Launching the Stakeholder Open Collaboration Space

In March, the Stakeholder Open Collaboration Space (SOCS), our multi-actor innovation community building & management platform, dedicated to all stakeholders (farmers, advisors, and suppliers) will be launched and adopted in the extended ecosystem around DEMETER. This digital space has been designed to connect users and organizations, leveraging on their skills, technologies and knowledge by providing a portfolio of services supporting best practice sharing, social interactions, community building and co-creation processes (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: SOCS Home Page

The implementation of the SOCS has been highly influenced by the MAA methodology adopted in DEMETER since the beginning, gathering inputs and feedback through a series of workshops and interviews with our stakeholders (belonging to the farmer or developer category).

Before the official launch, the DEMETER Consortium is still finalizing the latest customization of the SOCS to the identified needs, defining its different workspaces, which are spaces with the needed collaborative applications to satisfy specific users’ interests. Indeed, the current structure is based on a workspace for all the DEMETER participants and a workspace just for developers. The former will offer common repositories to discover organisations and farms’ core activities as well as pilots’ catalogue and will aim at facilitating the creation and sharing of agricultural contents, information, news, events, best practices, knowledge, challenges among all the different categories of users. The latter will aim at representing a virtual space to enable the collaboration among developers, mainly through the sharing of technical documentation that will be made available by using the wiki application (tool to formalise users’ knowledge in a structured way) (see Figure 2), the document library and through categorized discussions to solve specific issues.

Figure 2: Wiki for technical documentation

In the following weeks, further preparatory activities will be carried on and the overall platform finalized. Indeed, a strong support will be provided by the whole Consortium to populate the SOCS with both technical and business contents related to the DEMETER Enablers (needed to be integrated with the DEMETER ecosystem) from the current repositories (e.g. GitLab, NextCloud, …) to the applications provided by the SOCS for the knowledge management. DEMETER participants will also fill in the organisation and farm repositories, which will ease the discovery of companies’ core activities and the agri-trials catalogue to showcase the DEMETER pilots.

The key roles of the platform, such as the content managers, are going to be assigned among the most representative DEMETER partners, both for the agricultural side and for the technical side. Their role will be very crucial for the SOCS animation during the following months, e.g. selecting the main topics to convey through the SOCS (see Figure 3), updating the agri-trials catalogue, updating the technical documentation.

Figure 3: Discussion

Finally, one of the main functionalities offered by the SOCS is gathering and addressing farmers’ needs through a co-creation application. This application, designed thanks to requirements collected through the interviews with farmers, will be offered, in its preliminary version, before summer.