CommuniCity: Including marginalised communities in co-creation processes

CommuniCity is a 3-year project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme, building citizen-centred tech solutions focused on urban and societal challenges. Launching 100 pilots in Helsinki, Amsterdam, and Porto, the project will address the needs of cities and marginalised communities in these areas through co-creation and co-learning processes. These processes will focus on the creation of digital products.

 

Demos Helsinki will validate existing ethics and inclusivity frameworks with marginalised communities and develop new co-creation models. These will ensure that these communities get involved in the pilot selection and evaluation and will establish ethical considerations at an early stage of the process. We expect to develop an ethical and intersectional inclusivity framework to embed in the pilots. Moreover, we hope to equip EU institutions with enough knowledge to steer ethical and more inclusive piloting in their innovation activities.

 

This comes as part of Demos Helsinki’s commitment to strive for societal transformation without sacrificing citizens’ participation. It also builds on a decade-long body of work around fair and sustainable digital transformation.

 

Our methodology

The framework will be an outcome of document analysis and a set of background interviews. It will be validated over an iterative process of two rounds, where we first create an initial framework, then explore its applicability and boundaries across the project’s timeline, and finally revise it at the final stages of the project.

 

The project started in September 2022 and is expected to end in August 2025.

 

For more information on the project, you can visit the official website here.

 

For questions or comments, you can reach out to:

Anna Björk
Research Area Lead, Demos Helsinki.
anna.bjork@demoshelsinki.fi

 

Demos Helsinki’s work on co-creation and various aspects of democracy:

• TANDEM: Deliberative visioning for just transition
• BIBU: Tackling biases and bubbles in participation
• A call for humble governments
• A handbook for the experiment co-creation platform

 

Demos Helsinki’s work on digital transformation:

• To change system settings, click here.
• The Nordic Digital Promise: Four theses on a hyperconnected society
• An assessment framework for non-discriminatory AI
• ATARCA: Building new models for a digital economy
• TOKEN: On the fair adoption of DLT in the public sector

 

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Feature Image: CommuniCity