About Nacka Municipality
Nacka is a municipality with just over 112,000 residents and more than 600 providers of municipal services. The Future Dialogue is part of the municipality’s quality work, where residents are invited to contribute thoughts, ideas and visions about the future. Democracy Day with the school students became a new and important step towards creating participation also among those who often go unheard.
The challenge
Traditional citizen dialogues tend to attract those who are already engaged: people active in associations, chairs of housing cooperatives and the politically interested. But many, not least young people, rarely take part in these settings.
For Nacka Municipality, the question was therefore twofold:
How do we reach young people who do not seek out the dialogue themselves? How do we create real engagement – not just participation on paper?
By using existing channels such as the schools, and Vocean, Nacka Municipality could make efficient use of its resources to create an extensive dialogue and analyse the result at the same time.
The solution
Nacka Municipality therefore launched Democracy Day – a full day when the young people gathered for a hackathon focused on the Nacka of the future. To build engagement, Communications Director Henrik Kelfve facilitated together with journalist and moderator Frida Boisen, which raised the energy in the room and gave the young people a sense that their participation was for real.
With the help of Vocean, Nacka could:
Ask open questions with free-text answers to 1,300 students Analyse the result in real time with AI to find core insights Ensure an inclusive process where all perspectives carried equal weight Deliver a finished report to schools, politicians and the media directly after the event
Running an event like this for almost 1,300 students simply cannot go wrong. That is when it feels safe to work with Vocean – the tool has proven that it holds up throughout the whole Future Dialogue.
Henrik KelfveCommunications Director, Nacka MunicipalityResults & impact
Through Democracy Day, Nacka Municipality has shown that it is possible to combine scalable citizen dialogue with deep participation. The project has become an example to be inspired by, both for Nacka itself and for other municipalities that want to make young people active co-creators of the future.
The results are now used as input to the municipality’s Future Dialogue and strengthen the sense of transparency and trust.
Democracy Day was a success:
Almost 1,300 students took part in the hackathon The report with insights was completed and shared with schools, politicians, managers and the media within five days Created new insights for the municipality’s continued development work Gave young people a clear voice in a process where they had previously been hard to reach
We have shown that this works – and that the result can be both substantial and inspiring. Next time the threshold will be even lower, both for us and for the participants.
Henrik KelfveKey insights
The experience from Democracy Day shows that:
School is a key arena for reaching young people on questions of democracy Digital tools lower the threshold for taking part and bring breadth to the dialogue Quick feedback strengthens the feeling of being listened to An inclusive culture – where even “silly” posts have a place – builds trust and leads to more serious contributions
