About the customer
Nacka is a municipality with 112,000 residents and more than 600 providers of municipal services. They wanted to create a shared voice for the future – not just as a municipality but as a place and a community.
The Future Dialogue is part of the municipality’s quality work and aims to gather residents’ thoughts, ideas and visions.
The challenge
Nacka had long been looking for a way to hold a more open and broad citizen dialogue – without having to rely on drawn-out focus groups or narrow interest groups. But open questions brought new challenges:
Handling thousands of free-text answers efficiently Ensuring anonymity and data security Getting participants to think of Nacka as a place, not just a municipality Encouraging thinking about the future instead of a focus on the present Promoting constructive ideas instead of just criticism
Before, it was rather blunt. We easily ended up in separate groups around specific issues.
Henrik KelfveCommunications Director at Nacka MunicipalityThe solution
With Vocean, Nacka Municipality could for the first time create an open, scalable and secure platform for citizen dialogue that:
Asked open questions with room for free-text answers Combined data collection with inspiration through podcast episodes and social media Analysed answers directly with AI Ensured anonymity through anonymous links Showed the results in real time for greater transparency
The AI analysis was a breakthrough. It identified patterns and presented insights directly – without manual processing.
We are amazed at how well the AI analysis captures the core of the questions and how many perspectives it uncovers.
Henrik KelfveThe result
More than 1,850 people have so far contributed their thoughts about the Nacka of the future – and more answers come in every day. With the help of Vocean’s AI feature, the municipality has been able to analyse free-text answers quickly and in a structured way. Participants can follow the process in real time and see what others have contributed – which has increased the sense of transparency and engagement.
The result will be used in several contexts, including:
A hackathon with up to 2,400 upper secondary school students A final report with external analysis Input to Nacka’s long-term development work Insights into deeper resident dialogue
We have tried many ways of gathering residents’ perspectives, but this is the first time we have truly managed to combine openness, analysis and scalability.
Henrik KelfveKey insights
A working citizen dialogue needs tools that handle both large volumes and open answers With AI support, it is possible to summarise and find patterns in large amounts of free text When people see that their answers are put to use, engagement increases Well-thought-out questions are crucial for forward-looking answers
