"We will share our experience in managing and promoting the use of a local web platform for civic purposes, Comunità, included within the Bologna city web site, named Iperbole, which has been conceived and announced as a digital commons."

1. FOSTERING A CIVIC NETWORK
AS A DIGITAL COMMONS
Michele Restuccia
snark - space making
The City as a Commons
November 6, 2015 - Opificio Golinelli, Bologna

2. We will share our experience in managing and promoting the use of a local
web platform for civic purposes, Comunità, included within the Bologna city
web site, named Iperbole, which has been conceived and announced as a
digital commons.
As community managers of the platform, the three of us have been engaged
in many dimensions of such process.
We will present our insights and challenges, pointing to two questions: could
it be considered a digital commons? What should we work on to let it grow as
a commons?
We are here for...

3. 1994 - 2015
The city of Bologna first established its own web-site Rete civica Iperbole in
1994, along with other services as connectivity and e-mail address, for letting
its citizens access the Internet.
In December 2014, coherently with the results of the participatory process of
the city's digital agenda, the city web-site has been provided with two new
areas joining the homepage (www.comune.bologna.it).
Servizi Online (https://servizi.comune.bologna.it) offers a personal access to
several public services as welfare, mobility, taxes, etc., and Comunità
(www.comune.bologna.it/comunita) is a web platform for civic and
collaborative initiatives within the 'Collaborare è Bologna' policy.

5. Our role
snark, an independent public processes design group, joined the Iperbole
team, made of municipal offices staff, contractors and researchers, since the
developing stages of Comunità, to define and run community management
activities specific for the platform.
We identified a proposal for a peer-to-peer platform aimed at hosting both
spontaneous practices and those resulting from calls, policies and projects
promoted by the city government and similar actors.
This concept was aimed at allowing all the relevant civic and collaborative
practices to be hosted, and having the users taking care of the platform as a
commons.

6. How does it work?
Joining Comunità requires individuals to undersign a charter that, along with
the terms and conditions of use, make them responsible for the maintenance
and the growing of the platform itself, defining it as a commons.
Comunità and Servizi On line are accessible with different digital identity
systems: FedERa, provided by a local government-owned company (the only
one allowing a complete use of Iperbole's services), as well as those provided
by social networks as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Linkedin.

7. Comunità has been described as a civic network for the city of Bologna,
translating the name of the city website (Iperbole Civic Network), and trying
to provide an effective metaphor: it’s a network made of and for civic and
social initiatives.
The platform appears and works as a social network: individuals have to use
their own name, and are able to create, manage and browse contents
(profiles, posts, projects, etc.) as within Facebook, and most of the uses are
horizontal and transparent.
On the one hand users, both individually and for their own organizations can
autonomously publish contents.
On the other hand they can access to tools as public consultations,
questionnaires and send proposals for taking care of urban commons (within
the specific city regulation).

9. Spreading and connecting
Since December 2014 we worked both off-line and on-line to promote the
knowledge and the use of Comunità, to find improvements and development
requests, and to engage both the community and the administration in the
process of taking care of the platform as a commons.
We held meetings and workshops involving city government offices,
individuals and private organizations. The underlying principle has always
been to understand what was already happening within the local community,
and to find the viable metaphors for on-line interactions.
We undertook the effort to punctually investigate the contents as soon as
they are published to promote connections inviting users to get in contact.
On the whole we either met or remotely assisted more than five-hundred
individuals, holding about one hundred meetings.

10. Co-designing the platform

11. When the platform has been launched, a public consultation on the Charter
has been opened to the users. Due to the contents (creative commons
licensing, community management, etc.) and the timing and the stage of the
platform, just twenty users contributed.
Then we began a series of focus groups to analyze the platform use and to
find out a set of priorities.
In april we held a public workshop to review and co-design the platform's
homepage.
In May a new version of the homepage has been released, built around a
timeline of contents, and provided with a footer with informative contents as
a guide and a FAQ page, as well as new features.

12. Our efforts have also been oriented at designing new functions for social and
civic oriented policies, as they were requested by the city government
offices.
It’s been possible through an intense relation with several city government
offices, in particular with the one managing initiatives developed within the
city's Regulation on collaboration for urban commons, which is hosted in a
specific page offering two web forms to present proposals.
Since July 2015, a specific procedure has been made available to those
organizations (about 1.000’s) that have to confirm their accreditation within
the city government register for social and civic engaged actors, whose
status is officially recognized by the government itself.
The procedure makes the register management more transparent and fast,
as well as such organizations more accountable.

13. Insights
After a few months, we decided to invite a few organizations at public
presentations, to have them presenting their own projects, activities and
needs, letting them interact and discuss with those attending.
This format proved to effectively complete the on-line experience and to
provide new opportunities for collaborations.
Those who join the platform are interested and active: 100 out about 2.000
users (by end of September 2015) created contents, and an un-measurable
number of users commented and interacted somehow.
So far it is possible to say that Comunità is mostly used as a square (one of
the more frequent metaphors employed by the users themselves).

14. A co-design process requires a deep understanding of the available
resources.
Some proposals made within the consultation on the Charter haven’t been
implemented so far, specifically those requesting to change the Creative
Commons license from the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 to the
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0.
The workshop for co-designing the homepage has been accounced as the
first of a series of four, but given the timing of developments and available
resources, the staff agreed on a less structured planning.
The source-code has been released within the GitHub platform, but the local
developing community haven't been succesfully engaged.
We use to the metaphor of the trading zone to describe our current role as
community manager: we are perceived as necessary to make users and
stakeholders collaborate, and to practice a proper negotiation between
different needs, costraints and requests.
This could contribute to slow down the creation of autonomous communities
within the platform.

15. Comunità as a digital commons?
So far we can report a positive assumption of Comunità as a digital commons
by its users and many stakeholders.
Despite that, we tried to find a way to understand what was missing to let it
grow as a commons.
We decided to analyse the platform according to the framework proposed by
Mayo Fuster Morell (2014) for Online Creation Communities: we looked at
the community control over the infrastructure governance, and at the
openess of resources and of the communities that created them.

16. In fact on the one hand despite the co-designing process, the governance of
the platform itself lies still within the city governement offices involved, and
even the more proactive users missed the momentum to discuss the issue.
On the other hand, what we reported on contents licesing and on the source-
code re-use underlines a limited access to common pool resources, and the
communities defined around specific themes didn't succeed in emerging as
autonomous groups.
“The resource could not be produced or preserved without the community. In
other words, the “production” of the community is a precondition for the
possibility to produce the resource.” (Fuster Morell, 2014)

17. Two opportunities
Opening the governance of such infrastructure isn't an easy process given its
technical and design features, but a sustainable and gradual process to widen
such governance has to be pursued.
Considering the actual engagement on the platform by its users, is to
'recruiting' one by one a group of users already publishing accurate contents
and pointing out potential unfair uses, discussing with them first how to create
such a group and how to and to reward them.
Further stages of a community governance for the platform could positively tap
on such experience and users.

18. Which solution could allow to host and foster thematic communities has been
a long standing question for our group.
During the last few months we tried to ease collaborations between
organizations and users with common interests or practices, generally
speaking, most of them didn't seem motivated to go further in interactions as
they didn't share a common need.
Recently we had a intense conversation with some members of a local
association, already active in the platform, that is developing new welfare
solutions for individuals, characterized by a peculiar care for the quality of the
experience they provide to those receveing their support.
They were concerned for the deteriorating quality of their 'supply chain': a
growing number of careless donations and the emerging of a lack of
accountability within some organizations.

19. They realized that they need their own 'charter of values' to be developed and
shared with their stakeholders and all those concerned, and want to use the
patform to promote such effort and to shortly begin to work on it.
We realized that such a task could be the proper trigger to create an active
and committed community, that could use the platform to collaborate in order to
achieve a shared results.
The leading association could be backed by our group for engaging other
subjects and going trhough the process stages.
We are committed to use this process as a test, to let them grow as
autonomous group that care and maintain their own space within the platform,
that could be a post or a project.
If the process will succeed, the following steps will be to replicate it and to
move this community to use the platform as a tool to foster their practices, and
hopefully co-design and to manage their own 'room'.

20. Thank you!
Michele Restuccia
snark - space making
www.snarkive.eu
The City as a Commons
November 6, 2015 - Opificio Golinelli, Bologna