The Collaborative Territories Toolkit gets a Reality Check in Bologna: #Sharitories @ The Smart City Exhibiton 2014

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The Alpha Release

A reinforced local Sharitories team teamed up in Bologna on Wednesday afternoon to prepare the last bits of the workshop to be held on Thursday 23rd at the Smart City Exhibition. In addition to Simone Cicero and Stina Heikkila , the Italian branch of Sharitories now include Giulia Cipriani and Marta Rossato , and although not able to be there physically: the ever so trusted Italian translator Silvia Candida. We had printed the prototype, prepared the presentation, and so the last bits of preparation seemed to be coming together. We were all curious to discover whether the “serious board game” we had come up with as an awareness exercise would work.

Our session started with a brief introduction by Chiara Boungiovanni from Forum PA (our loyal around-the-clock support). The room was full, with about 100 attendees willing to participate in the workshop. After Chiara’s introduction, Simone set the frames of the session and, of course, asked everyone to put on their special OuiShare glasses for the presentation to come.

Next Stina presented the remixed Storytelling prepared a couple of weeks earlier by Albert Canigueral, telling the story of Cristobal and Katalin, a young family living in Barcelona where they integrate the collaborative economy in their daily life (yep, true story!). This we thought would be a well suited introduction to more complex topics.

After the storytelling, Simone went into further detail around the collaborative movement, after which he presented the rules of the game for the rest of the workshop. You can check the Italian presentation out here (English version to follow soon):

From the 10 interviews conducted in the early phase of Sharitories, one frequently recurring theme was the lack of awareness about the collaborative economy. Therefore, we wanted to focus on awareness raising in Bologna, and come up with a new way of presenting the collaborative economy in an interactive and relevant way for local actors. This resulted in a “serious board game”, including 30 scenario cards and 10 expert fields from the collaborative economy field. The idea was to not focus on taxonomies, but to only have practical examples of services and initiatives, such as car sharing, makerspaces, participative democracy and so on. The list is of course far from exhaustive, and participants were further encouraged to add to it if needed. To have more than 30, however, would probably have made the whole thing too complex.

The first things the eight working tables were asked to do was to choose a focus for the table, that is a territorial development theme they wanted to deal with. Some had already been identified beforehand by local politicians bringing real cases to the workshop. Thereafter, they collectively identified four to five challenged related to the macro theme. These were places on the strategic board where the game would take place.

The next step after having identified the development challenges, each of the participants around the table had to choose one expert field, and study the collaborative scenario cards relevant to that area printed in a mini booklet distributed on each table. After having obtained an idea about the possibilities offered in fields like shared mobility, community agriculture, or peer-to-peer tourism (just to give some examples), the table had to look again at the challenges and see whether the collaborative economy seemed to offer potential solutions to these.

At this stage, where a collaborative scenario seemed to contribute to resolving a challenge, the expert put down the card badge on the board, explaining to the others why he or she felt that this was an opportunity.

We were touched to see people’s enthusiasm and engagement. Considering they were being the test rabbits of this new prototype, and there were many big questions to deal with in a short period of time (the actual workshop was done in about 2 hours), a big eloge must be given all the participants who dedicated their time and energy to us. There was even time to give us some valuable feedback both on the process and the toolkit as we rounded up the session. More on this to follow soon!

With the results packed up (not so) neatly as we had to liberate the space for the next workshop, a satisfied and tired team thanked the participants and went to brainstorm on the next steps of this journey. We look forward to bringing the toolkit to “real” local territories, and we already have several local authorities interested in it, both in Italy and elsewhere. Lets keep the water boiling!

Stay tuned for the upcoming full wrap-up on the lessons learnt and feedback received on the workshop and toolkit draft. And of course, don’t miss the publication of the first draft in English following soon.

By: Simone Cicero and Stina Heikkila

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