The CO3 methodology has some core activities of different types that are mandatory:
Technology focus: To provide an overview and the opportunities of each technology, a set of meetings, demonstrations, and webinars are taking inside the consortium, including the three principal municipalities, which are the pilots.
Knowledge share: The meetings, face to face interviews, groups, and on-site visits are important to collect the information about existing services, local policies, needs, resources, and other barriers found on the three scenarios of the pilots.
Co-design workshops: Without those and the participation of the final users, stakeholders and public administration are impossible to design a service that is perceived as useful by the end-user. Also, it helps to identify the use case of each scenario.
Some of these activities required support materials that have been collected into the “CO3 Toolkit”. The CO3 Toolkit is composed of several elements, for instance:
Project Vision and CO3 Technologies introduction: A collection of slides that will be used in the face to face meetings and webinars. It contains the summary of the project and an introduction to each of the CO3 technologies: blockchain, liquid feedback, first life, and gamification.
A guide to interview CO3 Stakeholders: It is a guide with materials to know better the new public to be addressed. Define the venue, the participant’s profile, interests, service provided/used… this guide is useful to detect potential stakeholders that can make a difference in the project scenarios like associations, etc.
Questions list: These are specific questions related to CO3 project technologies, user’s habits, and all the information that can be interesting to segment and identify final user profiles. The objective of these questions is personalizing the service.
Co-Design Workshop
The workshop is usually one full-day session, but in some cases and depending on the number of the groups, it can take up to two days.
The participants should be as heterogeneous as possible, involving internal and external persons of the CO3 consortium. Heterogenial groups will create more abundant information from multiple perspectives. It is essential to balance the competences on each group, including policymakers, citizens, tech experts, etc. Each of those groups should be supported by one facilitator of the CO3 consortium, which is aware of the technologies and the objectives. One individual per group should take the role of the recorder to draw and write the content into the printed CO3 material. FIGURE 2 summarizes the previous information.
The data is collected before the workshop, where the recruited participants fill the question list and during the workshop with a different canvas (ECOSYSTEM, ACTORS PORTRAIT, etc.) filled by each group. Also, it is essential to note and capture where and how the CO3 cards are used inside of those canvases.
The used elements of the CO3 toolkit are:
ECOSYSTEM CANVAS: This canvas, shown in Figure 3, is derived from Platform Design Canvas. This is used to identify the three types of stakeholder profiles. During the realization, the moderators motivate the participant to put themselves in the paper of a public administrator/employee that is in one of those profiles.
EXPERIENCE CANVAS: This is based on the User Journey, as shown in Figure 7. It consists of a scheme with fields corresponding to a typical sequence of steps a person experiences when entering in contact with a service. The participants have to imagine that they are the final user to generate the opinion from the final user perspective. Participants should define where it should be found, what the user will discover, what actions can be performed, and finally, which technologies will be involved. Both activities and technologies are positioned side by side to allow the participant to see and suggest possible functional interactions.
In the following Figure 9, the template for a card is defined. It indicates the position of the text and color palette for the different categories. In Figure 10, a specific example of a card for the concept of sharing economy.
All of this material has been used in the different pilots covered in the “Paris co-design workshop” , “Turin co-design workshop” and “Athens co-design workshop”.