Deployment experiences with a Multi-Disciplinary approach

The participatory design (PD) methodology presented in Deliverable 3.3 consists of two main parts: 1. A list of recommended actions that might need to be taken by the project team, organized in different Processes, and Threads, together with evaluation metrics. This list has been compiled based on our own experience in the context of the Sarantaporo.gr case study, and more specifically the design of a smart farming application called AppLea, but also other experiences around the world, as described in Part I of D3.3, and 2. A recommended process for team work inspired partly by popular agile methodologies like SCRUM, but also by less structured activities like Jazz improvisation. The process, which draws an explicit analogy with music, has been experimented by netCommons researchers in on-line activities with Community Networks (CNs). This deliverable reports the results of the experiments and the feedback obtained from the three software teams leading the three corresponding software development tasks of the project. Furthermore, it describes the steps undertaken to improve both building blocks of the methodology as a result of the the feedback and experiments as well as the activities planned to increase the impact of this work beyond the end of the project. This feedback has been collected in two different ways: 1) through personal interviews by Alexandros Papageorgiou, the mediator of the PD process that was applied in the case of Sarantaporo.gr, and 2) through detailed reviews received by the mediators of the three PD processes corresponding to the three different software development tasks. The outcome has been very productive leading to various suggestions for the improvement of the list of recommended actions, but also toward the simplification of the overall process, or at least the offering of different alternatives with different levels of complexity to match the needs and available resources of different teams. Nevertheless, the methodology itself is conceived as a product of co-creation and this evaluation and refinement process will continue until the end of the project and beyond it, the methodology itself a participatory design effort we hope many communities will undertake. By the end of the project, we will release and print the final version of an easier to read and use booklet, and an on-line platform to support the adoption in scenarios where frequent meetings in person are difficult.