Methods and tools used in the Hungarian pilot – Learning co-creation in public service

Methods and tools used in the Hungarian pilot

During the development of the pilot, we applied various tools to enhance participation of service users and other stakeholders. We executed project activities on two levels.

First, on the level of the Hungarian pilot project as a whole, representatives of the local projects: leaders, service users, frontline case managers (‘coordinators’), and other stakeholders regularly took part in LivingLab workshops to develop a general service model. These deliberative workshops used boundary objects such as videos, photos, pilot products, etc. to facilitate co-creation discussions. These workshops were accompanied by training sessions on how to develop entrepreneurial skills and how to provide a supportive environment for the household economic activities of the local families.

Second, on the local level, in the pilot programmes in 10 rural localities, members of the families together with mayors, professionals of local authorities, representatives of local NGOs, councils of the Roma ethnic minority, and other stakeholders regularly took part in local workshops to initiate, design, evaluate, and disseminate local activities. We asked local leaders and coordinators of the household economy development projects to invite participants with whom they would shape the content and goal of local economy development activities together. The applied co-creative instruments involved:

organising workshops to plan and evaluate activities (co-initiation, co-design),
participating in the execution of the activities (co-production and co-implementation), e.g. selecting the tools to be purchased, working out the common rules for using shared equipment,
sharing their results on a local level at local events (dissemination).
Clients were also invited to prepare videos about each other to share their experience with the services on social media using the community reporter methodology.
Participants together with decision makers, professionals and stakeholders also took part in developing the service model and shaping the final policy recommendations in various workshops using the LivingLab methodology (scaling-up).
ICT and social media were used for internal communication (Facebook group, YouTube channel).

In this part of the training, we demonstrate 3 of them with examples and also take questions to sum up.

1) Using open data sources on workshops:

At various workshops, we used visualized social media data kick-off discussions on relevant topics. We selected a Facebook page, in which local developments and household economy was the focus of the posts and discussions. We downloaded 5334 posts and comments (using NCapture tool) to create a text corpus. For processing and visualizing the data, we used Nvivo 12 qualitative data analysis software, which is able to handle large text databases using both qualitative and quantitative methods. For having a first insight into the topics discussed, we used word frequency query, in which Nvivo listed the most frequently used words in order of count of appearance. After cleaning the list (i.e. ‘stopwords’ without potential prevalence (like ‘that’, “with” etc.) were removed), we used ‘word cloud’ for visualizing the data. It looked like this:

Questions and tasks:

A) What goals and values can be identified based on this image?
B) How would you use this method in a workshop in your working environment?

2. LivingLabs

The following service model was developed during a series of LivingLab workshops. First, workshop participants in small groups prepared charts to visualize the service, and this was merged at a common session into a general model, which was re-visited and updated during several phases of the pilot based on the local experience. (See the description of the LivingLab method here: https://sola.kau.se/cosie/project-level-findings/insights-from-living-labs/)

Questions and tasks:

A) What stakeholders can you identify?
B) If you started a similar project, how would you modify this chart? What stakeholders, goals, or means/services would you add or drop?

3. Community reporting

We used the community reporting to enable participants to reflect upon their experience of household economy. Our videos were prepared by our service users and were used at various stages if the development.

(For more details on the method, go to the project web-page)

Questions and tasks:

Please, watch the following videos and answer the questions below: