FirstLife. A geo-social network to support participation in urban design

FirstLife (http://www.firstlife.org/) is a civic social network, developed by the “Social Computing” research group of the Department of Computer Science, University of Turin. It is a civic media, since it explicitly conceives users as active players in the production of social knowledge to innovate and renovate the city. It offers a geo-referenced representation of crowdsourced data, by using a map-based interface where users can add places, events, news and stories as well as starting discussions about interested areas of change. Users can create open and public groups linked to a place in order to promote collaboration between citizens and strengthen social cohesion in the real world. First Life has been involved in an ongoing project “Riscopri Risorse” that will be presented as case study. The project is structured in four phases throughout two years to progressively activate the local communities of six municipalities in the province of Turin in micro-regeneration actions. The first phase, from September 2016 to November 2017, involved over 70 classes of 30 schools ranging from primary to high schools, with about 60 teachers, a group of public officers in each city, two trainers and facilitators of the University of Turin and four members of the promoter charity. During this phase, the methodology to integrate of a digital mapping tool in the regeneration process has been co-designed with teachers and facilitators in order to define use patterns based on the platform functionalities and common guidelines to map public spaces and commons and analyse these places. From November 2016 to January 2017, each school developed a proposal for a selection of public spaces in each municipality, with a final validation by the municipal technical officers, and a final selection of one place to be collaboratively regenerated. The project will continue from March 2017 to June 2018 documenting the regeneration process through the platform, and opening the participation to families and new local actors operating in the project areas

Back to public: rethinking the public dimension of institutional and private initiatives on an urban data platform

Currently, both private and institutional actors are using the most common social networks to promote the public dimension of their work, but only big players can afford large investments for spreading their initiatives, practices or building a participatory process of any kind. The existing social networks have several limitations: they have been modelled on a personalistic logic centred on the individual and on his/her private life. On the other hand, information about initiatives and actions of public interest are shattered in institutional and private websites making impossible to depict what is happening in the city. This contribution addresses the design a public platform for public initiatives, opened to any kind of public players, from citizens to institutions, from non-profit organizations to companies. We present the outcomes of the scenario analysis and the participatory design process, showing how general requirements have been translated in design principles and functionalities available in the platform FirstLife