Contextual aspects; drivers and brakes

Co-creation is barely recognised in Poland. The project faced an established bureaucratic model and a lack of any concepts encouraging the involvement of stakeholders, particularly end-users, in public policies. Against this background, the Polish CoSIE team cite the growing emphasis of commercial businesses on excellent customer experience, and drew upon human-centred design approaches intended to benefit both supplier and customer by putting the customer at the centre of innovation. The rationale is that services (commercial and public) are essentially relational and can improve their innovative capacities through new forms of social interactions, partnerships and value co-creation. Design thinking, which also informed pilots in Estonia and Finland, is at the heart of this pilot.

At national level, the key directions for the government’s activities with regard to older citizens are set out in Social Policy for the Elders 2030. Security – Participation – Solidarity. This is the first document to set out specific areas of activity, and – most importantly – indicates the entities directly responsible for their implementation. Creating a comprehensive programme in the field of senior policy is aimed at systematizing and improving the activities of public institutions for the elderly in Poland. The most important activities implemented over the past two years include the Senior Multiannual Program for 2015–2020 addressed to local government units. Its purpose is to increase active participation in the social life of seniors. Wroclaw is the first city in Poland that honours people, institutions and companies working for seniors in a special way.

Social media turned out to be extremely challenging in this pilot. Most members of the project team had not previously used such forms of media/communication. That was resolved by training team members in social media to become involved in these activities while assigning the task of managing social media to one person as access for several people may be unclear. Much more of an issue was that the group of target beneficiaries of the project – seniors – do not support social media, so reaching them via these paths was drastically limited (only a few percent of seniors use social media in Poland). Social media is a strange new world for many of them. The problem with seniors using social media or the internet turned out to be bigger than we thought at the beginning of the project. Despite training on Community Reporting with a group of leaders who co-created the pilot project with us, they still showed deficiencies in basic use of the internet. Additional training on social media was provided in July 2019. The purpose of the training was to engage this group of leaders in servicing social media and ripping films in order to as work as Community Reporters. It turned out that digital exclusion was even greater than we thought which is why it started from the very basics. Despite professionally conducting a series of simple training sessions, we did not notice greater involvement of seniors in the pilot programme with social media. The acquired knowledge was used for personal purposes – e.g. socializing, rather than promoting the ProPoLab project. This allowed us to precisely determine and visualise the scale of digital exclusion of seniors. Similar activities are absolutely justified, but they should take place on a much larger scale and with more regularity so that they bring the expected effect of the involvement of seniors in social media.

The publication of video materials on the YouTube channel was an additional way to inform about the progress of the project. We decided to record numerous events to have interesting material to present to people who could not participate in these events. Video films are also a more interesting form of presenting the effects of the pilot programme than reports or presentations. In this way it is easier to reach the beneficiaries or stakeholders. It is reasonable to choose a good company that creates video recordings so that all films are interesting, well assembled and in the same style. In addition, it is reasonable to train at least one team member to record and create good quality videos to avoid having to hire a professional company for small events or individual interviews.

Surprisingly, it was not very difficult to involve citizens into process of co-creation. Involving stakeholders is much harder. For them, it is much more difficult to see their role in co-creation or the benefits of the process. Although the pilot held many successful meetings with stakeholders, attendance was sometimes disappointing. On reflection, ways to address this include: plan your meetings in advance so that they last for several hours. Short meetings, involve a lot of time to get to the meeting place, and often leave not enough to discuss current issues. The multi-agency nature of the pilot – although a great strength – presented challenges in choosing the dates of meetings. It was often a problem because each member of the project has main employment in a different unit and at different times and varying flexibility of work, while participation in the project is an additional task.