Periodic Reporting for period 1 - dRural (The service marketplace for European rural areas)
Período documentado: 2021-01-01 hasta 2022-06-30
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
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
First steps have been implemented towards a better understanding of all regional service ecosystems. FThe methodology applied in WP1 relies on a human-centred ethnographic approach. Such approach allows to uncover the visible and invisible key elements of a service ecosystem, such as actors’ interactions, needs, value-in-use, norms, and beliefs. Following, we have consulted collectively with all regions in co-creation sessions to identify regional challenges, barriers, and goals. In order to validate the approach, Gelderland-Midden has been the pilot region (hence the higher number of interviews and workshops). Among other techniques, such as semi-structured interviews, a five-step workshop approach has been used and it will serve as an inspiration by other regions. WP1 has also focused on the ecosystem governance (D1.2) and the model is set up around the ecosystem, in which service providers and end-users are centrally positioned. In addition, WP1 has provided detailed value specifications (see deliverable T1.2) of the regional ecosystem to accommodate stakeholder engagement and ecosystem development through the design and development of services, and creation sustainable business models.
In WP3 Task 3.1. started intensely in the first four months of the project, with a Platform Design Toolkit “Design Sprint” organised online for all the regional demonstrator partners and key work packages involved in the task as a first attempt to identify user needs to build use cases. In the second and final release, delivered in M18, Boundaryless in accordance with the regional promoters, steered towards the analysis of several use cases per each region, writing a document with a dual purpose: support the identification of the relevant components needed in the Core Meta Platform to help the developers in WP3 in the features development of the complex services components, and at the same time provide more elements to the regional promoters like the services needed to be implemented in order to build an end to end service to users, and also give elements to evaluate the business impact of the complex services released.
Task 3.2 and T3.3 have focused on the IT solution design and development. dRural partners have worked on the definition of basic specifications and architecture definition of dRural solution that will be used for realizing the different dRural releases. Significant progress related work has been the definition and development of the complete modules of dRural technologies that will compose the final solution as well as ongoing communication and discussion with the regional teams in the regions. dRural IT Metaplatfrom is composed thus two major blocks:
dRural Core Metaplatform, which provides support to the capacities of IoT, AI, Big Data as well as other core supporting services;
dRural Metaplatform interfaces, composed on its own of the following subsystems: i) dRural marketplace,. ii) dRural SDK (Software Development Kit) and iii) Rural API Gateway.
For the M18 release all components have been provided as MVP except for the SDK, which will be ready for the M27 Silver release. For the Marketplace and the Core Metaplatform, in order to ensure that they comply to the needs of the regional partners a feature request system with voting capabilities has been instantiated and used in order to elicit the requirements that would be implemented according to the MoSCoW methodology.
WP4 has planned for the deployment of the WP3 delivered solution in the different regional systems, providing support for three potential scenarios: a) on AWS; b) on Azure and c) on Premises infrastructure. Works with the deployment planning have already started in March 2022 in order to ensure the provision of the needed servers, capacity, domains, etc to be ready for the MVP release in the end of June 2022 and be fully deployed by the first week of September 2022.
Focusing on the impact (WP6) of dRural, the consortium has developed a comprehensive measurement approach relying on capitals, particularly suitable for two reasons: (i) to offer a wide viewpoint on economic, ecological and social progress, with improvements in quality of life as the major outcome in line with dRural’s main objectives under H2020; (ii) to follow OECD’s suggestion to adopt a capital approach that integrates those multiple dimensions and deals with the many interactions inside and outside dRural’s ecosystem. Following this approach, WP6 conducted multiple workshops designed to support regional demonstrators in specifying values measured by key-performance indicators (KPIs).
The business model activities (WP8) have started with the preliminary definition of a MOOC as well with the initial contact with promoters regarding the potential business models that will be applied at regional level
The WP5 focused on the Open calls starts in M18 of the dRural Project; however, to ensure smooth and effective Open Call Management, the core WP5 partners have already put preliminary activities in motion.
In parallel, WP2 core objective is to ensure project-wide respect for research ethics and privacy, especially in relation to challenges concerning ICT development and data ethics. dRural has also implemented an Ethics and Data Protection Impact Assessment (EDPIA) to ensure the dRural online marketplace is developed in conformity with fundamental principles of ethics, privacy, and data protection, using a “by-design” approach.
In WP3 Task 3.1. started intensely in the first four months of the project, with a Platform Design Toolkit “Design Sprint” organised online for all the regional demonstrator partners and key work packages involved in the task as a first attempt to identify user needs to build use cases. In the second and final release, delivered in M18, Boundaryless in accordance with the regional promoters, steered towards the analysis of several use cases per each region, writing a document with a dual purpose: support the identification of the relevant components needed in the Core Meta Platform to help the developers in WP3 in the features development of the complex services components, and at the same time provide more elements to the regional promoters like the services needed to be implemented in order to build an end to end service to users, and also give elements to evaluate the business impact of the complex services released.
Task 3.2 and T3.3 have focused on the IT solution design and development. dRural partners have worked on the definition of basic specifications and architecture definition of dRural solution that will be used for realizing the different dRural releases. Significant progress related work has been the definition and development of the complete modules of dRural technologies that will compose the final solution as well as ongoing communication and discussion with the regional teams in the regions. dRural IT Metaplatfrom is composed thus two major blocks:
dRural Core Metaplatform, which provides support to the capacities of IoT, AI, Big Data as well as other core supporting services;
dRural Metaplatform interfaces, composed on its own of the following subsystems: i) dRural marketplace,. ii) dRural SDK (Software Development Kit) and iii) Rural API Gateway.
For the M18 release all components have been provided as MVP except for the SDK, which will be ready for the M27 Silver release. For the Marketplace and the Core Metaplatform, in order to ensure that they comply to the needs of the regional partners a feature request system with voting capabilities has been instantiated and used in order to elicit the requirements that would be implemented according to the MoSCoW methodology.
WP4 has planned for the deployment of the WP3 delivered solution in the different regional systems, providing support for three potential scenarios: a) on AWS; b) on Azure and c) on Premises infrastructure. Works with the deployment planning have already started in March 2022 in order to ensure the provision of the needed servers, capacity, domains, etc to be ready for the MVP release in the end of June 2022 and be fully deployed by the first week of September 2022.
Focusing on the impact (WP6) of dRural, the consortium has developed a comprehensive measurement approach relying on capitals, particularly suitable for two reasons: (i) to offer a wide viewpoint on economic, ecological and social progress, with improvements in quality of life as the major outcome in line with dRural’s main objectives under H2020; (ii) to follow OECD’s suggestion to adopt a capital approach that integrates those multiple dimensions and deals with the many interactions inside and outside dRural’s ecosystem. Following this approach, WP6 conducted multiple workshops designed to support regional demonstrators in specifying values measured by key-performance indicators (KPIs).
The business model activities (WP8) have started with the preliminary definition of a MOOC as well with the initial contact with promoters regarding the potential business models that will be applied at regional level
The WP5 focused on the Open calls starts in M18 of the dRural Project; however, to ensure smooth and effective Open Call Management, the core WP5 partners have already put preliminary activities in motion.
In parallel, WP2 core objective is to ensure project-wide respect for research ethics and privacy, especially in relation to challenges concerning ICT development and data ethics. dRural has also implemented an Ethics and Data Protection Impact Assessment (EDPIA) to ensure the dRural online marketplace is developed in conformity with fundamental principles of ethics, privacy, and data protection, using a “by-design” approach.
dRural is still working on the identification of key exploitable results, representing the set-up of dRural exploitation strategy. The final output, is a detailed library, namely a database in xls covering all key projects’ results (including both commercial and non-commercial) and highlighting partners’ strategy and intentions for the future. The xls is accompanied by a report explaining library structure and analysing exploitable results.