It's been one year since we sat the first time to organize the activities around the OPENCARE project - a project run by a consortium of partners and funded by the European Union under Horizon2020. A year of hard work, dedication, emotions and also surprises.
The role of SCimPULSE in this project is to be the partner dedicated mostly to Ethics and alternative ways of Engagement. Ethics are the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles, in specific principles that govern a person's or an organization's behaviour or the conducting of an activity. The role of the foundation is to assess the guidelines and safeguard the principles around the digital collaboration platform. In that regard we engaged a panel of neutral reviewers with expertise in the field of medical and social care to help us on the journey. Thanks to that we were capable to support the development of a Drupal module, enabling a "consent funnel" that guarantees the community's ownership of the content while preserving the individual privacy.
Just like Ethics can be applied broadly, Engagement is also a widely used word, including both online and offline activities such as posts, social media, personal and group meetings, workshops and other events. Here we played the role of creating alternatives to the "online-only" engagement proposing the approach of "offline first - then online". The idea here was to do the initial onboarding of proposals and initiatives getting the owners of the proposals to play what we call the "Deep Games", a combination of Design Thinking and LEGO® Serious Play®. After those activities the participants will converge on the online platform hosted by the Edgeryders.
For those who have not followed the project earlier, the Edgeryders platform is the place where all the stories about care made by "communities for communities" are collected, posted and commented, as a working prototype testing for social collaboration. The intention with that is to enable conversations and the run ethnographic research (one of the many branches of big data) to discover ways to redesign the medical and social care services in Europe. The resulting research will support European legislators to create new policies according to the needs of the population.
Alas, nothing comes free of risks, so did this project: we faced unexpected challenges with the budget allocated to support up to three initiatives for engagement in the Deep Games protocol. We tried to have a backup "Call" but did not work as expected. We did have engagement in collaboration with our partners of WeMake and from the Scimpulse network, resulting in a few initiatives applying for the deep games but not in the scale that we would have had if we had the budget.
Thanks to the collaboration with WeMake we have been able to get three initiative to participate in around of activities in January 2017, with good potential.
The initiatives were a bit on the technical side in their early proposal stage but with our intervention we refocused them to think about the community for whom they are proposing their solutions.
On their side the Edgeryders also tried to mitigate the impact of this risk with the creation of Open&change, an initiative to involve more people online and that way compensate for the loss of resources, and that helped capturing more ideas and stories around the topic, to increase the research sample size.
Overall it was an effective -highly collaborative- mitigation effort and there is now a social commitment with the initiatives to help them get to the communities for who they are intended for.
In the meantime, the University of Bordeaux developed a graphic visualization tool that promises to render evident the interaction between people on the Edgeryders platform, fulfilling one of the initial claims of the OPENCARE project: the capability to visualize the crowd's interactions.
What's next?
Next we need you - all of you who are reading this post! - come online and tell us your story, or a story you know, about community-organized care, alternative medical or social care, hacking the traditional system, proposing how to create new ways to deliver medical services and care about each other, preferably in a community-based organization but not excluding personalized services - either paid or volunteering - that propose a new way of caring for your neighborhood, your city, your country and the European Union as a whole.
Ready to Open Care? connect here www.opencare.cc or click on the image below to discover more!
