The service marketplace for European rural areas

Project Information

dRural

Grant agreement ID: 101017304

DOI

10.3030/101017304

Project closed

EC signature date 8 December 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 31 October 2024

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 15 260 702,50

EU contribution

€ 14 186 402,50

Coordinated by

TICBIOMED TECNOLOGIAS DE LA INFORMACION PARA LA SALUD EN LA REGION DE MURCIA ASOCIACION
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - dRural (The service marketplace for European rural areas)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2024-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

dRural aims to co-develop and roll up a digital marketplace of services for people living in rural areas, while creating jobs and opportunities for economic growth and quality of life improvement.
The Solution is co-created in close collaboration with the ecosystem of potential end users and service providers, to maximize chances of (economic) sustainability. Once developed, a local instance of the solution is deployed in each of the 4 project regions (called demonstrators), namely: Extremadura (ES), Jämtland Härjedalen (SE), Dubrovnik-Neretva (HR) and Gelderland Midden (NL). Though the Solution is technically the same, each deployment is independent and released in the local language under its own branding and its local offering of services.
The main goals are:
To engage a critical mass of rural citizens, businesses, and key stakeholders to build an ecosystem of users and service providers.
To co-develop a user-friendly digital Solution: iteratively developing, testing, improving, and validating it with the ecosystem of end users and service providers.
To support sustainable post-project exploitation of the platform in demonstrator regions as well as its uptake and replication in rural regions from across Europe.
To ensure high ethical standards and periodically evaluate benefits, including contributions to boosting economic growth and increasing quality of life in rural areas.
More specifically, dRural aims to improve the quality of life in rural areas through the digital transformation in the service delivery

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first steps in the project focused on understanding regional service ecosystems. WP1 used a human-centered ethnographic approach to identify key elements, such as actors, needs, and beliefs. Co-creation sessions with regional partners helped identify local challenges, goals, and barriers. The focus has been on refining regional goals and defining a decentralized governance model.
WP2 focused on ethics, privacy, and data protection, with the Ethics Management Plan (EMP) developed to identify and mitigate risks. From M19, guidelines for developers contributing to the dRural meta-platform were introduced, ensuring compliance with research ethics and privacy standards.
WP3 centered on building solutions with a Platform Design Toolkit used early in the project to define use cases for simple and complex services. From M19, the focus shifted to refining the architecture, including adding multitenancy to reduce infrastructure costs. The work culminated in the Silver, Gold, and Final Releases of the dRural solution.
WP4 aimed to ensure the proper deployment of technological components in the pilot and mirror regions. By M46, all regions were able to deliver services with localized branding, language, and currency. The DevOps strategy was developed to ensure smooth operation across multiple deployment infrastructures.
WP5 began at M18 with a focus on managing open calls for pilot and mirror regions. The first open calls were launched in 2023, followed by a second call for Mirror Regions in November 2023.
WP6 focused on impact evaluation, developing seven regional frameworks to assess economic, environmental, and social impacts. The complexity of these frameworks was reduced by streamlining 120 indicators into approximately 40 metrics, which were applied across demo and mirror regions.
WP8 worked on business modeling and sustainability, creating business models for each region that addressed recurring costs, revenue models, marketing, and long-term sustainability. The dRural Academy and workshops supported mirror regions in developing their own business and platform models.
In addition, the project conducted a policy mapping study to analyze policies influencing rural digitalization, reviewing both European and national policies and regional initiatives.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

dRural has identified 4 key Technical exploitable results, and 5 Knowledge-based exploitable results, representing the set-up of dRural exploitation strategy. T
TECH-KER 1 – dRural Core Metaplatform An IT meta-platform solution by combining regional needs and requirements with state-of-the-art technologies. The dRural Core Metaplatform, developed by EMERGYA (PROXYA) and SECMOTIC, is a no-code solution based on FIWARE standards and NGSI interoperability. Thanks to its horizontal architecture and versatile data integration capabilities, it allows users to create smart solutions across sectors easily. The metaplatform has been instantiated in the three pilot regions and the 8 Mirror Regions and offers 46 Complex Services and 616 Simple Services in 8 different arenas
TECH-KER 2 – dRural Marketplace. Apart from FIWOO, the dRural platform integrates another technical module: the dRural marketplace. Based on an open-source solution from the e-commerce provider Saleor, itis provided entirely free and open source to help with advertising, marketing, and delivering all services.
TECH-KER 3 – MIMs and MIM.meter. MIMs are universal specifications fostering interoperability for smart city solutions, ensuring seamless data and system integration while reducing costs and avoiding vendor lock-in. Tailored for the European market under the Living-in.EU initiative, MIMs are advanced annually by Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) and public champions, with dRural enhancing MIMs 2 (data models) and 3 (ecosystem management) for rural needs.
TECH-KER 4 – dRural DevOps procedures ensure scalable, replicable and customer-adaptable IT deployments. dRural Technical Team designed its own DevOps strategy setting up the standard practices that will ensure technological components will operate as expected in production environments even when managing multiple deployment infrastructures at a time. This DevOps strategy was compiled and reported in D4.2 deliverable. The solution is being successfully deployed to and tailored for each pilot region and Mirror region. (WP4).
KB-KER 1 – End-to-end Open Call Management. dRural has launched 4 calls applying the same methodology. This methodology includes rules and principles concerning the setup, launch, management and monitoring the Open Calls. For the Services calls, external evaluators were appointed and for the Mirror Regions, a Selection Committee was set up, involving relevant dRural partners.
KB-KER 2 – MOOC dRural Academy is a self-learning platform composed of courses with instructions, training session videos, working documents (also in Miro), as well as a Growth Guide and Users’ Manuals elaborated and customized for dRural capacity building.
KB-KER 3 – Business Model for Digital Ecosystems derive from RISE’s experience with the Platform Canvas, and BDL’s expertise stemming from their Platform Design Method and Toolkit.
KB-KER 4 – dRural Ecosystem Development Methodology lays out the general approach for a deeper implementation of the digital ecosystem in rural areas. It includes a Governance Model to guide project stakeholders on how to expand the initial ecosystem of regions and an Impact Evaluation Framework that sets up principles and guidelines for impact measurement within the economic, social, human, technical, and cultural areas.
KB-KER 5 – dRural Position Paper with the aim to stimulate meaningful knowledge exchange between policy makers, experts and practitioners discussing lessons learned in the implementation of dRural.

dRural platform diagram