The Collaborative Territories Toolkit Alpha Draft – Released for Comments

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The Alpha Release

A little more than a week has now passed since we held the co-creation workshop at the Smart City Exhibition in Bologna, where we presented the very first fruits of our work with the Collaborative Territories Toolkit . You can read about this in the post from last week, where the presentation we had prepared is further uploaded. Now, while absorbing this positive experience, it is important to pause and reflect upon what we learnt from the occasion, integrating both positive feedback and criticism into the continuing development of the toolkit.

In this post, not only do we publish the very first Alpha version of the toolkit draft, we also sum up some of the results that came out of the “serious board game” played during our workshop, in which stakeholders around eight working tables mapped out how collaborative services may help towards solving existing territorial challenges.

In this video, you can see what Simone thought of the experience just after the closing of the session.

Apart from a few “real life” cases provided by local politicians and officials joining the workshop, the participants were asked to come up with one marco-theme in the form of a local development challenge or objective that they wanted to work on. The themes that emerged were broadly the following:

Valorisation of material heritage

Improving inter-generational relations

Welfare and wellness

Sharing economy for Metropolitan Cities

Development and utilisation of human capital

Improving the collaboration between public administration and citizens

Centre-periphery dynamics

Economic development of the Bracciano lake area (close to Rome, Italy)

We realised at this stage of the workshop that defining these challenges was probably more difficult for the participants than what we had anticipated. This was also part of the feedback we received afterwards. However, it should be mentioned that the context of the workshop was not exactly the context in which the Collaborative Territories Toolkit ideally is to be implemented. In Bologna, participants around the same table did not know each other, nor were they from the same locality. This meant that they did not share the same principal concerns in regards to territorial development. In a real case scenario, this serious boardgame should be played by stakeholders living the same territory, seeking to solve a particular local problem or challenge. It might therefore be wise to have some spare challenges already formulated for a similar type of conference workshop if the primary focus is to familiarize with the context. Last but not least, the number of participants to every table was at least 10 due to high demand, whereas the ideal number may be better 6 or 7.

Once the participants had been through all the steps of the workshop, they were asked to pick three “favourite” scenario cards that they thought should be prioritised in order to solve their macro-challenge. Our audience seemed to be particularly keen on participative democracy , peer-to-peer learning and user cooperatives , which were the scenario cards picked most frequently as solutions. Another recurring card was time banks , indeed a great catalyst for social inclusion and inter-generational exchange. It was further interesting to see that some tables spontaneously started formulate their own collaborative services, before we even had time to instruct them to do so if desired. This was the case for example for the “Sharing economy for Metropolitan Cities” group, who wanted to include the development of a dedicated local multi-purpose sharing platform.

Today we also release the Alpha drafts, of the kit open for comments. We didn’t plan to release the draft documents making up the Kit before the Beta release date which is currently planned for January 2015 (see below) but as we received an overwhelming number of requests we decided to disclose the alpha documents and open them for readers to comment and help us shape the work. Please consider all these documents are not final and are currently being reworked and refined both in content and formats. It’s also crucial to say that we are talking about possible benefits, or likely benefits. Evidence for many of these assumptions is still being created in this space, and some of these assumptions have not yet been proven scientifically as “facts”: indeed, part of the work we want to do with the Toolkit is exactly that of creating a “factsheet” which will be backing these assumptions with facts.

The following release contains:

The Collaborative Territories Scenarios: a booklet describing 30 collaborative economy scenarios which are capable to positively impact territorial development strategies.

The Collaborative Strategymaking workshop agenda: The Description of the Workshop we adopted in Bologna on the launch of the Toolkit

Materials for prints to be used during the workshop (The Collaborative Scenario Badges, The Expert Tags: links inside the docs)

Here you can access the document open for live comments . Document is also available in italian: slideshare ; open for comments .

Materials for printing available inside the RFC docs.

Feedback is one of the core values of OuiShare as an organisation, and so of course we asked the participants to leave us a few lines on what they had appreciated more and less during the workshop. Without letting it let to our heads, we felt quite proud to hear that most of the feedback was really positive. There were of course also points for improvement, both in relation to the Toolkit draft per se, and in regards to the workshop methodology.

Overall, participants had a very positive and highly participative group experience and the tree – structure of the toolkit (macro-theme – challenges – actions) seemed very effective in helping them identifying challenges and priorities of action.

On the other hand, the most recurrent criticality that came out of the feedback was related to identifying the macro-themes and challenges (the first step of the board game) and to summarizing the detailed analysis of the central part of the game in a final recap (last step).

We thought it might be crucial, in similar situations, to spend more time going through a step by step presentation of the board game (also using photo documentation we took in Bologna), making examples of correct/misleading macro-themes and challenges and helping participants to identify a territory and play a specific role within it.

The “play the expert” part, was both funny and challenging, as participants only had ten minutes to read at least two cards and learn all about collaborative economy solutions. But it worked well, and they got so deep into it that they wanted to learn more on how the collaborative solutions presented in the cards could be implemented.

It was very interesting to hear them pointing out the importance of adding a monitoring and outcome evaluation phase to the toolkit, as well as a costs/benefits analysis, which we hadn’t included in the board game to avoid over complexity.

So, where do we go from here? Having carried out the very first “reality check” of the first stage of the Toolkit, namely the awareness phase, the first thing to do is to consolidate the prototype presented in Bologna. This work, which is already well underway with a reinforced team of OuiShare connectors and members, will be presented in January 2015 during an international release event in Rome .

However, it is definitely not too early to get involved, and Sharitories approach has already been proposed to several cities in France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Belgium, with which the local branches have started a dialogue to find the right local approach to develop and implement the toolkit. Like we have stressed many times already, we are envisioning a Collaborative Territories Toolkit that is partly co-designed together with local stakeholders, to make sure that it is relevant and adjusted to local challenges and opportunities.

Now we need some support to carry this important work forward, both in terms of resources and knowledge creation. We are therefore looking for standardized and tailor-made partnerships both with local governments, private companies, research institutions and trouble makers who believe, like us, that the collaborative economy offers renewed energy to face challenges that mankind has been struggling to face for decades.

What we are looking for more specifically will be published in the next coming weeks, outlining partnership models and what they entail.

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