FirstLife and CommonsHood
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Project Title
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Project Description
FirstLife and CommonsHood are two twin online platforms for fostering civic participation and sustaining the local urban economy. They empower citizens to co-create, co-produce, co-manage public services, and to coordinate urban commoning initiatives. FirstLife is a local civic social network based on an interactive map. CommonsHood is a blockchain-based wallet app promoting an Internet of Values 2.0 vision. Together they pursue the connected values of sustainability, aesthetics and inclusion.
Geographical Scope
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Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
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Description of the project
Summary
FirstLife and CommonsHood are two intertwined online platforms whose aim is to foster co-design, co-production and co-management of urban services by citizens.
They were partly developed within the H2020 CO3 project, ended on 31/12/2021.
FirstLife is a local social network based on a newsfeed paired with an interactive map. Citizens can publicly post news, activities, places, events, and create groups with coordination tools such as questionnaires and chats. The aim is to foster cooperation by connecting people that live or work in the same place to regenerate it.
CommonsHood is a wallet app based on blockchain, it was finalist for the EU Blockchain for Social Good Prize. It promotes an Internet of Values 2.0 approach that allows citizens to create their own types of tokens to support the local economy: discount coupons, purpose-driven tokens (e.g., to reward volunteers), time banks, digital collectibles, group buying and complementary currencies.
The two platforms represent the state of the art and are part of a single whole, bringing together different community services: activities on the map are associated with accounts for decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) on the blockchain app, where nearby activities are searchable thanks to geolocation.
The two platforms provide an exemplary research result in citizen engagement, and have been experimented in several projects providing local solutions to global problems such as making life in cities sustainable and ensuring financial inclusion. They are tools for improving our daily lives, focusing on living better together in more beautiful, sustainable and inclusive cities by fostering bottom-up cooperation and empowering citizens with a new way to create value, the blockchain.
The twin platforms have been developed by the Social Computing Group of the University of Turin in collaboration with partners around Europe: civil society organisations, local authorities, students, informal groups of citizens.
Key objectives for sustainability
Sustainability is at the core of this project, in that it promotes a different view of urban welfare and public services at a time when the current economic crisis is leading to a reduction in such services. With these online platforms, municipalities can empower citizens and urban stakeholders to not only co-create services with the PA, but to actually manage the services in an urban commoning fashion. FirstLife and CommonsHood support this process by allowing information exchange and coordination using the social networking map, and the creation and exchange of values using the blockchain. Moreover, in the H2020 Digital Disruptive Technologies to Co-create, Co-produce and Co-manage Open Public Services along with Citizens (CO3) project, CommonsHood was used to construct circular economy services to support, for instance, the internal circular economy of the neighbourhood houses in Turin and a library of things to enable the sharing of tools. FirstLife supported participatory mapping of urban voids and public spaces by allowing citizens and students to share bottom-up proposals for regenerative uses in Turin and Athens
CommonsHood promotes sustainability also because it allows the dematerialization of coupons, certificates, customer loyalty cards, etc., with the only requirement being a mobile phone.
From a technical point of view, sustainability is ensured by an opensource approach which allows the two platforms to be put at the disposal of different communities worldwide (we are involved in international cooperation initiatives in Africa). Finally, we use a consortile private blockchain that consumes minimal energy but is nevertheless perfectly adequate for the values involved. Partnerships composed of local authorities, research organisations and private organisations can bear the costs of maintaining the infrastructure and make it available to end-users as part of their policies and missions for supporting local economies and civil society initiatives.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Following recent developments in Urban Planning, as beautiful urban places and urban projects we mean those that keep together aesthetics and ethics, formal aspects and the quality of experience, including civic participation. Our tools play an active role in making local stakeholders responsible, trigger positive social changes that start from the physical and material dimensions (the urban territory in FirstLife, the economic values in CommonsHood) and encompass new systems of relations and social values.
The aesthetics of the territory includes the relations among people living in those spaces, and such relations are more and more determined by online means. Our tools foster a view where the digital is not set against the real, but it is functional to real world interactions.
Peripheral urban spaces are often ugly and chaotic. FirstLife allows such places to be augmented with an informational space, transforming maps as a traditional instrument of power into a collective effort to allow new meanings, cultural and artistic dynamics and lifestyles to emerge about the places people live in. FirstLife allows citizens to enrich dynamic maps with what they care most about. In a similar way, CommonsHood, with its customisable tokenization system, allows citizens to represent assets of value that are most important to them, i.e., the informal economy, composed of reciprocal care, time gifts and volunteering.
Finally, our digitalisation effort is not aimed at improving efficiency and speed, as often happens when technology brings the logics of industrial production into daily life. Neither does it aim to replace the real world with a virtual world, as in the metaverse approach. Our technology goes beyond pure functionality, supporting continuous slow-paced offline engagement processes to improve the quality of the experience. This requires continued efforts in co-design and facilitation to be put in place.
Key objectives for inclusion
FirstLife is a public participation platform. It not only supports citizen engagement fostered by institutions, but also peer-to-peer engagement and commoning. It has been used at the EU level to make interactive maps of urban commons in the Urban Innovative Action (UIA) Co-City and H2020 Generative Commons Living Lab (gE.CO) projects. It has been used at the local level for youth participatory planning in schools for urban regeneration in the Riscopri Risorse (meaning “rediscovering resources”) and TeenCarTo projects in Turin. As regards equal opportunities, FirstLife is also used in initiatives raising awareness about gender imbalance in street toponymy.
As for financial inclusion, CommonsHood introduces local financial instruments that can be tailored to the needs of local stakeholders to support initiatives that foster equal opportunities. It has been used in CO3 for innovative donation and fundraising initiatives such as solidarity shopping via local coins in three neighbourhood social hubs in Turin. The City of Turin plans to use it for welfare subsidies via prepaid cards created in the wallet. In Vilnius, tokens incentivise volunteers to take care of the elderly in their neighbourhood. The blockchain’s affordance of disintermediating allows users to not only avoid transaction fees from trusted third parties (and no “gas” is used since it is a private blockchain), but also to avoid depending on intermediaries for coupons, crowdfunding, group buying, etc.
Both are web apps, rather than apps downloadable from a store, which makes them available to all devices with a browser and an internet connection, including mobile phones, thus making them most affordable. The design has been carefully devised to improve accessibility. The interface is most intuitive, similar to that of a mainstream social network, and does not require any knowledge of blockchain.
Results in relation to category
FirstLife and CommonsHood have been implemented in several local and EU projects. The following have been concluded in the period 2020 - February 2022,:
1) Participatory Urban Mapping:
- UIA Co-City project, Turin. 480 urban commons mapped, promoting the City Regulation on Commons and Collaboration Pacts.
- PIUMA - Personalized Maps for Autism, Turin.
- H2020 CO3 project: mapping on urban voids in Athens and Paris.
2) European networks of commons:
- H2020 Ge.CO: more than 200 commons all across Europe are made visible and provided them with digital collaborative tools.
3) Urban regeneration:
- RISCOPRI RISORSE, with LAQUP association, Turin metropolitan area: students mapped 250 urban voids and proposed and implemented 12 micro-regeneration actions in 6 muncipalities.
- Participatory mapping on volunteering activities based on the “15 minutes City” model, in the Turin districts.
4) Promotion of volunteering and local economic activities:
- CO3: blockchain-based local coins supporting circular economy within 3 “Neighbourhood houses” in Turin;
- Erasmus+ NEON Project: youth activism for mapping and supporting local economic activities through tokens.
- Blockchain for VisitPiemonte: pilot of a token-based system of bottom-up promotion of local tourism.
5) Web and Civic Education in schools and universities (about 20 classes per school year)
6) Platforms for open monitoring of local social innovation projects supported by bank foundations in Piemonte
Based on these results, further implementations are planned that regard: participatory monitoring in International Cooperation projects in Congo and Burkina Faso; innovation of local welfare subsidies in Turin; local social and solidarity micro-economies in rural and mountain areas (Piedmont Region); tokenized incentives for eco-sustainable behaviours in Turin and Senegal; support to visibility and sustainability of youth volunteering initiatives.
How Citizens benefit
Citizen engagement and involvement is both the aim of the two platforms, and the methodology through which they have been developed.
FirstLife and CommonsHood result from co-design processes involving several meetings with representatives of different stakeholder groups: associations, schools, local authorities, citizens and local businesses. The main steps in this process are: identification of key stakeholders; introduction to the technology and its potential; participatory identification of the needs in the community; participatory definition of the functional requirements of the technology; proposal of technical solutions and prototypes by the developers; iterative testing and refinement of the functionalities after users’ feedback.
Moreover, the co-design approach has characterised every implementation of the two platforms, whose flexible functions allow the tools to be adapted to context-specific needs.
FirstLife was first developed through 7 “open labs” in Turin where more than 300 people contributed to designing the platform. Then, specific instantiations of the platform were created for different initiatives so that the functionalities (type of entities, categories, embedded collaborative tools) were tailored to the objectives of the stakeholders of the initiative.
CommonsHood was first developed through co-design workshops within the UIA Co-City project in Turin. Then, its functionalities (for the creation of coupons, coins and crowdsales) were refined thanks to simulation workshops with UniTo students, who figured out possible application scenarios. Further functionalities for creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and time banks were developed following requests from the Co-City and CO3 pilots stakeholders. Co-design is fundamental also during the actual usage phase of the app, since, by definition, it allows users to create and design tokens in a way that collaboratively defines their purposes, via the “create new asset” function in the wallet.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
Both FirstLife and CommonsHood exploit the same innovation strategy: they bring technologies that are successful at the global level down to the local level. FirstLife is inspired by mainstream social networks and by GISs, integrating their functionalities at the local level. The focal point is the metaphor of a map whose content can be updated by everyone (differently from Google Maps where users can only put reviews), coupled with a newsfeed. Users are connected to entities on the map and interact with their representations via updates, chats and questionnaires. Connections are fostered among people who do not necessarily know each other rather than those who are in close friendship bubbles. In CO3, FirstLife was combined with LiquidFeedback, the state-of-the-art interactive democracy tool. Differently from tools like Decidim, FirstLife is not (only) a platform that allows institutions to consult citizens, but is also an actual social network at the local level. It excludes undesirable functionalities, such as biassed recommendation algorithms, extraction of personal data, etc.
CommonsHood transforms the blockchain, initially created for the purpose of global finance speculation, into a source of local financial instruments to sustain local economies and commons. Differently from most blockchain apps, CommonsHood does not provide a single token whose value is pre-defined by its developers, but rather provides a simple way for users to create their own types of tokens based on templates of smart contracts and distribute them.
In CO3, these tools were combined with augmented reality to achieve the new concept of augmented commoning areas, a phygital (physical + digital) space where, differently from the metaverse approach, augmented reality is used to expand the number and range of possible interactions in proximity among people and to incentivize them to experience the same spaces, rather than just enabling online interactions at a distance.
Learning transferred to other parties
FirstLife and CommonsHood are open-source software and are also provided as software as a service for those who cannot implement the systems themselves. FirstLife’s map uses OpenStreetMap, so that it can be used in all parts of the world covered by the opensource map provider. It has already been used in Turin and its metropolitan area, Trieste, Venice, Paris, Athens; and in Congo and Burkina Faso in international cooperation projects.
The two tools are general purpose platforms. The use of FirstLife encompasses urban mapping, participatory planning, open public debates, micro-initiatives of urban regeneration, education in schools (web literacy, civic participation, neogeography, urban sustainability, gender toponymy, and urban knowledge). CommonsHood can be used for fostering civic initiatives and local economic activities, financing associations and commoning, innovating welfare services.
Both platforms are made available to the public through their websites, www.firstlife.org, and www.commonshood.eu, that provide: information about their purposes, functions and use cases; and registration sections for direct access to, and use of, the platforms. User guidelines (and, for FirstLife, an online tutorial) are available. The CO3 project also made available some guidelines on co-design methods and tools to implement the Augmented Commoning Area model in local urban contexts.
Formats have been validated for co-design but also educational and awareness-raising workshops, targeting youth as well as adults, aimed at introducing local stakeholders to the civic-oriented applications of the geolocated social networks and of the blockchain.
Networking is carried out at the national and EU level, going beyond academic networks, with the aim of designing collaborative experimentation projects to implement the technologies in new contexts. Public events such as the “European Researchers’ Nights” have been fruitful occasions for raising awareness and spreading knowledge.
