In the past week, the Cities-4-People teams in the different pilot areas were busy organising meetings and events. It was not just the usual September frenzy, when everyone is back from holiday and life goes back to normal. For us it was a special moment: we were on the verge of selecting the concepts that will be prototyped and then piloted. However, we could not select without the input of our communities. This is why each pilot area took care of setting up a Quadruple Helix Stakeholder Meeting. The concept of Quadruple Helix Stakeholder refers to the four main category of stakeholders we aim to include in the co-creative process of the project, notably: public authorities and policy makers, researchers and academics, industry representatives, and, above all, citizens. These are the people who have the insights into what is most needed, what would benefit the local community the most, what is sustainable and what are the main challenges related to each interventions (for instance, legal – obtaining the right permits; scientific – defining methods to measure the effects and finding the data; or social – poor buy-in or existence of cultural barriers).
Therefore, building on the outcomes of the hack days, we resorted to a dual process to motivate the Citizen Mobility Communities to express their views. We first held an online vote using YourPriorities: in each location, people had access to a dedicated group on YourPriorities, where they could read about the ideas selected during the hack days, comment on them and vote their favourite ones. Moreover, each city organised a Quadruple Helix Stakeholder Meeting, which provided the framework to further discuss the ideas from the hack day and rank them according to impact and feasibility. The online ranking and the offline one were then compared by the team, who could develop an overall ranking. The latter was used by each pilot area to single out the five most appreciated concepts.
If you are curious to know which concepts made it to the top five in Barton, Budapest, Hamburg-Altona, Trikala and Üsküdar have a look here: