Chronicle of the CoBoi JAM#2, a collective work session to imagine the CoBoi we want
As part of a process where both the CoBoi team and its community are thinking about the nature and capabilities of the social innovation center, CoBoi JAM #2 was held last Friday, April 15th in the afternoon.
The first JAM served to learn firsthand what CoBoi represents for its community today.. In this second session it was collectively defined what we would like it to be in the future. The information collected during this work session will serve to establish the basis on which the operation of CoBoi will be considered in the medium and long term.
CoBoi JAM#2 was conceived as a collaborative speculative design exercise where participants would imagine how CoBoi could solve a series of challenges in a possible future. A fictitious scenario was created keeping in mind that it would be easier to trigger the imagination of the participants. Inspired by the current situation in the North American city of Detroit , the following situation arose:
A decadent future where the State has gone bankrupt and is completely inoperative, the labor market is incapable of creating jobs, much of the city’s buildings have been abandoned due to the relocation of factories and society lives in a state of constant depression.
In this hypothetical future situation, people who had participated in or known about CoBoi were invited to imagine a new civic center for social innovation capable of creating a sustainable alternative to this dystopian future. The people who had to project the solution to the city’s decline were the participants of the CoBoi JAM#2.
Staging
To place the participants in an atmosphere of uncertainty and mild anxiety, a scenography was created that showed a dirty and decadent CoBoi. The space where they had to wait for the dynamic to begin was the coworking room, which was in the dark, with messy tables, papers on the floor and a video showing a documentary about Detroit. After a few minutes, two members of CoBoi entered the room and read a manifesto who had just presented the scenario proposed, emphasizing the 4 challenges to be solved during the dynamic. These challenges were SPACE , NETWORK , LEARNING and SOUL , four basic axes that the community itself had identified in the previous CoBoi JAM.
The day consisted of 3 dynamics:
The first part consisted of providing solutions to the 4 challenges through a collective brainstorming session.. Each participant had to randomly pick a card with 1 of the 4 challenges mentioned above written on the back, and they had 5 minutes to think about it. an idea that would respond to your challenge. After this time, each person had to share their idea with another person, who had to provide an idea that added to the original, and vice versa. This action had to be repeated 4 times, so that at the end of the dynamic each person would have 1 initial idea + 4 complementary ideas to respond to one of the four challenges.
In the second dynamic, they formed 4 groups that worked for 20 minutes on one of the four challenges. Each of them had the mission of collectively creating an initial prototype that would help create a network; promote learning; reproduce the CoBoi environment, and think about what form it would take in the space. This time, each participant could choose which group they wanted to collaborate with according to their criteria, and they were free to use or not all the information collected in the previous exercise. In addition, they could choose the most appropriate format to present their idea to the rest of the participants.
Once the prototype was finished, all groups had to return to the coworking room. Each of the 4 teams had 5 minutes to present it to the rest of the participants through a previously chosen spokesperson. Once the presentation was finished, the public could give their opinion and/or add suggestions, without the team having a turn to reply.
The result was the following:
Network
This group dedicated itself to thinking about how CoBoi could encourage networking among its participants.. The primary feature of the CoBoi of the future is that it should be open to everyone and non-discriminatory. It should motivate participants, putting entrepreneurial and motivated people in contact with people who are not but want to make a change in their lives.
In addition, CoBoi should encourage:
- Facilitate the exchange of knowledge. Create a Online space to publicize CoBoi’s projects and people, thus creating a network of contacts.
- Create working groups on similar or related topics.
- Create a series of videos on YouTube to promote the projects, encourage word of mouth, send newsletters to homes in the neighborhood and create t-shirts with the CoBoi logo.
- Hold parties or meetings where all the people who have participated in CoBoi in the past or present participate.
- A resource where job offers can be published, people who participate in CoBoi can be valued as responsible and proactive workers, and a network of companies can be created that collaborate and hire people who go through the Employment Shuttle.
- To stimulate the urban and social transformation of the neighborhood. It was also proposed that administrative services be provided to the associative network to make them sustainable, so that they would be helped not to disappear.
Space
The team in charge of this challenge considered that CoBoi’s current location negatively conditions its growth. Understanding that the current building has become too small and that the values it transmits are beneficial and replicable for society, they considered creating a network of social innovation facilities and laboratories spread throughout the city, following a concentric scheme.
The uses of these equipment would be the following:
- A building located at the center of this system that would act as an information and dissemination point for everything that is happening in the rest of the facilities. It would also bring together all the administration, management and direction services.
- A set of satellite buildings that would orbit around the central building, and would specialize in different types of support services for social entrepreneurs and training open to citizens (coaching, emotional education, economics and business, health and well-being, sustainability and responsible consumption, …).
These facilities would be connected by a network of “blue CoBoi” paths adapted to the peaceful circulation of bicycles and the like, and which would also serve to promote different CoBoi actions.
Learnings
The project presented by this group focused on learning where people are the priority.. A learning system based on the exchange of knowledge and experiences shared among the members of the community themselves, where generating a good environment becomes cause and consequence.
It is for this reason that people should be encouraged to get to know each other and identify each other’s abilities, incorporating the feeling of collectivity into their day-to-day lives.
To achieve this objective, the conclusion is reached that it is necessary to build a system that provides support in different areas:
- Moral and emotional
- Generate ideas
- Provide resources to put them into practice
- Information channels
- Logistics
One of the challenges that this model would have to face would be the system for evaluating this knowledge , and how to prove that a person has received quality training through this alternative collective training system.
Soul
The ÀNIMA working group wanted to provide an answer to how to make CoBoi a space where optimism and complicity could be breathed , ambition for change and an environment where we could rethink how to generate this type of atmosphere that, at the same time, would infect the rest of the city .
Different aspects were raised to take into account while collaboratively designing this ’emotional space’. Ideas related to the Support , understanding , acceptance , integration and emotional health began to shape the future CoBoi environment that the group imagined.
The main conclusions that were drawn were:
- CoBoi represents an emotional meeting space for an involved and committed community with a way of understanding its role in a wider community than just Sant Boi.
- CoBoi as a welcoming space, healthy from an emotional point of view; where learning, responsible companies and different types of services can be articulated through a prior ‘reception space’ from which the rest of the community relates sentimentally to agreed and defined values and ways of doing things.
Once the different dynamics were completed, we asked the participants to answer a questionnaire. to evaluate the participatory methodologies carried out in this second session. The following conclusions emerge from the responses obtained:
– The ages of the attendees were mostly between 26 and 45 years old.
– Participants learned about the dynamics mostly through CoBoi channels, both physical and online.
– Almost all of the attendees would repeat the experience, perceiving it as an opportunity to meet other people and projects that participate in CoBoi.
– The overall rating of the day was 4.5/5.
– The part I liked the most was the prototype, both the design and the public presentation.
– However, they missed more attendance at the event and more time to get to know the rest of the participants.
Regarding attendance, in this second JAM 45% of the attendees did not attend the first. However, the total number of participants did not increase compared to JAM#1. Assessing different aspects, we have reached the conclusion that the majority of people interested in participating in these dynamics is higher than the number of attendees at the conferences, and aspects such as the date, the schedule or family reconciliation influence participation. We value considering other dates and formats for the organization of future activities.
Learning on the go
This activity has also served as a laboratory, an experimental space where we can explore ways of working in teams that incorporate speculative design, storytelling and play as methodologies. Putting it into practice has helped us to extract some reflections to improve for the future.
On the one hand, the surprise effect of finding a lived space with a totally different aspect to the usual one increases the predisposition of the participants to immerse themselves in the dynamics. This effect is multiplied if the activity facilitators add a characterization and interpretation of fictitious characters. To guarantee the success of this undertaking, prior rehearsal is essential, to maintain the tension of the characters and not fall into overacting. In addition, the scenography of each of the spaces through which the dynamics take place is essential to give veracity to the story and maintain the tension.
Regarding the dynamics, it is necessary to ensure that the participants truly understand the objectives of the dynamics in an easy and enjoyable way. In addition, we have perceived that these have great potential when it comes to becoming spaces for relationships between entrepreneurs and people interested in social innovation. These dynamics must recognize this fact, giving people the opportunity to get to know each other and for synergies to emerge.
In this second CoBoi JAM we have reflected on what aspects should be taken into account when designing the CoBoi of the future. We are very satisfied with the results obtained in both this and the previous day, since this process is being carried out collectively, involving 100% the community and people outside of CoBoi. Nobody said it would be easy, but we are pleased to know that we are not alone in this journey .
