For three consecutive years, during the 3rd semester of the program at Taltech, our students of the Public Sector Innovation and eGovernance (PIONEER) MA program have been working with the Public Sector Innovation Team to find innovative solutions for public sector challenges. This year, the students offer solutions on how to use the local municipality dashboard to nudge local governments to deal with local environmental and climate challenge issues.
"Climate change is one of the major challenges the public sector is facing today. The central issue is how people perceive climate change. On one hand, we have more data on climate change than ever before. On other hand, climate change tends to be a distant topic, because we do not perceive these changes on a daily basis and therefore do not tend to change our behaviour. With the support of the innovation team, we are researching with PIONEER students whether and what data could be used to make people more environmentally conscious with the help of the public sector” said Veiko Lember, senior researcher at Taltech’s Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance.
For the last three years, PIONEER students, under the guidance of the innovation team, have participated in making Estonian public services more user-friendly and people-centered by applying service design methods. This year students have conducted interviews and observations with people on the streets, trying to understand how people perceive climate-related information. They have also experimented with possible solutions to tackle challenges that have arisen during the fieldwork.
In 2020, the previous cohort or PIONEER were able to present solutions to the City of Tallinn for the realization of a very important goal for the green capital - the Putukavail.
In 2019 together with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, solutions were sought to the challenge of Estonian tourism policy, how to take tourists beyond Tallinn.
The seminar will take place on 23 of November 2021 at 9:00 am (EET) both virtually and physically at Taltech. Link for registration: https://lnkd.in/gWW9J9G9
Topics include how might we…
… make people heard based on data?
… create actionable noise (and include it into a feedback loop) through the means of the dashboard?
… make climate data more personal?
… use the media to inform local decision-makers about the environmental needs of citizens?
*This class project is implemented by TalTech's Ragnar Nurkse Institute of Innovation and Governance, and the Government Innovation Team in association with the Ministry of Finance.