NackaDialogen

Nacka is a municipality with about 76000 inhabitants. It is a suburb to Stockholm. We have divided the responsibility for financing and operations in the municipality in order to develop competition with private enterprises. The main reason is to develop the service and to minimize the costs. We also pay a lot of attention to the development of local democracy. Citizens' demands are in focus for our work. Nacka started the Nacka Dialogue in order to:

• Involve citizens in the deve lopment of the services
• Improve the basis for the political decision making process
• Continuously make sure that citizens are satisfied with our services
• Increase the local democracy
• Improve the adaptation of the services to people's demand

How it works. The Nacka Dialogue is developed mainly for citizens' involvement in infrastructure, ground maintenance and waste services. The duties of the municipality, the expected level of service and expectations of the citizens are described in the Internet and in folders available in the local libraries.

There, citizens can also find how to get answers, to complain or to suggest. We have one e-mail address and a 24 hour phone number everyone can call.

The citizens do not have to wait for the right person to answer if, for example, they find any risks at their children's playground or if the street is not cleaned after a snowfall. They just send an e-mail or dial one number which is transferred to the responsible person.

Benefits. Citizens have also access to all information about the services provided and the level of services. They are also invited to the dialogue on service. The service provider has the mail and the phone calls and include it in a quality assurance plan. Politicians have all phone calls and e-mails analysed and processed. It is the most important that we have local discussion about the level of services and the ways to improve them.

Results so far. The Nacka Dialogue has been in use for two years, and has handled about 20:000 contacts. Approximately, one half are e-mails. Most of the citizens wish to inform that something is not functioning properly, for example street lightning or insufficient clearing of snow. One fifth is suggestions for changes. A great share of the suggestions concern traffic regulations, often citizens who wish to reduce the speed of vehicles in their neighbourhood or desire other traffic solutions. Many of the contacts concern safety issues.

About two weeks time after receiving the complaint we check if the citizen is satisfied with the way we have handled the problem. All the information is kept in a database, which gives great possibilities for analysis. This system gives a transparency - the complaints and suggestions from the citizens now become a shared knowledge for politicians and staff.