1st CAPSSI Community Workshop

The First Community Workshop was held in Bratislava on September 28th, just after the ICT Proposers Day 2016.
Approximately 30 people participated in a highly interactive workshop; they represented 11 ongoing CAPS projects and organisations interested in learning more about the CAPS community.

The workshop started by presenting ChiC objectives and main activities and then mapped CAPS projects’ R&D topics and challenges. The research topics vary from machine learning to wireless technology, include low-cost hardware and data processing and touch also crucial aspects of community building activities such as engagement methods, participatory design approaches and collaboration behaviours analyses.
This activity gave all the opportunity to know each others better and will help the ChiC Consortium in mapping potential synergies and collaboration opportunities among projects that, even if working on different “vertical” topics such as air quality, critical consumerism, participatory budgeting, financial awareness just to mention few of them, still have in common several research questions and challenges.

Challenges

With reference to the challenges it is interesting to mention, beside the technical ones, the ones related to the willingness to answer to real users needs, to provide sufficient motivation to users in order to keep them engaged in the project activities, gain their trust, support the sharing of data and take the best out of the collaboration in very interdisciplinary consortia. It is worth mentioning that the participants saw the necessity and the difficulty of supporting communities in moving from awareness to action and this is one of the point that could be explored further in the next Community Workshops.

DSI Fair 2017

The next point in the agenda was the upcoming First Digital Social Innovation Fair that will be held in Rome on the 1st and 2nd of February 2017. Participants were asked to express their preferences on a number of topics to be discussed in dedicated workshops during the fair. They voted on several option and got the opportunity to add new topics. The results of this exercise have now be submitted to CAPS representatives not attending the Community Workshop in order to gather also their preferences. The process will end on October the 13th so that after few days a more complete agenda of the DSI fair will be available for all. We will need to start organising all the workshops together and any suggestions and support is more than welcome!

World Café sessions

The afternoon was dedicated to a World Café session discussing CAPS projects’ knowledge needs, networking needs and other needs ChiC may help to address. The outputs of the World Café will help the ChiC consortium in organising the next Community Workshop by answering to the emerged knowledge needs, the upcoming DSI Fair by answering the emerged networking needs and in framing its overall activities by considering the other needs emerged during the discussion.

The participation was really active and the interaction friendly creating a climate of reciprocal understanding and support that will for sure help this community to growth and reach its common goals.