CAPSELLA is a community-driven and, thus, events-intense project. Keeping in mind one of its pillars that is awareness raising for key communities and its bottom up approach, CAPSELLA will organise different types of events to capture and accommodate the various needs and requirements of the communities and audiences addressed by the project. We categorise our events along two classifications:
- The objective and aims of each event: (a) for collection of requirements, mainly in the first phase of the project, (b) events providing solutions to identified problems, (c) events that provide open training on concrete technologies and applications, (d) events generating solutions including the entrepreneurship events, and (e) general awareness raising events.
- The audience it addresses: The communities directly targeted by the project, (b) the social environment around these communities, agro-biodiversity research community and (c) the broader society interested in sustainability issues.
The first awareness raising workshop was held in Volterra, Pisa on the 30th and 31st of May 2016. The event’s vibrant environment provided a stage where farmers from both conventional agriculture and organic farming, networks, clusters, stakeholders and ICT and data experts met, openly discussed and compared point of views. Existing ICT tools were briefly presented focusing on their benefits for the agrobiodiversity various actors including farmers, networks and clusters. The meeting was also the occasion to raise awareness and present the Capsella goals and expected outcome.
The agenda structure was conceived taking into account several elements such as the importance of spending some time/half day in a farm in order to break the ice among participants and build a smooth and collaborative spirit. Moreover, it was expected that offering a mixture of on farm meeting and then key, focused presentations might have caught participants interest more. Finally and before the event wrap up, focused groups moderated/chaired by a facilitator ensured a concrete exchange of opinions/knowledge/experience, a collection of requirements by networks and communities involved and raised awareness about the importance of sharing open data and collect them.
The CAPSELLA FINAL workshop will be organised towards the closing of the project and will act as the final event of the project. Most likely, it will be held in Crete and its structure will be set up to combine presentations and panels during one plenary session and group sessions that will include all the targeted communities of CAPSELLA, specifically farmers, IT experts and providers, ICT SMEs, food chain players including citizens, policy and decision makers in order to discuss specific issues that had been identified as relevant and to possibly pave the way to future collaborations. The main scope of the event will be to present the CAPSELLA results and to foster their adoption by a wide array of players in the business and agroecology environments.
Hackathons, the most well-known innovation contest form, have already become massive events which have achieved to bring together people with diverse backgrounds to co-create tomorrow’s products and services, effectively raising public awareness on selected topics and sectors. In CAPSELLA, hackathons will serve a dual aim: (a) as a bottom-up requirements collection and solutions seeking process, and (b) as an innovation creation contest.
In this light, the 1st CAPSELLA Hackathon will focus on mature challenges that has been produced by the project’s pilot partners and work as a pilot event that will drive next year’s pilots to other countries. More specifically, 5 challenges are expected to be presented. To this end, the CAPSELLA Hackathon will have two stages, as follows:
- During the first stage, the challenges and problems that are being faced by local communities (e.g. members of agricultural associations and cooperatives, as well as smallholder farmers and other stakeholders involved in food production systems) from different European countries will be presented to hackers, developers and new startup companies, who will participate to the Athens Startup Safary (http://athens.startupsafary.com/) on 18th of November 2016.
- During the second stage, hackers, developers or startup companies, who will express interest, will be invited on 2nd of December 2016 to work on technical solutions towards addressing the challenges and problems preselected during the first stage.
The venue of the hackathon will be the Orange Grove in Athens, Greece.
Entrepreneurial bootcamps are a guarantee for successful implementation of the ideas created during the Hackathons, ensuring that all the participants gain the needed skills to make it through the innovation funnel, simultaneously luring capable people from all sectors to become users of the open innovation platform and becoming eminent entrepreneurs and start-uppers.
Being aligned with the crowd-sourced innovation principles, the CAPSELLA project utilises all the above innovation tools to achieve its dissemination and exploitation objectives. A promotional campaign starting early in the project lifecycle will use the massive impact of hackathons to reach out to – and finally attract- existing communities and skillful people active in the primary sector of the economy, IT people and business people, thus creating the early adopters of the platform. An open call will invite everyone to participate, aiming to identify those people that have the technical knowledge, the entrepreneurial spirit and the passion needed to create their own start-up. Tightly related to the platform, the hackathons that will follow will promote knowledge and awareness of the CAPSELLA platform.
Finally, the three month pre-incubation bootcamp, starting in the M21 of the project, offered free of charge, will create an extra incentive for people to join the CAPSELLA journey. Furthermore, at the end of the bootcamp, more than thirty carefully selected participants will have gained the needed platform-related, technical and business knowledge to become the future CAPSELLA ambassadors. The best team with the greatest idea will be also incubated and pampered to bring the idea to a business.