Governments are striving to deliver more efficient and effective public services in order to achieve better public service quality, with reduced waiting times, improved cost effectiveness, higher productivity and more transparency. It is an issue of doing things in new ways which requires fundamental change in the provision of public services in the future and a complete new approach for Governments to work and interact with their citizens.

Cockpit aims to define a new Governance model which actively engages and empowers citizens in Public Service delivery decision making process. Cockpit will combine the research areas of citizens' opinion mining in the context of Web 2.0, enhance Service Science Management Engineering in the context of the public sector and encourage deliberative engagement of citizens for forming informed judgments on public services delivery.

Globalization increasing automation, and the growth of Internet are change-driving forces which inevitably stimulate Governments to reconsider the way they deliver public services

Description of target users and groups

Public Administrations: This is a wide group encompassing innovation driven local, regional authorities, representatives and associations, Ministries, Parliaments and Public Administrations at national and international level.

Public service theorists and policy makers: These groups have a scientific way to define all dimensions of a public service in a disciplined way and, hence, realistically estimate the cost of the public service, apart from improving governance of the public service decision making process, but also the predicting the  impacts that the delivery of a particular service may have in relation to related policies and policy measures will be improved.

Service Science, Management and Engineering academic and research community: this group targets all research communities interested in the project's developments

Citizens: This is the most important target group, they will be involved in the design of the new governance model by feeding their opinions and contributions in the public service decision making and they will benefit from the improvements the new model will offer

Industry: This group targets providers of opinion mining technology and deliberation platforms as well as developers of simulation and visualisation tools which can take advantage of the new achievements made during the project's lifetime.

Technology solution

• A new governance model to engage and empower citizens in the public service delivery decision making process;
• Automatic extraction of citizens’ needs on public services delivery from Web 2.0 mass collaboration applications;
• Modelling of public services delivery.
• A deliberative approach to citizens’ engagement in the public service delivery decision making process.
• An ICT-based Toolkit for supporting the COCKPIT new Governance Model that empower and engages citizens in the public service delivery decision making process. 

Specifically, the  COCKPIT Toolkit will include:

• The Citizens’ Opinion Mining Tool;
• The Public Service Engineering Tool;
• The Public Service Simulation and Visualisation Tool;
• The Policy and Law Retrieval Tool;
• he Deliberative Citizens’ Engagement Platform;
• Piloting and evaluation of the proposed Governance Model;Dissemination of the results of the project    and formulation of a viable and sustainable exploitation strategy.

 

Technology choice: Open source software

Main results, benefits and impacts

OBJECTIVES

• New Governance Model which engages and empowers citizens in the
  public service delivery decision making process.
• ICT Toolkit for supporting the COCKPIT new Governance Model including
  a Citizens' Opinion Mining tool, Public Service Engineering and
  Visualisation/Simulation Tool, Policy and Law Retrieval Tool and finally
  the Deliberation Citizen's Engagement and Cooperation Platform.
• 3 demonstrators in order to pilot and evaluate the Governance Model via
  real case scenarios on national (Greek Ministry of Interior)
  and local (City of Tilburg, City of Venice) level

DEMONSTRATION

The consortium will validate the proposed Governance Model via real case scenarios on national (Greek Ministry of Interior) and local (City of Tilburg, City of Venice) level.

IMPACT

Cockpit will take advantage of Web 2.0 as the emerging collaboration platform for Co-Creation in Public Service Delivery. The project will innovatively collect citizens' opinions about public service delivery with the aim to continuously improve Governance of Public Service Co-Creation and increasingly engage and empower citizens in the public service delivery decision making process.

Apart from the improved service design delivery, Cockpit will enhance the trust of citizens through transparency and incorporation of their feedback and improve the prediction of impacts of Policy measures.

Lessons learnt

• The project provides policy decision makers with an innovative modeling environment to guide them in a disciplined way to design public services.;
• Cockpit supports the notion of open, smart Public Administrations that care about increasing the degree of confidence and trust the public have in them, resulting in better public service quality including new effective citizen oriented e-Government services. Increment of social and cultural factor;
• Political and democratic value by encouraging debate, participation and engagement amongst citizens.

Scope: Pan-European