Is Co-production the key to Public Services 2.0?

I was having an interesting discussion last night with colleagues and thought I would share it here. As you may have guessed, we were talking about "co-production". I think what is attractive about this idea is the promise it holds out of radical change - instead of public service being done to us by them (the government), public services would be done jointly. Instead of being subjects (or passive objects) we would be partners. In fact, it is already quite interesting that we feel this way about the status quo and it is not hard to think of lots of experiences that connect up with this - from road works that drag on forever and seem to take place at the most inconvenient times to any kind of public process where you have to follow the rules however inappropriate they seem in your particular case. We certainly don't feel like we are in charge or that our views or personal circumstances are taken into sufficient account. So promise of radical change is highly attractive!

So what might co-production be like? Well, before I try to answer that, I think it is worth looking at various other things that might reduce our sense of everything being done to us without any regard for our views and circumstances. To start with, much greater transparency and effectiveness in sharing the background to decisions would probably have quite a lot of impact. I suspect that quite often when I think "*** another stupid decision by THEM", I might take a different view if I understood better why they made the decisions they did. Similarly, a radical emphasis on input and feedback would also help. Imagine if routinely all public decisions were published online and contained both a link to where feedback could be given and a link to information on opportunities people had to contribute to the decisions before it was made (and what input was received).

These kinds of changes, however, seem still to be about making public services more citizen-centric and more citizen-led (or responsive to citizen input). What about citizens actually producing the services? The first thing I would say here is that it is obviously misleading to suggest that up to now the state has done everything and citizens have done nothing. People have always done lots of things to contribute to the welfare of their community - if we see a fire starting, most of us would at least call the fire service and depending on the circumstances (and the danger) we might even start to take action to put out the fire or reduce its impact. So for thousands of years citizens have been involved in co-producing fire safety! And of course there are dozens of other ways - new or old - in which civil society has tried to supplement public services in more organised ways, e.g. neighbourhood watch areas or movements like the housing association movement in the 60's. So what's changed?

Well, as a Shirky-ite I think it is the internet's impact on our ability to self-organise and you can see amazing things happening either in response to natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina) and political oppression or in everyday contexts (e.g. NetMums). So because we can self-organise they is more we can do for ourselves either without the state or with a different (and reduced) role for the state. I think that is a really interesting area to map out, but I do think there is a fair amount of mapping out to be done. Citizens sharing information with each other (as Netmums do) is a highly effective way of sharing information (and probably does reduce the burden on the state and if leveraged more effectively could do so even more), but in what sort of cases can this move beyond information sharing/advice? This is where I find it hard to make the leap towards co-production as the key aspect of public section transformation. For me, the two biggest things are a) the state playing a much greater facilitating role so citizens come together and individually and collecting do more things with a positive public impact for themselves; and b) the state radically changing the way it interacts with citizens so they have more input into decisions and more control of service delivery as it affects them. I am positive that radical action in these two areas would have a huge impact; and perhaps they do add up to co-production. I am not sure. What do others think?