Human-Centric Governance Through Experiments
* Report: Design for Government: Humancentric governance through experiments. Demos Helsinki, 2015.
URL = http://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/projektit/design-for-government/
Description
1. Demos Helsinki:
"New forms of government are sprouting up everywhere: Helsinki Design Lab and Design Driven City programme of Finland, Policy Lab under the UK Cabinet, MindLab of Denmark, and the Public Policy Lab of New York are just the beginning. These actors are renewing the public sector and innovating better societal solutions in the process.
How could the same behavioural insight, prototyping culture and evidence-based policy approaches be best operationalised in Finnish government? This was the driving question behind the new Design for Government project, ran by Demos Helsinki in partnership with Avanto Helsinki and Aalto University.
The DfG project was commissioned by the Prime Minister’s office and consisted of two stages:
1. Establishing a global benchmark of best practices by interviewing both global leaders in the field as well as key Finnish stakeholders.
2. An experiment as part of the DfG course at Aalto University, with students attempting to solve concrete challenges faced by the current Finnish government. Led by doctoral researcher and Demos Helsinki Associate Seungho Lee, the course also included panel discussions open to the public in March and May."
2. Roope Mokka of Demos Helsinki:
"“It’s bizarre that the rest of the society works with testing, prototyping and then scaling, but not governance. It makes politics very theoretical, slow and to rely on guesses as opposed evidence,” explains researcher Mikko Annala of Demos Helsinki. He was part of the team that designed of the experimentation model.
“There’s a lot going on in government innovation right now, with initiatives such as the ‘Nudge unit’ in UK and the Mindlab in Denmark, but we wanted to take this a step further, with large experiments and scaling up to the policy level,” Annala explains. “What the typical government innovations units lack is a feedback loop to policy. That is different with the Design for Government initiative. Now the experiments are designed to scale from the start.” (http://www.demoshelsinki.fi/en/2015/12/08/this-is-why-finland-is-able-to-implement-the-basic-income-experiment/)