Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 27th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG2: E-government Author(s) Mitja Decman University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia Title Co-governance at the Local Level: An Analysis of the Citizens Suggestion Service in the Slovenian Municipality of Ljubljana File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Mitja Decman Abstract Co-production in the public sector can be described as a way of designating collaboration between government agencies and stakeholders from the private sector, third sector and citizens. Within this concept, citizens upgrade their role of users or passive clients to the more demanding, influential and active role of co-producer or co-creator of a public service. Such a role can be also linked to the context of the New Public Governance (NPG), which prompts the development of new forms of leadership that will support public innovation based on collaborative forms of co-initiation, co-design, and co-implementation. In such a role, citizens are expected and can contribute valuable information for improvement or even development of public services. Within this process citizen and public service providers achieve deeper understanding of the problem and better potential for collaboration and therefore improvement. With the advancement of information and communication technologies, such activities can be put online. Using dedicated online services and tools, citizens can implement their role anytime from anywhere using their computers, tablets or smartphones. Adequate back-office systems linked to these front-office platforms can efficiently integrate the process to internal activities of service providers being on the state, sectoral or local level. Along with other existing technologies, such as social media, these special tools are customized to co-creation activities and provide a better potential for success. In the paper we analyse one such service, provided to the citizens living in the Municipality of Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia. Ljubljana, as the largest municipality of Slovenia with almost 300.000 citizens and an equal number of daily commuters provides many services and uses ICT successfully in many areas. We analysed the service "Citizen suggest" that enables citizens to co-create different public services on local level using a web service or mobile application. We gathered more than 14.000 suggestions over the period of eight years (2008-2016) and used qualitive analysis tools to detect and categorize co-production activities from the aspect of location, service types and co-production levels. From the analysis of the "Citizen suggest" tool we can detect the topics that are of interest to the citizens, the issues that they find appropriate to be raised through the co-production online service and the language used in such co-production activities. From the analysis of the whole process of the service, including the back-office system evaluation we can explore the ways such co-production works and should be organized, to be successful.
