The management structure and procedures have been put into place establishing clear rules for the rights and obligations of all partners. The reporting tools developed guarantee effective monitoring of activities and resources. Potential legal and ethical issues, data protection and data management requirements have been systematically identified along with mitigation plans.
A dissemination plan was agreed and a set of dissemination materials and tools have been developed. The project has been disseminated succesfully in social media with the core effort in Facebook. 5 newsletters have been published and shared within partners’ networks. For post-project dissemination an outreach and take-up action plan has been designed, which will serve as the baseline communication strategy for exploitation related activities.
The main objective of the developed exploitation strategy, is to utilize the project’s outcomes within a self-sustained non-profit organization running PlasticTwist beyond its EC-funded life-time.
By the decision of the consortium the launch of the PlasticToken under the original ICO campaign was shifted to a crowdfunding campaign. It is important to differentiate PlasticToken and its social good purpose from the numerous available digital cryptocurrencies usually geared towards investment. The launch has been set for the early 2020 with interspin CreaLab (HSLU spin-off) agreed to handle the donations collection and then transfer the raised funds to the NPO.
With regards to the technological components, after the initial pilot requirements were collected and the design specifications and data schemas defined, development begun. Progress has been made on the integration of pilots activities with the platform components during an agile methodology. The crowdsourcing toolkit (observatory of crowdsourced plastic topics, open designs, RESTful API) offers advanced, yet easy to understand, visualisations of the wisdom of the crowd aimed to raise awareness and to empower users to understand plastic reuse thematic relationships. Monetization (PlasticToken, PlasticWallet Point of Sell) is supported by the Hyperledger Fabric permissioned blockchain architecture. The marketplace back-end is a distributed application (smart contract) integrated with the web platform, via a new version of the API that allows for the direct rewarding in PlasticTokens through the gamification. Plastic Heroes, a mobile gaming experience was developed and went through several iterations of user feedback improvement. Testing revealed that its target audience is mostly up to 14-years old, where it can serve both as an educational and awareness tool. The gamification framework core includes a dashboard-based UI leading the integration process for all modules and a virtual marketplace with a bidding tool connected with the monetization system. AUTH developed an online evaluation tool and managed an issues tracker to assist the testing and validation of the PTwist ecosystem and services.
Pilots created specific plans for their individual activities, and worked in mobilising their communities, with specific actions for engagement and focused dissemination strategies. All pilots have been active in running science-cafes, innovation bootcamps and other activities, developing prototypes and testing the platform and services. Additionally, TAGES while not an official project pilot, has also organized events in Istanbul focusing on a very interested audience of local stakeholders. The participating communities developed novel ideas on plastic revaluation innovation and plastic-as-an-asset systems. An open voting process was used to select the ideas preferred by the public. The winning ideas were presented by their owners in the project’s final event held in Istanbul on November 2019. The event participants voted for their favourite ideas using their PlasticWallet and PlasticTokens. An important innovation for the PTwist ecosystem concerns the development of a peer-reviewed evaluation tool, following an LCA methodology to value the sustainability of initiatives around plastic waste revaluation and award tokens accordingly.
