Project summary

A seamless interaction with the public administration (PA) is crucial to make the daily activities of companies and citizens more effective and efficient, saving time and money in the management of administrative processes. In particular, online public services have an enormous potential for reducing the administrative burden of companies and citizens, as well as for creating saving opportunities for the PA. This potential is however far from being fully exploited. Online services made available by the PA typically rely on standardized processes, copied from their offline counterparts and designed only from the public sector organizations’ own perspective. This results in online services that fail to adapt to the specific needs of citizens and companies. With SIMPATICO, we address the issues above by proposing a novel approach for the delivery of personalized online services that, combining emerging technologies for language processing and machine learning with the wisdom of the crowd, makes interactions with the PA easier, more efficient and more effective. SIMPATICO combines top-down knowledge of the PA with bottom-up contributions coming from the community. These contributions can be of different types, ranging from the qualified expertise of civil servants and professionals to problems and doubts raised by citizens and companies that find online services difficult to use. Our approach is able to take into account both explicit information sources coming from citizens, professionals and civil servants, and implicit ones, extracted from user logs and past user interactions. SIMPATICO’s ‘learning by doing’ approach will use this information and match it with user profiles to continuously adapt and improve interactions with the public services. All the collected information on public services and procedures will be made available within Citizenpedia, a collective knowledge database released as a new public domain resource.

Work Package 1: Project management

Work Package 2: Interaction adaptation and personalization

Work Package 3: Front-end interaction and enrichment

Work Package 4: Human computation

Work Package 5: Integration and environment setup

Work Package 6: Use-case management

Work Package 7: Dissemination and exploitation activities

 

Work Package 1: Project management

Then main objective of WP1 is to ensure the timely and qualitative achievement of the SIMPATICO project results through technical and administrative coordination, as well as to provide timely and efficient organisational and financial coordination to meet contractual commitments, by making sure that the structures and procedures defined in Section 3.2 and in contractual agreements are followed.

The detailed objectives are to:

  • O1.1 – Plan project activities and provide administrative and financial management;
  • O1.2 – Provide technical and scientific guidance at all stages in the project;
  • O1.3 – Monitor and control progress and assess quality of the results.

Description of Work:

T1.1 Administrative and financial project coordination

This task will involve coordinating and managing administrative matters and giving administrative support to allpartners, preparing administrative reports to the EC, ensuring financial management (cost monitoring, accounting, cost statement preparation and distribution of subsidy), ensuring the compilation of project deliverables, ensuring the periodic reporting and communication with EC services and project officer(s) for purposes of coordination, progress monitoring and reporting. In addition, this task includes the organisation of meetings of the coordination and decision making body for project progress review, decisionmaking and conflict resolution, modifications of contracts (Consortium agreement, budgets etc.), adaptation of the project strategy and partnership if and as required. The Project Manager will lead this task.

T1.2 Scientific and technical coordination

This task will carry out the overall technical coordination and will ensure the project develops as planned. It includes the coordination of technical progress, resolution of any problems of technical nature, decision making and changes regarding scientific and technological implementation. It will also be responsible for monitoring the general scientific and technological state-of-the-art revision, work plan maintenance and follow-up, monitoring of project progress, identification and troubleshooting of technical problems, the preparation of required reports and the liaison with related projects and networks. This task will operate in synergy with Task 1.3 for identifying and managing technical risks, pre checking and ensuring quality.

T1.3 Quality assessment, ethics compliance and risk management

This task is comprised of three main elements:

  • Quality control and assurance, using procedures to verify and assess the achievements of the project. It includes the internal and external deliverable review, internal review of the results and tracking of the lessons learned. It will create and maintain a quality plan that will define quality control procedures to be applied in the production and review of deliverables.
  • Data Management will guide a careful investigation on privacy and security issues of data produced within the project and provide guidelines and procedures to deal with sensitive data and its distributions. This will result in the Data Management Plan.
  • Ethics compliance will make sure that all the activities carried out within SIMPATICO will comply with ethical principles and relevant national, EU and international legislation. Special attention will be devoted to the collection and/or processing of sensitive personal data and to the involvement of human participants in SIMPATICO use cases.
  • Risk management planning, identification, analysis, response planning and monitoring and control. It will elaborate the Risk Management Plan, collect risk-reports from WP-leader, and it will define and execute a contingency strategy when needed.

Description of Deliverables:

 

Work Package 2: Interaction adaptation and personalization

The main objective of WP2 is to devise a self-evolving framework to adapt texts and workflows according to user needs.

The specific objectives are to:

  • O2.1 – Analyse and annotate text profiles, i.e. select and prepare texts for adaptation.
  • O2.2 – Design operations to adapt text and workflows, based jointly on the requirements of users and characteristics of the texts and workflows, while making sure these operations can be generalised to various language constructions, texts and users.
  • O2.3 – Apply such operations seamlessly while ensuring continuous self-improvement of the framework with its use.
  • O2.4 – Manage user profile and personal data ensuring its privacy and security.

Description of Work:

T2.1 Text profiling

This task involves analysing texts with the purpose of identifying various features that may be relevant for effective text adaptation. Such features include the readability level of the text (or of its sections), the type of reader it has been originally written for, as well as several types of metadata (date, source, domain, etc.), and linguistic information (number of clauses or depth of syntactic tree for sentence, concreteness level for word, etc.). Once the text is analysed, features judged relevant will be used to annotate it (e.g. using an XML markup scheme). The annotation labels will be connected to those used to define user profiles (age, readability level, publication date etc.).

T2.2 Design and learning of operations for text and workflow adaptation

This task consists in designing and learning adaptation rules that include the adaptation of texts and the adaptation of workflows. For what concerns text adaptation,a basic set of lexical and syntactic adaptation rules will be handcrafted for different types of text and user profiles. For non-native speakers, rules will also include operations for translating (using online translation tools) complex lexical items into the user's language when these cannot be further simplified in their original language. Confidence estimation will be used such that only translations with high confidence values are shown to the user. For what concerns workflow adaptation, the interaction process and the forms to be filled will be fragmented in blocks that codify information elements that the user needs to provide. Basic rules will be define that present to the user only the elements that are relevant for his specific profile (i.e. if the citizen is not a foreigner, he will not be presented the section of a form reserved for foreigners), and in the order that is estimated as more natural and efficient. The generalisation will be achieved by a combination of machine learning techniques to learn new rules based on existing ones and on user profile information, as well as on feedback from users. New operations via generalisation will be deemed necessary in two situations: (i) when existing operations do not cover a given adaptation need; and (ii) when existing operations are inadequate for the user/text needs. The biggest challenge in this task will be moving away from the design of rules based purely on linguistic features of the text to user needs and user feedback altogether. Core to this project is the self-evolving nature of the interaction, i.e. the fact that it may need to adapt itself over time, particularly from interactions with users. The evolution of the framework includes identifying the need for new rules or for modifications in existing rules, the need for additional information regarding users and text profiles, and so on. For example, a user may have a reading disability that is not in his/her current profile, and can be only inferred by observing the behaviour of the user when interacting with the system. The system will need to evolve to take into account this new information.

T2.3 Application and evaluation of adaptation operations

The goal of this task is to apply and evaluate iteratively the adaptation operations designed in T2.2. The effective application of text adaptation rules involves decisions on rule order and rule precedence, which are unsolved challenges. Additionally, in this project these rules will interact with workflow adaptation rules, which are applied together with the text adaptation rules. User feedback will be used as a way of evaluating the rules themselves, their combination and the order in which they are applied. This task will also be in charge of releasing the Adaptation Engine, which will include work carried out in T2.2 and T2.3.

T2.4 Citizen Data Vault

This component allows citizens to manage and share their own personal data. It enables citizens to control how the data should be accessed and by whom, within the legal framework in which they are involved. This way, the citizen will represent the provider and the owner of her/his personal information. In fact, the Citizen data vault (CDV) represents a safety vault where the user personal data, preferences and profile details are preserved and exploited only by authorized components (e.g. the adaptation engine). Three types of data are kept and processed in the CDV:

  • those coming from the PA and contained in its document legacy, for instance citizens’ biographical data and other sources of information, if any;
  • all information entered by the citizen through the SIMPATICO system, for instance when filling some forms;
  • all information collected during the interaction and based on the documents’ content, e.g. questions, underlined parts, user feedback, etc.

This data is collected and processed in the CDV in order to merge the existing and new data in a unified representation and cluster them into groups of similar users’ profiles. Such profiles are then passed to the Adaptation Engine for the application of personalized adaptation.

Finally, the functionality of CDV will not be limited to private citizens, but will store information for all customers of the PA, including enterprises and professionals.

Description of Deliverables:

 

Work Package 3: Front-end interaction and enrichment

One of the main objectives of the SIMPATICO system is adapting to users’ needs to improve efficiency and simplicity in interactions with final users (citizens and companies) during administrative processes. An automatic evaluation of system operation is therefore needed along with mechanisms to allow final users to provide explicit feedback information to improve SIMPATICO’s performance. These interaction aspects will be tackled in WP3.

The specific objectives of this work package are to:

  • O3.1 – Make SIMPATICO a fully interactive service turning PA portal users from passive receivers to an active part of the process.
  • O3.2 – Provide SIMPATICO with the ability to infer useful information and provide the space for suggestions to civil servants in charge of administrative processes to perform further enhancements based on historical logs collected and statistics of use.
  • O3.3 – Automatically identify and extract useful information from questions, comments and suggestions explicitly stated by end-users during their interaction with SIMPATICO.
  • O3.4 – Automatically generate useful annotations on administrative documents, forms and workflows to be presented to civil servants and finally to be included in procedures to be delivered to the general public.
  • O3.5 – Based on both implicit and explicit information extracted, provide evaluation data to be used in WP2 to adapt SIMPATICO to user needs.

Description of Work:

T3.1 Modelling of interactions

This task will analyse the different types of interactions of the SIMPATICO system with final users, generating as a result information to evaluate the use of SIMPATICO. These interactions will also provide relevant information elements to be included as annotations that will be presented to civil servants to instrument the e-service interaction model and finally to the general public. This task will include the following activities:

  • To identify the main explicit interaction mechanisms between SIMPATICO and final users. This will include expected type of information exchanged in the interactions, its format, types of documents, processes and sections where users will provide feedback, etc. This will model the several types of interactions such as free format opinions (in the form of brief unrestricted natural language texts), to semi-guided opinion gathering (by means of requesting users to answer some questions or simply asking them to provide their feedback on certain items) or even by means of more explicit rating schemas
  • To identify other types of implicit information to be gathered from SIMPATICO interaction logs alongside this explicit feedback information. T3.1 will identify what kind of data is useful for analysis and will transfer this information to the interaction subsystem designers to ensure SIMPATICO’s subsystems generate this data.
  • To study strategies to present optimally these automatically generated annotations both to civil servants and the general public.

The goal of this task is therefore threefold: 1) ensure that interactions with final users occur in an natural way (minimizing end-user effort and fostering user involvement); 2) ensure that the analysis of this valuable interaction information is effectively provided to the rest of SIMPATICO; 3) serve as a starting point for the development of the interactive front-end in T3.2 and for the development of data and log analysis procedures to automatically extract user provided knowledge in T3.3.

T3.2 Interactive front-end

This task will consist on the design and development of the front-end interaction components for the citizens and the PA staff so that they can interact with the SIMPATICO-aware services. This front-end will enable a user interacting with a given e-service to annotate, enquire or obtain content and workflow adaptations based on his/her profile and preferences detected in previous interactions and recorded in the Citizen data vault resulted from WP2, as well as on his/her actual interaction context (i.e. what section he/she is on a given e-service interaction workflow).

This task will analyse several alternative front-end options and select the one that best fits the interests of the project. The resulting viewer will be integrated, on the one hand, with the adaptation engine and the citizen data vault components APIs resulting from WP2, and, on the other hand, with the Collective Knowledge base and Citizenpedia derived from WP4.

Two main strategies will be explored to this end: (a) relying on the legacy services already deployed by the PA for the use-cases of interest and (b) defining new front-ends from scratch which take the new options brought by SIMPATICO to the spotlight from the design of the services.

  • Overlay front-end: this front-end has the advantage of running on top of the front-end of the legacy workflow engine of the PA, thus ensuring a more homogeneous access to this engine. The advanced interaction functionalities of SIMPATICO are realized by injecting code that manipulates the “legacy” front-end as required. This can be accomplished through single JavaScript files enforced server-side or by providing a plug-in for browser-side adaptation through a dedicated SIMPATICO browser extension or using middle-man technologies such as GreaseMonkey (http://www.greasespot.net/) or TamperMonkey (http://tampermonkey.net/).
  • SIMPATICO-specific front-end: in this case, a new front-end will be developed from scratch rather than adapted from the legacy code. This approach will ensure a maximum of flexibility for the development of solutions that take advantage of SIMPATICO APIs (e.g. the enrichment engine introduced in T3.4), offering at the same time to end users a better experience and minimal obtrusiveness in the interaction with the services. Also, this allows bypassing the need to install browser extensions, which may complicate adoption from non-technical users. On the converse, the integration of this front-end with the legacy systems of the PA may require considerable additional work with respect to the overlay solution.

The selection of the approach to follow for SIMPATICO is part of the maturation process that will happen along the two R&D iterations of the process.

T3.3 Data/log analysis

This task will provide the capacity to process the information originated in end-user interactions with the administrative processes to identify and extract useful information for civil servants, according to the data types and formats identified in T3.1. This analysis will be performed in several layers to include, at least the following types of information:

  • Implicit interaction logs, including information regarding the administrative processes executed by users (including both complete and incomplete flows), the types of documents served by the system, the data provided by users, mistakes identified in provided data, etc. This kind of data will typically be statistically processed to obtain relevant trends.
  • Explicit and likely non structured feedback provided by users during administrative flows in the form of natural language questions and comments. The processing of this kind of information will require the use of multilingual NLP and information extraction techniques.

The design and implementation of the technological platform for these functionalities will be carried out during this task.

T3.4 Enrichment engine

This task will design and implement the subsystem in charge of the addition of annotations to the documents and any other related information elements involved in the interaction flows between end-users and PA. This includes not only formal documents and data forms to be filled in, but also any other auxiliary textual or graphical elements involved in interactions. Automatic annotation will involve several steps:

  • Identification of information elements to be included in resources, to be carried out by the analysis defined in T3.3.
  • For every relevant information element, identification of the resources and the most appropriate sections where they must be included as an annotation. This involves a generalization and classification process to identify similar related sections that would likely share the same kinds of annotations. For instance, if an annotation is found suitable for “Regulation 12/99” in a given workflow-service, the enrichment engine will be responsible for adding this annotation in all other e-services or documents where “Regulation 12/99” is also mentioned.
  • Formatting annotations and inserting them into resources according to the interaction models identified in T3.1.

Different sources of annotations will be considered in this task: those coming from the processing of log data and explicit feedback from users, as provided by the results of T3.3; on the other hand external knowledge from civil servants, professionals and citizens in general, as processed in WP4.

Description of Deliverables:

 

Work Package 4: Human computation

The main objective of WP4 is to leverage the SIMPATICO solution with the collaborative knowledge provided by its stakeholders. A collective knowledge database will be configured which will be fed both by the civil servants themselves and by contributors to an advanced web-based social question answering engine and a collaborative procedure designer. In essence, WP4 will result in the Citizenpedia component, providing a collaborative, human-computation inspired, knowledge base, which feeds the Enrichment engine supplied by WP3. Different measures will be adopted to ensure the quality of the cooperatively provided contents and their exploitability, e.g. voting up or down answers to rank them according to their suitability. Contributors to this public service Q/A repository will earn reputation according to their involvement (participation) and high reputation will grant privileges to moderate the site and ensure its governance. Selected civil servants belonging to the hosting PA will also be assigned the moderator role to ensure the quality of the database being generated and that it stands for the interests of the PA and its stakeholders. Entries in the collective knowledge base and question/answer tuples will be editable by anybody, with changes being tracked to allow moderators to revert contents when needed, following a wiki-based approach. An awarding mechanism (e.g. badges) will be provided to increase the engagement of potential participants. An open API to enable updating, querying and browsing of Citizenpedia and perform analytics on user participation, questions and answers management will be provided. Such API will be used by the Enrichment engine devised in WP3.

The specific objectives are to:

  • O4.1 – Specify and design the human computation framework.
  • O4.2 – Design and implement the social question answering engine, the collective knowledge database and their API.
  • O4.3 – Provide civil servants and other stakeholders with a tool to collaboratively define a graphical representation of PA procedures executed by both digital and non-digital services.
  • O4.4 – Enable mechanisms for stakeholder engagement and deploy the framework.

Description of Work:

T4.1 Human computation framework specification

This task will involve the full specification of the functional and non-functional requirements of the Citizenpedia framework. A top-down approach, i.e. from the user perspective to system perspective, will be followed. A methodology used by the partners in earlier project (e.g. Volere) will be used to formally specify the Citizenpedia component requirements. A comparative analysis of existing participative solutions will be carried out in order to select, on the one hand, those features which should be added to Citizenpedia, and on the other hand, already existing tools which could be integrated or extended, e.g. MediaWiki, stackoverflow or Apache Solr. The high level architecture designed will follow SIMPATICO 48 a service-oriented approach based on REST in order to ease its integration with the other components of the SIMPATICO solution.

T4.2 Social question answering engine

This task will carry out the design and implementation of a responsive web interface to enable the interaction of users from any type of device, e.g. smartphone or PC. Different techniques to promote users, questions and answers will be enabled and tested, so that the most popular questions and answers associated to them are promoted by social opinion.

We will also design and implement the data model to manage the main entities within the social question answering engine, namely users, questions, answers, comments, rankings and so on.

T4.3 Collaborative procedures designer

This task will carry out the design and implementation of a tool that will allow SIMPATICO stakeholders to enrich the collective knowledge with a graphical representation of public procedures, whose tasks represent both e-services and (non digital) services to be performed by citizens to achieve a specific goal. Thanks to this, civil servants will be able to initially model and publish public administration procedures, implemented by both digital and no digital services, while citizens could enrich procedures diagrams with feedback and annotations.

T4.4 Citizenpedia collective knowledge base and API

This task will tackle the design and implementation of the Collective Knowledge base generated by Citizenpedia. It will define the data model of such knowledge base, including entries, contributors, revision entities among many others. Besides, it will undertake the integration of such knowledge base with the other two components of Citizenpedia that feed information to it, i.e. the question/answer engine and the collaborative procedures designer. A responsive web interface will be provided for the whole Citizenpedia which will enable browsing, searching and contributing to its entries. A programmatic API based on REST will be provided which will be used both by other components of SIMPATICO and also by third party entities. A Solr-based indexing engine will be integrated in order to enable a speedy recovery of question, answers and interaction information from Citizenpedia. Alternative storage mechanisms, e.g. standard RDBMS or NoSQL engines, will be considered to select the most scalable and flexible option according to the needsof Citizenpedia. Regarding searching, advanced methods which enable the retrieval of indexed terms by proximity and semantic affinity will be explored. A verification module will be created to detect and alert about low quality or spam entries into the knowledge base.

T4.5 Stakeholder incentivization techniques and Citizenpedia deployment

This task will explore gamification techniques in order to incentivize people to take an active part across the platform.

The most relevant gamification mechanisms for the Citizenpedia framework will be implemented, adapted and integrated within Citizenpedia. Besides, the resulting Citizenpedia SaaS from T4.4 will be integrated with the rest of the SIMPATICO solution components and deployed in a Cloud-hosting environment.

Description of Deliverables:

 

Work Package 5: Integration and environment setup

WP5 focuses on the definition of the reference architecture of the SIMPATICO platform, on the interaction with PAs information systems, on the integration of all components coming from previous work packages specifically for the execution of use-cases, and on the technical validation of the SIMPATICO platform.

In particular, the objectives of this WP are:

  • O5.1 – Define technical specifications and the reference architecture of the SIMPATICO platform.
  • O5.2 – Provide SIMPATICO with an interoperability framework and specific connectors to interact with PA legacy systems in use-cases, allowing execution of personalized workflows.
  • O5.3 – Set up the technical environments for the execution of the use-cases by deploying and integrating all the assets coming from WP2 (Citizen data vault and collaborative procedures designer), WP3 (Data/log analysis engine, enrichment engine) and WP4 (Social question answering engine and collective knowledge database) in compliance with WP6 activities.
  • O5.4 – Validate the SIMPATICO platform from technical, usability and replicability points of view.

Description of Work:

T5.1 Technical specification and architecture of the SIMPATICO platform

In this task the technical requirements and specifications will be defined and collected taking into account inputs coming from: a) technical aspects of IT systems of PAs where the use-cases will be implemented; b) technical nature of the SIMPATICO components that will be reused and tailored; c) best practices to ensure that the components are interoperable and loosely coupled; d) privacy and security issues that need to be addressed by SIMPATICO. In this task, the conceptual architecture and detailed specifications of the integrated SIMPATICO platform will be derived and documented with focus on loosely coupled architectures to ensure that the tools are interoperable across platforms, operating systems and programming languages. The architecture of the SIMPATICO platform will describe in detail the integration logic and interfaces between the involved components.

T5.2 SIMPATICO interoperability framework

This task focuses on the definition and tailoring of the layer that permit to interoperate with PA legacy systems and to use the related data/services in order to implement personalized service interaction models within the SIMPATICO environment, according to the interoperability frameworks for government paradigm. It will also be in charge of the connectors between internal components of within the SIMPATICO system. This task will work in close collaboration with T6.2 as it will require use-case specifications, and specific connectors will be implemented within this task in order to interact with actual data/services provided by PA IT systems.

This task will deliver: a) the tailoring of the interoperability framework in SIMPATICO; b) the connectors between the different components of the SIMPATICO solution; c) the specific connectors to be used by the interoperability framework to access legacy systems of PAs.

T5.3 Use-case deployment and connection with legacy systems

The SIMPATICO platform will be integrated and installed in three different operational settings, corresponding to the three use-cases in the three cities/regions. For this reason, careful coordination of these different setups is necessary to ensure a successful deployment. In particular, technical problems in the SIMPATICO components delivered in previous WPs which prevent a successful operation need to be promptly detected, analysed, and reported; also, success cases need to be promptly shared among sites. The instantiation of the SIMPATICO solution in a wide range of settings will also offer the opportunity to collect guidelines and best practices which will offer an important knowledge base for the adoption of the SIMPATICO platform outside the project. This task will also manage the initial population of terms and concepts of the citizen knowledge base: a minimum of 50 query/answer and 30 technical terms/concepts will be provided for each site.

In the first phase of use-cases, this task will coordinate the activities for what concerns the integration and setup of the SIMPATICO environments at the three trial sites; and at collecting, managing and sharing technical problems and success cases, thus providing also a technical validation of the SIMPATICO platform. In the second phase of usecases, this task will also contribute to the definition of guidelines for the adoption of the SIMPATICO platform by new municipalities outside the project.

T5.4 Technical validation of the SIMPATICO platform

This task will evaluate the SIMPATICO platform through its usage in the use-cases.

This will include not only technical issues that may arise (due to different computational and application environments) but also the practical ability of the platform to support the general requirements coming from T5.1. An overall assessment and evaluation of the components offered by SIMPATICO within the use-cases will be carried out. Benchmarking will be provided based on the requirements (as expressed by the participating users), as the strengths and weaknesses of the services must be seen from this perspective.

Description of Deliverables:

  • D5.1: SIMPATICO platform requirements and architecture v1
  • D5.2: SIMPATICO platform requirements and architecture v2 (not yet available)
  • D5.3: SIMPATICO interoperability framework and use-case environments v1 (not yet available)
  • D5.4: SIMPATICO interoperability framework and use-case environments v2 (not yet available)
  • D5.5: SIMPATICO platform validation report v1 (not yet available)
  • D5.6: SIMPATICO platform validation report v2 (not yet available)

 

Work Package 6: Use-case management

The objectives of this work package are to define, plan and execute the three proof-of-concepts use-cases in the three PAs participating in the project (i.e. City of Trento, City of Sheffield and Region of Galicia) and to perform a social and technical evaluation of the solution. These objectives have a local dimension, since they cover activities performed within a specific city/region/province, and also a global dimension, covering aspects such as methodologies, best practices, overall monitoring and evaluation strategies. Both dimensions are covered within this WP.

Use-cases are planned in two iterations in order to enable a virtuous loop of development and evaluation. The results of the first iteration (M1-M20, Inception and R&D Iteration 1), will guide the choice of the technology, features and tools to offer in the full SIMPATICO platform that will be validated in the second part of the project (M21-M36, R&D Iteration 2 and Transition).

The detailed objectives are to:

  • O6.1 – Prepare and plan the deployment, operation and evaluation of city use-cases in a coordinated and consistent manner.
  • O6.2 – Ensure a successful engagement and management of end-users, civil servant and other stakeholders in the use-cases.
  • O6.3 – Implement the use-case by customising, operating and monitoring the SIMPATICO platform in the three use cases.
  • O6.4 – Evaluate the SIMPATICO solution on the three use-cases, in terms of its impact on user community, civil servants and other stakeholders and in terms of the efficiency/effectiveness of the technical solutions.

Description of Work:

T6.1 Coordination of the use-cases

The SIMPATICO platform needs to be installed and operated in three different use-case sites with different operational settings, background, user maturity levels. For this reason, careful coordination of these different use-case sites is necessary to ensure a successful validation of the SIMPATICO solution. For example, technical problems in the SIMPATICO components delivered in WP2-4 and integrated in WP5 which prevent a successful operation need to be promptly detected, analysed, and reported. Similarly, success cases need to be promptly shared among sites.

In the first phase of the use-cases, this task will coordinate the activities of tasks T6.2-6.5, as well as coordinate with T5.3, for what concerns requirements, planning, deployment, operation, monitoring and evaluation. The task will also be responsible for the collection management and sharing of technical and operational problems that will be solved either within WP6 or by WP5. This will also offer the opportunity to collect guidelines and best practices which will result in relevant documentation for the adoption of the SIMPATICO platform outside the project.

T6.2 Use-case requirements, planning and KPI definition

The aim of this task is the specification of the experiments to be executed in the three PAs. The task will be responsible for the identification of PA specific end-user needs and requirements, for the specification of the e-services to be validated in each PA, for their functional and non-functional requirements and for privacy and security issues. In particular, the activities in this task will allow to define a framework document describing:

  • specification of the experimentation, including: purpose and background, use-case objectives and evaluation criteria, use-case strategy, assumptions, risks, personnel and responsibilities.
  • the activities for conducting the experiment, including use-case plan organization, use-case site description, personnel involved, use-case methodology, services to be tested, potential users, schedule and test result collection.
  • planning and KPIs specification for the evaluation of the SIMPATICO platform and the associated technical components.

T6.3 Use-case community building

An engagement & cooperation plan will be established in each use-case before implementation and platform deployment: the project has the objective to obtain the participation of citizens, other local stakeholders (e.g. professionals, associations) and civil servants. In each use-case location the specificity of the use-case implies the involvement of different types of stakeholders (e.g. construction companies in Trento, elderlies in Galicia, parents of children with special needs in Sheffield). The following types of communication actions will be done:

- awareness material is aimed to promote the project among the identified key stakeholder groups;

- presentations in public spaces within the cities and region will be done by the local authorities or associated partners in order to introduce the project and enrol the required number of stakeholders in the use-case.

The engagement campaign will be executed before the launch of the first phase of the use-cases in order to obtain a limited number of highly motivated users from a variety of stakeholder groups. Between the 1st and 2nd phase of the use-cases the engagement campaigns will be re-launched in order to increase the number of users. The main actors involved in the design and execution of the engagement campaigns will be the municipalities involved in the project.

T6.4 Use-case operation and monitoring

The main goal of this task is to ensure a seamless operation of the city-specific systems deployed in T5.3. To this extent, the task will monitor the trial operation and promptly detect and analyse problems or missing features that prevent a successful execution, and report them to the appropriate project WP. These activities will be triggered by PA-specific problems, but their management will ensure project-level coordination for those aspects that have cross-site relevance (task T6.1). This task will also collect all the required data and information on the execution of the systems in the three use-cases, in order to ensure the evaluation performed in task T6.5. The task will finally be responsible for collecting operational best practices and know-how from the different PA experiments, and make them available to the other PA.

T6.5 Use-case evaluation

The main goal of this task is the evaluation of the system on the three use-cases. The aim of the evaluation is twofold:

  • on the one hand it aims at evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed SIMPATICO solutions and at collecting information to improve the system (formative evaluation);
  • on the other hand it aims at assessing the level of achievement of the KPIs (defined in T6.1) and at identifying improvement actions towards their achievement (summative evaluation).

The evaluation will not only cover technical aspects, but will also investigate the social implications of the adoption of the SIMPATICO solutions. We will investigate the impact of the SIMPATICO solution on the lives of the users, companies and civil servants to detect its strengths and the barriers/obstacles to its wider adoption. These activities will be repeated for the two iterations of the PA use-cases.

Description of Deliverables:

 

Work Package 7: Dissemination and exploitation activities

The aim of this task is the dissemination of the project results. This is a strategic objective since to impact the administration modernisation agenda within the EU the achievements of the project should reach as many European PAs as possible. As such, the WP entails the definition of the dissemination and communication plans, the implementation of the communication materials (brochures, logo, brand identity), the setup of the project web site and a strong action of liaison with other on-going projects and existing networks operating in the same area, with many of which the SIMPATICO partners already have ongoing cooperation. This WP will also support dissemination within the local use-case PAs (i.e. City of Trento, City of Sheffield and Province of Galicia) and it will cover media support to the project. Finally, the WP will be in charge of conducting a market analysis and developing an exploitation plan to ensure the exploitation of SIMPATICO result beyond the project lifetime.

More specifically, the objectives of this WP are:

  • O7.1 – Plan all relevant communication and dissemination activities and develop tools required for successfully promoting project results to target groups and stakeholders at local, national and international levels, thereby contributing to the exploitation activities.
  • O7.2 – Develop suitable materials and communication means which will facilitate the dissemination of the results to all relevant stakeholders.
  • O7.3 – Develop an innovation, sustainability and exploitation plan that will exploit the overall results of the projects as well as the individual partner exploitation objectives. This will support the sustainability of the project results both during and after the project lifetime.

Description of Work:

T7.1 Communication & dissemination plan and activities

This task will define the scope and the KPIs of the dissemination activities to be conducted by the SIMPATICO communication’s team. This will include a strategic activity plan, local use-case activity plans and Media & Press coordination at local/national events and networking both at international and national events plus synergies and exchange of experience with supporting activities. The overall communication and dissemination plan will be agreed among the partners at the start of the project and will aim to achieve the following:

  • The identification of relevant target groups and key stakeholders who will be responsible for dissemination activities.
  • The provision of a comprehensive list of dissemination activities for each partner and the planning of the execution of these activities.
  • The identification of the tools required for the successful dissemination of results and associated activities.
  • The definition of KPIs that will be used to measure the success of the project dissemination strategies (e.g. number of visits/contributions to the SIMPATICO website).
  • The communication and dissemination plan will be updated throughout the duration of the project and will include the list of dissemination activities and results achieved.

T7.2 Communication & dissemination materials

This task will identify and create materials and templates for all documentations and communications activities of the project. This includes the design of communication material (including website, social networks, logos, all printbased logo, brochures and posters for events). These materials are the ones required in order to achieve the successful dissemination of project results while taking into account the plan outlined in T7.1. The following tools will be set-up and developed in this task and exploited for the successful dissemination of project results:

  • Project logo: the development of a project identity by the design of an appropriate logo for the project which will be used on all produced materials and will be characterized by a high recall-value.
  • Project website: the website will provide information about project objectives, use-case sites, project partners, Advisory Board, achievements, meetings, news, events, etc. News on the advances made by the project and the Consortium members will be published regularly.
  • Newsletters: regular newsletters (on a 6-monthly basis) in order to inform stakeholders of ongoing results and progress of the project.
  • Leaflets and posters: leaflets in different languages will be produced to inform the public about what the project is trying to achieve and its ongoing progress.
  • Policy briefs: policy briefs will be produced to explain to the policy makers at European and national level SIMPATICO results and its potential impact and to recommend options to foster the adoption of e-services in Europe.
  • Collaboration with the regions and city councils in the participating countries, networking activities of project partners with stakeholders.

Description of Deliverables: