Digital Platforms for Global Collaboration
In a globally distributed community, digital platforms are a high priority. In order to shift the global paradigm from PITO to DIDO, a digital ecosystem is a crucial layer of the Fab City Full Stack, our strategic action plan.
Platform Ecosystem — Fab City Round Table
The first of four yearly Fab City Round Tables, gave a general overview of digital platforms and provided some insights into how cities can start to benefit from them. Representatives from the Fab City Network, enthusiasts, experts and members of the wider Fab City community gathered to hear from digital platforms Materiom, BOTTO and Appropedia and an introduction of the Interfacer project including the FabCityOS platform by Fab City Hamburg.
So how cities can start to benefit from the digital platforms presented during this first Round Table event? What were the key takeaways from the speakers?
1. Open mentality for online collaboration
Open source is taking on new meaning with the rise of digital platforms that encourage online collaboration.
Appropedia, presented by Director Emilio Velis, is an open site for stakeholders to come together to find, create and improve scalable and adaptable solutions. It enables the development and sharing of collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development through the use of sound principles and appropriate technology, original research and project information. Appropedia is a wiki, a type of website which allows anyone to add and edit content. Contributors are only required to complete a quick and simple registration. Driven by a principled approach, Appropedia enables knowledge sharing to build rich, sustainable lives.
Materiom, presented by Co-Founder and Director Alysia Garmulewicz, provides a database with open access to information sources for material recipes and their properties, in order to better enable more citizens, in more places, to commercialize and get new material alternatives on the market. Using open source principles, Materiom is an infrastructure to enable people all over the world to test, develop and work on material systems together and to accelerate the innovation process. To do that, it focuses on the principles of FARE: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable data; embedding those through practice into the material infrastructure.
2. Digital platforms fed by real-world systems
There is a rising ambition for digital platforms to augement the physical world, by facilitating and making existing regnerative processes more precise at scale.
BOTTO is a solution developed within the Horizon 2020 Reflow Project. Presented by Enrico Bassi, Director of OpenDot Lab in Milan, the platform aims to support volunteer associations to combat waste in food donation logistics in the city of Milan. The digital platform collects inputs from physical devices held by wholesalers, who can quickly and easily report fruit and vegetable surplus and report the data to RECUP Association who recover the surplus for donation to the Italian Red Cross. The device interface is simple and intuitive, with a button and rotary controller to make all the operations, and a buzzer and LCD display to give feedback. Inside the device, a microcontroller connected to the internet through wi-fi sends GraphQL calls to the ReflowOS system. The ReflowOS is a digital platform also designed within the Reflow Project which sends alerts to RECUP regarding the nature of the surplus for donation. Outputs can be received via Telegram, which means RECUP can be alterted to any surplus food and collect it within an hour.
Materiom takes inspiration from the natural world and to look at how citizens can develop an ecosystem of materials that can incentivize more people, in more places, to enter the market and provide materials at a local level that are made from sources of abundant biomass. Alysia said the organisation is looking at incentivizing and enabling the shift from a very centralized linear model of supply chains, where petrochemicals are dug up from the ground, made into products and exported globally to a regenerative more distributed approach. They work with companies, cities and communities to support the development of local biomaterial supply chains that nourish local ecologies and economies. The team are working on the provision of open data through the FAIR Data Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) to enable data to be shared and reused between applications, organizations, and communities.
3. An ecosystemic, community approach
‘There is no one platform to rule them all’, instead a cultural shift towards an ecosystemic use of platforms with a community mindset is needed.
BOTTO is a striking example of how some circular transformations can be enabled by technology, but they require the involvement and engagement of multiple stakeholders to ensure the real causes of the problem (need-finding) are identified and the solution includes everyone’s feedback (co-design). When questioned if solutions like BOTTO can serve the Fab City Network, Enrico explained that the multiscale approach of Fab City, seen in the BOTTO example, is vital to ensuring that innovation drives policy in cities and visa versa. Initiatives created in Fab Labs like BOTTO speak for themselves and the prototyping approach can engage policymakers. “These people [policymakers] understood the potential and the limitation of the policies that they were defining. After a point, the discussion [around BOTTO] starts on how to improve the policies and frameworks”, said Enrico.
Appropedia director Emilo also suggested that their platform is enabled by people and community, he said: “One platform can’t do everything right now. This is one of the things that we’ve learned at Appropedia. In terms of platform, I’ve learned that it’s always good to work together with other like minded people and their value propositions of different platforms. What we are trying to do with organizing information on an ontology is to point to specialized platforms that can do something better than we might do.”
News from the Fab City Network
The Platform Ecosystem Round Table also gave an opportunity for Fab City Hamburg and the Interfacer Team to present FabCityOS, open source software that enable distributed collaboration on design and manufacturing. The software is under development as part of the Interfacer project for which members of the Fab City Hamburg and the Dyne Foundation received a sizable EU grant. A Fab City Network working group has been established for Network members to participate in the development of this emerging Platform. More information about Interfacer can be found here.
