In 30 months CAPSELLA unfolded a wealth of activities working in parallel on multiple levels:
(a) Technical: the CAPSELLA data infrastructure and the pilot demonstrators
(b) Community oriented: the community-driven design, the open and participatory innovation and the bottom-up approach of the pilots
(c) Business: the incubation and acceleration process, the support of startup creation
Taking a horizontal screenshot of the CAPSELLA work, one of its major contributions is the multilayered and inter-communities approach. CAPSELLA brought together farmer communities that are the epitome of the precision agriculture and smart farming, and others that implement only organic farming practices, farmers from Northern and Southern Europe. It was a major challenge for the project to bring these two worlds together. It can be, therefore, considered as a major success of our bottom up and participatory approach, that these communities did not only meet during joint events, but worked together. The two field pilots (precision farming/compost and soil health) have started discussing the cross-fertilization and the development towards a single application. A joint trial took place in December 2017 in the Netherlands, to check in practice the difficulties and opportunities of merging functionalities of both applications into a new, single one. This new application could not be developed in the lifetime of CAPSELLA, but there is a declared interest from all partners involved in these pilots to further pursuit this objective. This direction is also reflected in a research paper, that was jointly prepared and submitted to the IFSA Conference in July 2018.
In the food sector CAPSELLA developed probably the first open data-driven application that has been implemented in a major European city. The Public Food application developed together with the Cities of Milan and Asti connects city officers with their citizens, enhancing transparency in the food supply management and allowing for informed decision making. Through the combination of open, nutritional, health and social data, cities can have detailed information about each city area, and citizens can influence the policies and priorities in their neighborhood.
Summarising the CAPSELLA innovation and impact in figures, in the last two and a half years, CAPSELLA developed 1 technical platform, included in it almost 600 datasets, developed 3 scenarios, run 7 pilots and developed 7 applications, created 1 online map, run 1 incubation process, supported the creation of 1 start up, and had 1 nomination for the European Digital Skills Award.
