BELSPO BRAIN-be 2.0 - BECODIGITAL - WP1 Report - Baseline Measurement

The BELSPO BRAIN-be 2.0 BECODIGITAL project (2022-2024) researches, over a two-year period, the (pre-)conditions for effective and inclusive digital co-creation in a federal context. In connecting practical and scientific insights about digital co-creation, the project's results will materialise into a validated roadmap to support future co-creation initiatives using digital technologies or targeting public (e-) services. The Baseline Measurement presented in this report entails a first stepping stone in the knowledge acquisition within the project and, hence, the build-up towards the roadmap. Throughout this report, we will first present an elementary introduction to co-creation in public administration. The conceptual choices that will inform the further course of this project are described and argued. As research antecedents are scattered across the fields of public administration, political sciences and information system management, the intersection between them can render intriguing and enriching insights for practitioners. However, research on the crosslines of these disciplines is scarce, and many questions remain unanswered. One of them—and the explicit focus of this Baseline Measurement—involves the stakeholders that can potentially engage in digital co-creation and how to engage them. The reader will find that with each consecutive step in its theoretical build-up, the Baseline Measurement gradually builds a digital co-creation framework that captures the main concepts within work package one—which are, by extension, also central to BECODIGITAL. Therefore, the analytical framework will serve as a tool to present unique cases in subsequent parts or deliverables of BECODIGITAL clearly and unambiguously. Through a qualitative research approach, deploying semi-structured interviews on various real-life cases, the Baseline Measurement's theoretically-inspired framework will be adapted, expanded and validated. Whereas the framework's final version will be presented and elaborated in the policy brief (D1.4.1), project's final report (D4.2.2) and road map (D2.3.1), this report already details the research questions and design guiding our analytical framework development exercise from a practical angle. Moreover, it provides a first example of what the framework might look like when applied to a digital co-creation case (i.e., the Corona Consultations as organised by Sciensano).