083 companies in 2015. Out of the total, 99.92% were companies without employees, micro-enterprises and SMEs. More than 50% of business units do not have salaried workers (12,314, according to the latest published statistics). This atomization is also reflected in the fact that most of the companies in the region are legally formed as solo-corporations or freelances. Likely, this bears an individualization effort to promote and engage these individuals into employment and training policy.

Transferability & Replicability

The Plan FP+E is a complex strategical project. Our selection of this case is justified as an example of the tremendous impact that PSINSIs may have in all sorts of public sector initiatives. In this case, a strategic plan for a social issue of major relevance such as unemployment and your professional education was handled with such a type of network. What surprised us from this case, beyond the formation of the network itself, is the publicity and openness of the initiative. It is true that it was subject to criticism, but the Working Group developments and final version of the plan was publicly and easily available from the regional government website. Moreover, the sessions of the Working Group, being a heterogeneous group including less qualified organisations, or certainly, not used to develop strategic political and operational plans, must have been rather complex to coordinate. Still, using the European, Spanish and earlier regional mandates and frameworks, they put together a complex plan that includes not only young people entering the labour market, but also long-term unemployed, disabled people, and those willing to re-qualify to improve their employability.

Success Factors

One of the major drivers for this Plan FP+E is the willingness of all economic actors to regain the competitiveness of the economy of La Rioja. Even along the economic crisis of the 2008-2013, the greater weight of the secondary sector justified that the economy of La Rioja was more productive than the Spanish economy. Measured through the relationship between GDP and the number of hours worked, La Rioja’s productivity was 36.37 in 2012, compared to 34.75 in Spain as a whole (Regional Accounting, Base 2008, INE). Another decisive driver of this Plan was the (EU) 2015/1848 Decision of the Council (October 5, 2015) on the guidelines for the employment policies of the member states for 2015. It set the following guidelines in terms of employment within the EU:

Boost the demand for labour.

Improve the job offer, qualifications and skills.

Improve the functioning of labour markets.

Promote social integration, fight poverty and promote equal opportunities.

Lessons learned

The 3rd Plan for Professional Education and Employment (Plan FP+E: Plan de Formación Profesional y Empleo of La Rioja) for the 2016-2019 office term represented an effort towards facilitating access to employment of the citizens of La Rioja, a region in the central northern Spain, World-famous for its wines, shoes and agriculture. The new federal government of La Rioja soon declared the care for its youth and unemployed a priority of its policies and public actions. And it embarked in a new plan towards improving professional education and employment in the region. This initiative was led by the Consejería de Educación, Formación y Empleo (the regional Department of Education, Training and Employment) and was the result of a very close temporal collaboration with the most representative unions (UGT, CCOO), enterprise association (FER) and other relevant social stakeholders in the region. Together, they built a Working Group to design and implement a new plan for professional education (PE) and employment for the 2016-2019 term. This has been a project then that can be associated with the new public governance paradigm (NPG) paradigm, and fits into the public sector innovation networks for social innovation. Besides the specific context described earlier, there have been several news concerning the implementation of the Plan FP+E since its inception. Maybe the most relevant is that the Spanish Court of Auditors, in its evaluation of the different instruments for employment policies in La Rioja, 2016 has observed a degree of implementation of the objectives of the Annual Employment Policy Plan higher than the average of the Autonomous Communities. In the case of Plan FP+E though, there is an absence of an evaluation. Also, some criticism from the political opposition publicised the plan was delayed in some of its proposals.