Over the past few weeks, we have focused on exploring how intergenerational collaboration could be incorporated into open government by creating an age-friendly Finland. From contacting various organizations to conducting interviews, our schedule has been packed with activity and learning opportunities as we gathered insights to shape a more inclusive future for all ages.
Our project has shifted from imagining Open Government as an orchestrator to a working concept thriving on a peer-to-peer network rather than an institution. We also examine the vision of an ‘age-friendly’ Finland as an appropriate response to the country’s major demographic shifts, especially from the perspective of Open Government.
After engaging with officials from the Open Government Finland initiative, and the Helsinki Elderly Citizens Council, an exercise of systems analysis was a great way to understand the phenomenon of Aging Population with relation to Open Government in Finland. Reframing the aging population as an opportunity for intergenerational collaboration, rather than a crisis, reveals untapped opportunities.
Our project reimagines Open Government Finland as an orchestrator of action coherence, ensuring that insights from diverse stakeholders—municipalities, civil society, and citizens—translate into meaningful governance. We explore strategies to enhance participation, strengthen feedback loops, and drive impactful, transparent decision-making.
The first blog post explores the context-setting stage of the Open Government project, focusing on the role of the ageing population and public service in Finnish governance. It highlights the challenges of the negative perception of elderly citizens and barriers to their political participation. The post also reflects on understanding policy language and upstream thinking to create impactful proposals.
This blog explores how policies transform into real engagement under the topic of elderly participation initiatives. However, a heated meeting in Vantaa revealed the challenge: how can elderly participation truly engage in decision-making? Key organizations include the Finnish Ministry of Finance, City of Helsinki, City of Vantaa, and Elderly Citizens Council.
How do you understand aging, participation, and open government? This spring,
our class is exploring how Finland’s commitment to open governance supports older citizens as
active participants in society. In this blog, we’ll discuss key aspects of our research, including
language alignment, challenges of meaningful participation, and the strengths and limitations of
incremental policy change.
Team 1A sees that harmonising the public digital services is a solution for the troubles the users are facing. But how it can be done? Our final proposal is described here!
This post gives an overview of our final proposal and a reflection on it. The proposal is to nudge people to start preparing for their retirement earlier so they can have more options when getting older. With our proposal, we also want to encourage people to reflect on their life.
In collaboration with the Digital Population and Data Services (DVV) and the Ministry of Finance (VM), we explored the trends surrounding Finland’s diverse and aging population. As a result, we propose Tomorrow Together – a four stages-framework that adopts a life course perspective through predictive governance and multi-party collaboration into policy making.