Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I work for my hometown City Hall, dealing with application development and business analysis.  In the last three years we are trying to improve the quality of the public services in our city,  and at a certain time, we have the necessity to understand the citizens opinions about the city  and the public administration. We had a lot of meetings and dynamics to debate ideas and find  proposals to talk with the local citizens. We need some tool that let citizens do surveys, but  without public administration employees participating on the interviews. So we can know that  the opinion was not driven by someone else.

Selection

After some consideration, we needed to start some pilot, but without spending a lot of money.  We faced that we can use cheap tablets to make surveys with the population at strategic  points, or do surveys with SMS as the people use our services, or even do surveys online at our  website. We choose the tablets idea. We’ve made some prototypes, searched cheap models  that fits the desired functionality, made attractive application to call the attention, and get  ready to start our research.

Application

We decided to start our learning launch, searching for any public event that brings an  adequate quantity of people. Hopefully, there’s an Hospital event where the Mayor will open a  new service area to the population. We started putting our tablets at strategic places, but  without administration employees calling people to vote. We wanted to know if the people  will be engaged on the surveys without someone telling them to do so.

Fortunately, at this event, many people noticed the tablets, interacted with them and  answered the survey. We dah good results and more answers than we expected.

Insight and Approach

Despite the good result at this event. We had some more questions at the end. The quantity of  answers are driven by the event? And on an average day? Que good results we have on the  answers are also driven by the event? On an normal day, only the “angry” citizens will use the  survey to claim their necessities? There’s time to grow up. We launched the survey on all 110  local public health clinics. So we started another survey where citizens can vote for the  preferred local of the city to be renewed first on an effort to renew 12 local public places.  Actually we have more than 200 tablets around the city on four different surveys were local  citizens and visitors can do their perception about health, education, tourist points of interest  and city environment.

As said on the last paragraph, the project is a huge success, and actually population can  interact sending their perception about the city and what they need to improve. We started  doing more researches, like use of bots at social media. Every small idea that brings us to  prototypes and research drive us to grow and scale the project, that is aimed to work with  various efforts to make our city more modern and smart.

Maybe we could do some things better. We had some problems with the initial versions of the  survey application. But that was part of the process and as we learned with the problems we  resolved and go forward. But the prototypes itself and the learning launch helped us a lot.  After all, if we start again anything like this, we could find more experts of the administration  areas (health, education, tourism) to be part of the project since it’s very start.

