Guiding Principals for the Citizen Experience , Jess McMullin

Guiding Principals for the Citizen Experience

By Jess McMullin

(Taken directly from Jess McMullin's website)

Understanding these principles is the beginning of great citizen experiences. Of course, this version is just the start. I’d love to hear your thoughts and input as we iterate over the coming weeks.

1. Citizen experience is about people.

2. It’s about the relationship between citizens and government. The Citizen Experience is the foundation of that relationship. 3.It’s about the entire range of that relationship, from active political participation to community civic engagement to policy creation to daily service delivery.
3. It’s about what’s in hearts and minds, about what people say on the campaign trail or over the fence to their neighbor or standing in city hall.
4. It’s not just about hearts and minds, though. It’s about results too. What is a given experience like? Is it good? Bad? Indifferent? The answers echo every day, in every community across the country. All together, those results are the reflection of a nation.
5. It’s about rights and responsibilities that transcend simple transactions. The citizen is not a consumer or customer. Using language and concepts from the world of business can help us be more efficient, but we cannot let that efficiency eclipse the relationship, rights and responsibilities between citizen and government.
6. As part of those responsibilities, government should sometimes be a partner and engage in conversation, collaboration and co-creation. Government needs to be open to the expertise of its citizens collectively and individually.
7. Other times, government should be a provider: a vending machine for public services. It should just work, simply and on demand.
8. In turn, citizens have a responsibility and right to be participants in shaping the public sphere. Participants make opportunities to offer their insights, perspectives, and expertise to help their communities and countries become the best they can be.
9. These roles of partner, provider and participant extend to every interaction, every touchpoint between citizen and the public service–whether face to face, online, in print, in the media, or over the phone. What matters isn’t the medium, it’s the relationship supported by that specific experience.
10. These touchpoints exist at every level of government and reach beyond government to embrace every publicly funded institution–the citizen experience fails or succeeds on the contributions of all public sector organizations.
11. There are many people who aren’t citizens, but have the same need for a caring, empathic, efficient and effective public sector. Pursuing excellence in citizen experience benefits residents, immigrants, business, and more as the public sector seizes opportunities to improve for all constituents.
12. We recognize the reality of competing demands, limited resources, partisan maneuvering, public apathy, ambiguous mandates and unknown futures. However: Embracing constraints and uncertainty prepares organizations for opportunity.
13. Thriving despite today’s public sector constraints requires a different way of thinking, a third way, an alternative to either/or. It isn’t about raising taxes or cutting programs–it’s about finding a way to improve service delivery while managing limited funding, about winning the game and making ends meet. It’s about innovation.
14. This innovation shares much the same spirit and aims as Open Government and Gov 2.0, but at its core, innovation for citizen experience is focused on people more than platforms.
15. This innovation extends along a continuum: from how we deliver and design services to how we design policy and organize ourselves to how we understand and solve problems in general in the public sector.
16. That kind of innovation for the citizen experience demands new tools, new thinking, new ways of doing and being. It demands creativity and insight into discovering, defining, and solving problems and realizing opportunities. It demands more than a tired buzzword, it demands and deserves a practice with real methods that are tangible, applicable and practical for public servants to adopt alongside the tools they already use.
17. We believe that methods and proven practice for transforming the citizen experience can be drawn from dozens of disciplines, and most of all in design and customer experience. These sources don’t have all the answers, but they do have the beginnings of a path forward.
18. New methods aren’t enough to improve the citizen experience on their own. Instead, new methods can lead to a new mindset, and new mindsets lead to new culture – a culture of opportunity.
19. [Your principle here?]