F1: M., researcher EUR
Collaboration is built by making connections and relationships. You do that by meeting people, visiting, understanding their context, needs, and priorities, and working toward alignment. It’s always people-work. Partnerships often fail due to people not clicking or due to turnover. There needs to be a “spark”—a click that makes people willing to collaborate and put a higher goal above their own interests.
F2: F., researcher barca
It’s relational and based on trust built over almost three years. We feel like a good team with a purpose beyond protecting information. During the collaboration the idea is to multiply
leadership and create ripple effects, so different people take on leadership roles as needed.
F3: M., Digi
A lot of calling people, talking, seeing them, staying in contact—so everyone feels heard, seen, and involved. In sessions, you have to be sharp so everyone contributes and has space, but also outside sessions.
F4: M., Digi-ICTU
in-person days were consistently the moments where real connection and understanding happened — the many digital and fragmented meetings in between couldn’t replace that.
F5: A., PBA
Capacity is a continuous consideration — both how many partnerships an organisation can sustain, and how many people are needed within each one. If the people who need to deliver are overloaded, the partnership won’t function. On information and communication: a shared folder is rarely enough. What makes partnerships really work is human interaction — regular meetings, open channels, active information management. Tools like Teams, WhatsApp, and email are useful, but you can’t just depend on them.
F6: A., Signalen - VNG
The main collaboration channels are a Teams environment with different channels for Signals 2.0 development, product guidance, documentation, and general discussion. The sprint review keeps everyone updated on what’s being built. The sounding board serves a different purpose — it’s where municipalities share experiences, present how they’ve implemented things, and spar with each other about practical challenges. The community aspect is genuinely valued — municipalities don’t just come for the software, they come for the network. Being able to ask other municipalities how they handle certain situations is something you simply don’t get with a regular supplier. That peer exchange happens both in Teams and through reference visits, where municipalities can visit each other in person to see how things work in practice. I help facilitate those connections, matching municipalities of comparable size and context.
F7: L., PBA
mainly face-to-face, big part is relational.
F8: A.
The municipality had little experience taking projects from start to finish, which made engagement difficult at first. Public sector staff often work on isolated parts of a larger whole without ever seeing a full project through — like people designing different parts of a car who’ve never actually assembled one. So we brought in private sector engineers and project managers to fill that gap. What I found is that once municipal staff realised these projects were actually going to happen, they transformed completely. They became internal champions who pushed things forward from the inside. That shift in engagement was one of the most important things to cultivate.
F9: J., Novum
At the start, working agreements are established and roles are divided. Collaboration is always bespoke — every project has a different composition and calls for a different approach. What also emerges is that ownership is a prerequisite for good collaboration: past experience has shown that if people do not feel they have been genuinely involved, they do not regard the outcome as their own solution. Tensions or bottlenecks within the team reach the PM either through the Innovation Designer or through informal channels, whereupon the PM acts as the first point of contact. It also becomes implicitly clear that collaboration can be vulnerable if the right people have not been brought on board from the start.