D3.3 Selection of Common challenges

Dear SCORE partners,

Work package 3 leader speaking.

In the last weeks we worked with the challenges you submitted. In order to help you all understand the process of clustering & selecting that we undertook, you can find the process flow underneath:

• In January we received 56 challenges from several partners, you can find them in [this ‘Raw responses’ document]

• Some challenges had to be refined to keep them open to different technologic interpretations later. Other challenges did not sufficiently fit any of the 3 SCORE themes nor the purpose of the ‘meta’ theme and were left out.

• This resulted in 51 challenges validated by WP3 Lead team.

• In order to formulate common challenges we went through the work of first assigning topics to the individual challenges, then defining clusters from these topics. The current result can be found here, combined with the validated version of the challenges you submitted.

• Read this document from right to left to find out how we came to these 147 topics and 24 clusters.

• Note that some clusters are specific for a SCORE theme while others are more generic and re-appear in different themes, such as ‘crowdsourcing’ or ‘awareness’.

• After the first draft of the clustering, we had now ended up with 24 different clusters. To promote all of them to common challenges in SCORE would be overkill, therefore we need to refine further to a feasible amount of 9 clusters.

• As a shortlist we suggest 9 clusters which you will find on our digital voting ballot. These were chosen with following criteria in mind:
  • Potential to generate ideas for common solutions in challenge working groups
  • Potential to re-use data

• Diversity in cities
• Diversity in underlying challenges
Please mind that at this point this selection is just our take as WP3 lead. To come to the final set of common challenges we need your voice.

So now it is your turn! What do you have to do before Aarhus (April the 8th)

Have a look at the clusters, topics, and challenges. You can consult the sheets above, but of course we also invite you to view the updated data in SCORE’s smart city challenge visualiser & explorer tool: https://lab9k.gent/score2/
• The first screen is the ‘visualiser’ part: all cities and the clusters that link them are rendered (see also the screenshot below)
• The second screen is the ‘explorer’ part. Double click a cluster to explore a single cluster in the second screen. all cities that are involved
in the cluster you chose are now combined with the relevant topics & the actual challenges.

Discuss the current results with people in & outside of your SCORE team Does it all make sense? Does the selection of clusters provide ideas for potential common solutions?

Choose the 9 clusters that seem the most relevant for your own city on the digital voting ballot, or accept our suggested selection.
(The first column is our suggestion, but that does not mean that they are the most relevant for the city of Ghent.)

Help us enrich and improve this important work: Send us feedback on anything (choice of challenges, titles, the collection of each cluster, anything missing, typos, …. That is why we numbered all items in this document. Don’t hesitate to send us the feedback in a bullet list. You can send this to Justine, preferably through this SCORE community thread.

PROCEED HERE to the digital voting ballot

Once all votes are in, we will consider, weight and rebalance all input to come to the final selection of 9 clusters. These will be ‘promoted’ to the common challenges from where we will work in the next stages of the D3.1 guideline that sets out the WP3 workflow.

Together with a predefined 10th common challenge, the ‘meta’ challenge, these common challenges will form the subject of four challenge working groups to be formed:

• Mobility
• Water
• Environment & Waste
• Meta

Thank you all for your cooperation.

Looking forward to see you all in Aarhus!

Kind regards,
Justine

Hi @Justine,

I appreciate the considerable amount of thought and effort that’s gone into this selection process however perhaps the clustering can be better refined.

As you have mentioned, several clusters reoccur across the broader themes.
This however is due to clusters representing different classes of “entities”.
For example crowdsourcing, tracking and sensors are methods, whereas air quality, traffic management and people flow are areas for which useful targeted solutions might be devised.

To illustrate this, within the traffic management cluster, there might be solutions devised that use a combination of all the methods mentioned above.
Making this distinction could eliminate a lot of cluster overlap.

I believe the ‘method’ clusters represent areas that might have to be addressed when developing solutions to defined Challenges, rather than a basis for their own Challenges.

I hope that makes sense??
Perhaps it’s too late to change the clustering now, but maybe it’s worth making a note.

I also see that a Water Challenge group is one of 4 proposed, however there is already a Challenge group looking to deal with a wide range of water issues (and by the way, is actively using both sensors and crowdsourcing in it’s solutions ).
I’m sure however it can accommodate a wider range of potential solutions

Best regards,
Syd.

Dear all,

at first big thanks to the WP3-leaders, who organised and conducted the process of challenge identification that we all agreed on in the SCORE Project application. We really appreciate the work done. The following Feedback is not intended to critizise this.

Unfortunately it seems to us, that the result of this second waterfall is very similar to the first one and we suspect that we’ll have the same difficulties to extract “real” common challenges from the clusters. For example a common challenge “traffic management” still includes such a broad range of specific challenges, so we are in a similar Position as we were with the challenge “mobility”.

In our opinion we should discuss the results and the future handling of this second waterfall in Aarhus. We should honestly question if this approach is the right method for finding specific common challenges in the SCORE project. Maybe other methods like the speed dating we did in Ghent are more promising.

Please don’t get us wrong, we are not criticizing the work of WP3 and we were really confident that the commonly agreed method would be successful. After we went through the different clusters it seems that we are at a similar point as we were one year ago. In our opinion it is not a failure to admit that a method did not result into the expected outcome. In contrast, we suggest to learn from these two waterfalls and consider other methods.

This is only our opinion and we are looking forward to discuss this with all of you in Aarhus.

Best regards
Samaneh and Henning

Hi Syd.

What you say, makes sense to me. We made this clustering in one track and then sent it out. When we looked back at it, we already noticed some weird decisions. So our feedback to ourself for a next waterfall should be to make a first draft, let it rest for a few days and then look back at it and rework it. I think that would help us to see the overview and see differences in methods and other subjets. That is also why we want to rework the classification in an active session during our plenary moment in Aarhus. This feedback is really helpfull and we should keep that in mind, even in the next staps within waterfall 1. In the document l’ll mark the methods to come to future solutions.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.
See you in Aarhus

Kind regards
Justine

Hi Henning.

Thank you for the feedback, we do not see this as critic but as a very welcome feedback.
I’m new in the project and had no idea of how the clustering is done in the previous waterfall.

In Aarhus the plan is to get around 5 tables during our plenary session (10/4 17u-18u).
On table 1-4 we will work per theme. Each table will form a working group for 1 specific theme . After a discussion on topics and clusters each table should come to specific common challenges. Chosen and carried by the different partners around the tables.
On de fifth table we will rework the classification and re-do the clustering. We hope to come to a classification and to common challenges that work for every partner.
When we do it like that it will feel as a work from all of us and not just be the input of the Ghent partners.

Kind regards
Justine

Hi @Justine,

Thank you for this!

We have now voted the most relevant clusters for Gothenburg city and Science Park.
Our voting is not given based on priority order but in alphabetical order.

Would be great to further discuss this voting process during our meeting in Århus since we are not 100% sure if we have filled in the excel sheet as expected.

See you in Århus.

Best regards,
Eva