Communities
The project collaborates with a number of content communities in order to assess, trial, demonstrate and validate the use of the proposed P2P technology with real user communities to evolve new social practices.
Community selection
The project identifies potential partner communities which have the potential to use the features and evolve the development of the Fusion platform. These communities use media as a central part of the communities’ activities. The selection was made based on national ‘community quickscans’ which attempt to identify potential user communities, further interviews based on those quickscans and strong intent to participate in P2P-FUSION from behalf of the community.
Co-design: collaborative and co-operative design
Technology and people’s practices in their everyday life co-evolve. Co-design is an experimental design approach which explores how technology should be developed so that users can design the technology themselves to suit their need and support their practices better. As P2P-FUSION focuses on developing media applications for communities, the focus of these co-design workshops is on creative media use and re-use. The process includes a series of national and international workshops in Finland, the Netherlands and Hungary, with participants from the local community partners.
Community testing & inhabiting of the system
As part of the co-design process, the content communities will use, test and ultimately inhabit Fusion. As new features are gradually added to the prototype technology, the communities are encouraged to try them and provide feedback to the developers. Further local workshops are held to improve the users’ skills, encourage use and disseminate information about the application. International workshops are organized to bring together members of content communities with a cross-border co-operation potential.
Sustainability of social use
In the last phase we compile a guideline to the further development possibilities of Fusion. We aim to prepare the content communities for the times when they will have to use and develop the system on their own. As a last effort for dissemination of the news that the system operates with full functionality, we will organize an international conference on Fusion and content communities.