Nacka is a municipality with 112,000 residents and over 600 providers of municipal services. They wanted to create a common voice for the future – not just as a municipality but as a place and community. The future dialogue is part of the municipality's quality work and aims to gather citizens' thoughts, ideas and visions.
Nacka Municipality - How do you capture an entire municipality's thoughts about the future?
Nacka Municipality wanted to start a future dialogue where all 112,000 residents could contribute – but how do you avoid getting stuck in individual issue debates? With Vocean they could collect free-text responses at scale, analyse the content with AI and create a process where both residents and decision-makers gained new insights to build on. The result: Over 3,800 contributions so far – and an open process where residents in real time can see what others think and contribute.
About Nacka Municipality
"Previously it was quite blunt. We easily ended up in separate groups around specific issues"
The Challenge
Nacka had long sought a way to conduct a more open and broad citizen dialogue – without having to rely on protracted focus groups or narrow interest groups. But with open questions came new challenges:
- To effectively manage thousands of free-text responses
- To ensure anonymity and data security
- To get participants to think of Nacka as a place, not just a municipality
- To encourage future-oriented thinking instead of a focus on the present
- To promote constructive ideas instead of just criticism
The Solution
With Vocean, Nacka Municipality was able to create an open, scalable, and secure platform for citizen dialogue that:
- Asked open questions with the possibility for free-text responses
- Combined data collection with inspiration from podcast episodes and social media
- Analyzed responses in real-time with AI
- Ensured anonymity through anonymous links
- Displayed results in real-time for increased transparency
"We are amazed at how well the AI analysis captures the core of the issues and how many perspectives it uncovers."
Results & Impact
Over 3000 free-text responses were collected from members, boards, and activists in the associations during more than 100 association processes. Many expressed appreciation for being involved in a larger context and for having their input made visible. The approach has also continued to live on – Vocean is now used for several different purposes within the organization.
A hackathon with up to 2400 high school students
A final report with external analysis
Baseline data for Nacka’s long-term development work
Insights into deepened citizen dialogue
Key Insights
Important lessons learned from the project implementation
Strong focus on sustainability and green spaces
Mixed opinions on car traffic and public transport
Desire for more mixed-use development and social meeting places
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