← The Citilab of Cornella de Llobregat, ← A case study on living labs Abstract During the past decades, connecting communities to the digital networks has been a critical concern for groups of researchers and social activists. In 2003 the first World Congress on Information Society declared the fight against “digital divide” a global priority. In 2010 around 2 billion people are online of a total global population of around 7 billion. (Internet Stats, 2010). Still a long way to go. The more communities and people are connected the more are interested not only in “using” more or less effectively ICT but also “producing” it, specially in the form of applications, services, content, new social relations, new things,... In the 90s we said “access” and in the next decade “effective use” (Gurstein, M. 2003), the last years the new motto has been “to participate”. Increasingly, people want to participate in the online world even in the innovation process in itself. Decades ago we talked about “online communities” . Now we are beginning to talk about “living labs”, a generic term beginning to define new environments gathering the participation of people, companies, universities and public administrations in open innovation processes. In particular, in this article we will analyze the specific case of Citilab in Cornella de Llobregat, a young living lab, launched by people historically connected to the community networking movement in one side internet and computing research in the other. During two years this experiment has developed an collaborative environment where local, coming from citizens, local companies or local administration’s demands have driven innovation projects. A place where a network society is trying to evolve into a lab-society. Key words: living labs, citizen labs, PPPP, next generation community networks, 1. Community networks, social networks, living labs, citizen labs. 1.1. To the GCNP colleagues. After the series of global conferences on community networking that took place in Barcelona (2000), Buenos Aires (2001) and Montreal (2002) a group of researchers and online activists started to think about the next steps. After gathering a good amount of the best international experiences on community networking and community technology centers or telecenters, some kind of lack of perspective emerged
Analysis of the first years of Citilab, a first European citizen laboratory
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← The Citilab of Cornella de Llobregat,
← A case study on living labs
Abstract
During the past decades, connecting communities to the digital networks has been a critical concern for
groups of researchers and social activists. In 2003 the first World Congress on Information Society
declared the fight against “digital divide” a global priority. In 2010 around 2 billion people are online of
a total global population of around 7 billion. (Internet Stats, 2010). Still a long way to go.
The more communities and people are connected the more are interested not only in “using” more or less
effectively ICT but also “producing” it, specially in the form of applications, services, content, new social
relations, new things,... In the 90s we said “access” and in the next decade “effective use” (Gurstein, M.
2003), the last years the new motto has been “to participate”. Increasingly, people want to participate in
the online world even in the innovation process in itself. Decades ago we talked about “online
communities” . Now we are beginning to talk about “living labs”, a generic term beginning to define
new environments gathering the participation of people, companies, universities and public
administrations in open innovation processes. In particular, in this article we will analyze the specific case
of Citilab in Cornella de Llobregat, a young living lab, launched by people historically connected to the
community networking movement in one side internet and computing research in the other. During two
years this experiment has developed an collaborative environment where local, coming from citizens,
local companies or local administration’s demands have driven innovation projects. A place where a
network society is trying to evolve into a lab-society.
Key words: living labs, citizen labs, PPPP, next generation community networks,
1. Community networks, social networks, living labs, citizen labs.
1.1. To the GCNP colleagues.
After the series of global conferences on community networking that took place in Barcelona (2000),
Buenos Aires (2001) and Montreal (2002) a group of researchers and online activists started to think
about the next steps. After gathering a good amount of the best international experiences on community
networking and community technology centers or telecenters, some kind of lack of perspective emerged
in the movement. “Now what?”. “Connecting people to the Net is all about?”. Garth Graham, a major
activist from Canadian community networking, even proclaimed the “end of community networks”
(Graham, 2005). The “effective use” concept helped to articulate a group of community researchers
gathered around this Journal of Community Informatics that has done a valuable contribution to continue
the best experiences and insights for the better use of ICT into the communities.
One of us being an anthropologist by training but working in a technological university (UPC) and a
technological research center (i2cat Foundation), and the other a researcher in computing and artificial
intelligence, we were interested in a different way: how could be possible to transfer the innovative
culture of technologists into the minds of the community activists and plain citizens?. Our interest was
not in “communities” in general, but in a particular kind of it: the innovative communities, in the
processes of cultural innovation. The traditional model of social scientists working with technology has
considered for years that technology is “only a tool” serving the “needs” of the community. The goal was
the community and the means, the technology. In the 90s a group of anthropologists from University of
Barcelona (Rojo, A. 1995, Serra, 1992) developed a fieldwork research project at CMU discovering how
a technological community built during decades a set of core cultural values around the innovation and
design. Could it be possible to transfer this culture of innovation to local communities? One of the
problems of community networking movement was their blindness to consider that one of the “needs” of
people is also the need for innovation, of being innovative actors of their own future. As the traditional
anthropological research, communities were considered a “fact”, instead of a “deed”, a reality to be
analyzed and, in the best case, “to be served”. In this last case, the use of applied social sciences methods
trying to cope with the changes in communities were not enough. Applied anthropology has been used to
facilitate cultural change from traditional communities to the modern societies. But the problem now it is
how to evolve from both kind of communities to a new one, called knowledge society that nobody knows
what is it about exactly. In the core values of community networks innovation didn’t appear as a core
value of the movement. A key point was missed: communities and people also do innovate. Some
anthropologists even considered innovation as the driver of the cultural change (Barnett, H. 1953). In
2000 Prof. Toru Ishida from University of Kyoto organized a Seminar on Digital Cities where the idea of
a next generation of community networks as “innovative knowledge networks” emerged (Serra, 2000). In
2002 the citilab concept was born preparing a proposal for the municipality of Cornella. In 2004, in the
first number of the Journal of Community Informatics the Canadian Research Alliance for Community
Innovation and Networking was announced (Clement, A, et al. 2004). The connection between
community networking and innovation was starting.
2. A new generation with different values.
Just after the last CN Congress in Montreal in 2002, what we saw was an explosion of the Web 2.0,
showing a new Internet trend towards participation. Instead of “surfing”, the initial metaphor of an
Internet for navigation and discovery, “bloging” portrayed an Internet for publishing your own thoughts.
Big difference. Finally, companies My Space and particularly Facebook has open up social networking
tools to the people . From the old community networking point of view, people connected each other
thanks to a commercial social network package is not a “real” community network. Of course Facebook is
not The Well. But this company is facilitating a social networking platform to 500 million people around
the world. Quality versus quantity, but the same goal: sharing thoughts and friends. The first ones
expending time in an non-for-profit way. The second ones making money. In the 80s people from
FIDONet, a global voluntary computer network made by volunteers, didn’t consider Internet as the right
choice for connecting computers and people because it came from the military. But the true thing is that
Internet extended the capacity of be online to billions of people. Now Facebook and other “social
networking” environments are extending the capacity of people in connecting each other beyond the
better dreams of old community networkers. This paired with the online group collaboration of the
“makers” around Open Source software and hardware projects, give a completely different perspective to
communities.
From a sociological viewpoint, community networks were a product of the baby boomer generation of
activists (people born between 1943 and 1964. People educated in the counterculture in the 60s and 70s
willing to “put technology at the service of the people”, by the way, an old motto of President Mao
Zedong. The current social networks are the product of a brand new generation, the Millennial or Net
Generation (Strauss and Howe, 1991) , born between 1982 and the first years of 2000. They are taking
and exploiting the ideas of community networks from a completely different perspective: as a “friends of
friends” structures. They consider themselves as individuals before than members of a community. There
are ego networks It is interesting how this idea of social networks as friend of friends structures was for
the first time discovered by the School of Manchester that started the social networks analysis in the 40s
and 50s studying the urban structure of African cities. (J.C. Mitchells, 1969, Boissevain, 1968,1974) .
Now companies like Facebook have taken advantage of this concepts changing the way Internet is
evolving. Digital social networks are confirming the network society hypothesis as the basis of the
information era. (Castells, 1998).
An interesting thing of Facebook and other commercial environments has been to open up the closed
world of civic networks to companies. Traditional community networkers were reluctant to accepting the
commercial world as a partner. Individualistic and competitive mind was considered a threat against
communitarian one. But now companies are open more and more to cooperate, to share, to cope with
“social responsibility” issues. Companies are also citizens. Even the local authorities, keeping still
fiercely the official representation of the citizenship in a city, are more open to collaborative agreements
with grassroots ciberactivist organizations in the Web 2.0 world. Finally, academic computer science
researchers even thinking in visionary Future Internet plans, recognized that the real future is in listening
the users and creating with them new services and content. In fact, as S. Finquelievich demonstrated in
countries like Argentina, commercial cybercafés has played a more important role of promoting
community use of the Internet that traditional community telecenters. (Finquelievich, S, Prince, A 2007)
Facebook is not the end of history, but simply a new chapter. In parallel to the paramount success of
the digital social networks, a new structures are emerging: the people not only wants “to participate”, but
they want to innovate. There are not only communities or individuals. There are also companies, public
institutions, NGOs,... all together. “Open innovation”, “living labs”, “citilabs”, are different names for a
this new process and structures.
1.3. “Democratizing innovation”.
Talking about innovation and living labs we are talking about new knowledge-based structures. From a
socio-cultural system perspective, what is happening is that Internet is already having an impact not only
in the technical infrastructures of current societies, or in their socio-economic structures, but also in its
knowledge systems, specially with the system of production of research and innovation. An open network
technology like Internet is facilitating to open up of the sancta sanctorum of the modern societies: the
science and technology system, the system that produces and reproduces the values of the modern
world, . This system organized mainly around the research universities, the national governments and
the big corporations is now entering in an new period trying to adapt itself to what has been called “the
democratization of innovation” (von Hippel, 2005).
One of the more interesting cases to analyze this process is what is happening in the relatively young and
fragile European R&D system. After repeated analysis indicating that Europe is loosing ground in
innovation in relation with USA and Asia-Pacific, the Aho Report (2006) confirmed the need of an urgent
reform. Some steps has been approved like the creation of the EIIT, European Institute for Innovation and
Technology, but conserving the essential of the all framework. But one of the most novel initiatives,
coming bottom up, has been the setting up of an European movement of living labs. Started in the
Nordic countries, in 2006, the Finnish Presidency of the European Union, facilitate the public
announcement of the European living labs movement.. Previous European research projects like Corelabs
(2006) were instrumental to gathering the group of innovators (Veli Pekka Niitamo from Nokia, Roberto
Santoro from ESOCENET, Alvaro Oliveira from Alfamicro, and others...) In four years, EnoLL has
credited 200 local and regional open innovation structures made by entrepreneurs, researchers, local
politicians and citizens interesting in participating in the renewing the old European innovation system.
Even the fathers of the classical Triple Helix model, asked themselves if the “public” was the fourth
helix. (Leyderdorff and Hezkovizt, 2002).
This new situation have favored the establishment of the Citilab, a first citizen lab inaugurated in
November 2007. Former seminal ideas and experiments have inspired this project as the Dutch Science
Shops movement of the 70s, the community technology centers in the 80s leaded by Antonia Stone from
Playing to Win, the “collaboratories” as virtual laboratories (Wulf, 1989), the community networks in
the 90s. (T. Schuler, 1996, de Cindio, 2000) or current “collaborative innovative networks” or COINS
(Gloor, P. 2004, Fernandez Hermana, 2008) The goal of this new experiment has been trying to do is to
bring and to foster explicitly the innovation culture to citizens in a local community of 80.000
inhabitants in the Barcelona metropolitan area. 20 years ago talking about citizens meant working on
concepts about democracy, civic intelligence, but no companies, not profit, not competitiveness. The last
decade, talking about social networking meant making business, starting companies, ego networks
without too much community dimension . Now what living labs movement tries to open up a new
collaborative model where public, private and individual interests come together and are inspired by a
common innovation culture.
2. The case of Citilab of Cornella.
2.1. From a Textile Factory to a Citizen Lab.
Citilab is a new facility in the city of Cornella de Llobregat, Barcelona. This new formally open in
November 2007 center is organized as a non-for-profit foundation called Fundacion por la Promocion de
la Sociedad del Conocimiento. The president of the Board is the major of the municipality and a
representation of full body of companies and social actors in the city, including members of the secondary
schools are also members. The university is also represented by the UPC. The current executive director
is Vicenç Badenes, old founding member of CornellaNet, the community network of Cornella and during
20 years, local officer in the City Hall, currently on leave.
Citilab is a research project on citizen labs, as new kind of community organizations compromised in
promoting technological and social innovation in the community.
In summer 2010, Citilab has 4.500 individual members, identified with an small card like in a public
library. They pay 3 euros per year to have the right to participate in the general activities of the institution,
including the basic activities of a telecenter (free access to Internet, basic digital literacy courses, free
attendance to talks and general activities). Beyond these activities, Citilabers can also participate in
innovative projects of the institution. Yearly there is a set of projects that are approved by the Board that
are open to the users.
Citilab is located in an old textile factory, built in 1897 in Art Nouveau style. This factory was called Can
Suris and it is located in the popular neighborhood of FontSanta-Fatjo in the municipality of Cornella de
Llobregat, in the metropolitan Barcelona. In the 60s this factory stopped producing textile, becoming an
abandoned symbol of the traditional industrial culture of this city. The Art Nouveu factories were a
symbol of the Catalan entrepreneurs that launched the industrial revolution in the region in the XIX
century converting Catalunya in the “Fabrica de España”. (The Factory of Spain). In the second haft of
the XX century, this productivity spirit was recovered by a young working class that made Cornella, the
capital of the new democratic labor movement that accelerated the end of the Franquism. These working
class, coming from the rural South of Spain in its majority, produced a lively period of social activism
that was ending in the 90s. As a result some local politicians tried to formulate some new ways to adapt
the city to the new digital era. CornellaNet and Citilab has been two moments of this process.
In 1996 a group of activists started CornellaNet, a voluntary NGO promoting Community networking
in the city . With the help of BCNet, the Barcelona Community Network and others Cns in Catalonia,
CornellaNet made an initial effort to gather the Internet pioneers in the city and organizing the first
literacy courses in the Orfeó Catalonia in the Padró, a popular neighborhood in Cornella. CornellaNet was
also critical to raise the initial funding to organizing the First Global Congress on Community
Networking in November 2000 in Barcelona.
2.2. The beginnings of the Citilab project.
In June 11th 2002 a group of researchers (R. Sanguesa, H. Milla, A. Serra), headed by the architect Vicent
Guallart, presented to the municipality of Cornella the document with the “Proposal of uses and services
of a center of innovation between the university and the city for the knowledge society”. The name
suggested for this center was Citilab. The City Hall approved the proposal and created the non-for-profit
Foundation based in a public-private-people partnership. Including several public institutions and
companies (Generalitat de Catalunya, Fundació Catalana per a la Recerca, Siemens, ...), the University
and also the citizen sector represented in this case by the school system represented by the director of the
Esteve Terrades, a vocational training center.
This step of a local municipality adopting a new competence (innovation) and new structure (Public-
private partnership) is in itself a novelty. Municipalities, at least in Spain, are very stressed institutions
trying to find solutions anxiously to daily life of their citizens and lacking the financial resources to do
it. Historically urbanism is the traditional more important competence of the cities. Cornella as the rest of
democratic municipalities have made an enormous effort in the last 30 years of putting in order the urban
structure of cities after the years of “desarrollismo” in the 60s and 70s. At the same time, during these
years, Spanish municipalities adopted the “economic development” policies, via creating industrial areas
or local building companies. But in the 90s and specially after the economic downturn in 2008 these two
major competences are not enough. More and more municipalities are beginning to understand that they
have to participate in setting up innovation activities, policies and finally institutions. Cornella did it in
2002 with Citilab. The municipality provided a piece of land, a building, and also accepted the creation of
a new institution with an bizarre name.
A second novel aspect was the new structure. Municipalities are small administrations with a lot of
problems to solve. Their culture, specially in small and medium cities, is trust nobody, because they feel
that t nobody help them enough. Apparently, the major is a very open public figure, but in reality he feel
alone and hopeless. With Citilab a new culture of formal cooperation and sharing with the private sector
and the public is trying to open up. In the community networks it was almost impossible to share this
open culture between cities and citizens, at least in Barcelona. CornellaNet was a purely citizen based
structure. Citilab inherit this civic spirit but added a private-public partnership. Citizens and city seemed
finally working together, not without conflicts. This is still one of the major issues in the digital era.
2.3. The Physical Facility.
Citilab is located in a old factory officially catalogued as cultural heritage piece by the municipality.
During five years an slow and very careful process of architectonic rehabilitation was needed. During this
time, architect and builders ruled. The results have been spectacular. One of the first projects started in
2008 after the official inauguration, Seniorlab, was dedicated to recovering the history of the site. The
former last workers of the factory in the group remembered that this factory was plenty of working
women, as the rest of textile factories. They were pleased by the physical transformation of the facility
and agreed to the new uses.
In some way, Citilab go back to the importance of physical spaces in the tradition of telecenters.
People like to meet each other, if possible close to their homes. Citilab have the looking of a common
house, using extensively wood as a building material, avoiding cold materials and grey colors typical of
the office environment.
This brick and mortar environment is also connected digitally in new ways. In the first place, Citilab is
connected to the academic networks. In the 90s, when only Universities have Internet access the pioneers
community networks like National Capital Freenet in Ottawa helped the communities to connect between
them via university facilities. During last decades Universities have made enormous changes in Internet
capacity, but this new Internet (Internet2, Next Generation Internet, ...) have not connected the
communities anymore. In particular, in Europe GEANT III is the current European backbone connecting
national networks with dark fiber and capacities at least at 10Gbps, allowing the transfers of a real high
definition interactive and real time Internet. Citilab has been may be the first citizen based institution
connected since 2007 at 1Gbps to i2cat and RedIRis, allowing their members to develop applications and
networks with Universities and research institutions. The Cultural Ring for example, a broadband network
testing and sharing cultural productions in interactive HD between cultural centers locally and
internationally is one of the projects developed with this infrastructure.
In the second place, Citilab has a commercial Internet provider, Orange (France Telecom) that
connects the center to the “utility” Internet that is used for routine applications and services. Citilab is
strongly interested in collaborating with telecom companies in developing joint projects in areas of
common interest.
Finally a citizen-based wireless network, Guifinet, (Meinrath, 2008) the biggest in Europe has also a
node in Citilab, experimenting with digital infrastructures built by the own citizens.
It is possible to combine in a citizen laboratory different kind of networking infrastructure: academic,
commercial and citizen-based infrastructure and testing that the Internet of the future will need the open
cooperation of such diverge kind of actors.
2.4. The people.
The overwhelming majority of the Citilab members come from the City of Cornella. Prof. Jordi
Colobrans from the Department of Sociology at the Universitat de Barcelona is analyzing the Citilab
dynamics starting with its constituency. In April 2010, Citilab has approximately 4.500 members from a
total population of Cornella of 86.519 inhabitants following the 2008 INE data. The 85% of them are
living in Cornella and neighbors cities. The rest came from other 75 Catalan cities. In relation with
nationalities, 80% of people was born in the different Spanish autonomous communities. The rest in 42
different countries from all over the world. In relation with gender is quite balanced, although male is
majority. 24% of the members have tertiary education. Finally, if we analyze the age pyramid the groups
more represented in Citilab are between 6 to 21 years old, adults between 31 and 51 and the seniors older
than 51. The age group less represented is in between 21 and 31. (Colobrans, 2010)
Citilab was conceived adding new layers of complexity to the traditional structure of a telecenter. The
basic question that Citilab staff ask to the newcomers is “What do you want to do? If you know it , you
can do it here yourself. If you cannot, we can help you”. The idea is inviting people to develop projects
more than sitting down in front a teacher getting courses. But this is not an easy task.
In the recent paper presented by Jordi Colobrans to the Spanish Congress of Sociology about the case of
Citilab describes: “ Until now, the access to technology and training is what the people love the most. In
a survey ended mid February 2010, the majority of members identified citilab with the facility and the
technology access. A minor part with training and a small group with the labs. In other words, the
majority of members ...are not aware of the hypothetical scope of the project. They use the access to
technology, the take advantage of the offering of training and , only a few are engaged in changes, may be
because the mechanism allowing this collaboration is still in a maturing process. Still there is no
institutional process to promote it as part of the culture of the centre”. (Colobrans, 2010)
All the fantasies imaging that people has a kind of “ innovation gene” disappear when you see
repeatedly that majority of people wants what their education has trained to wish. This fight between the
basic activities of a telecenter , like free internet access, basic literacy, having a coffee and a conversation,
and entering in the more demanding culture of projects, goals, deadlines, deliverables and fundraising is
on the way.
Nevertheless some steps closing the gap are on the way. Two simultaneous projects Seniorlab (Serra,
2008) and Digital Horchard (Torres, R. 2009) ) using pedagogical methodologies like PBS Project Based
Learning and PLE, Personal Learning Environment have facilitated the bridging of the learning culture
with the innovation culture. . These two projects has been started initially groups of seniors and secondary
teachers, both from the city of Cornella, and now has been open up to the rest of the Citilab users. If we
want that extend the innovation to people, and people wants learning, we can make courses as projects
and projects as courses. At the same time, the work of Citilab staff in devising methods to let peer to peer
self learning groups is beginning to have some results (Sangüesa et. Al 2010), (Dominguez,P Sangüesa,R
et al 2010)
2.5. “Huerto digital” and “ Relatos Digitales”: to learn and to innovate.
One of the first social groups invited to participate in the Citilab was the teacher’s community of
Cornella. The city has no public or private university in his territory. It has only primary and secondary
schools, one of them, the IES Esteve Terrades, the vocational center of reference in Catalonia in the area
of ICT training. Through an agreement between the i2cat Foundation and Citilab, it was started a joint
cluster of e-learning joint projects. The first step was visiting one by one all the high school centers in the
city gathering through focus groups interviews the worries and concern of the teachers community. Our
approach has been to work closely with teachers in order to facilitate personally how to incorporate ICT
into the curricula. R. Torres and his team set up at Citilab a Digital Orchard lab. Inspired in the Media
Zoo facility at the Lancaster University, this project during two years has created a PLE for allowing the
teachers using Web 2.0 tools to discover that Internet can be not an enemy but a strong allied. At the
beginning was the listen to them: what is their matter, what are their teacher interests, what kind of
problems have in the classroom, what they expect from ICT, ….Listen again and again each of them. First
they discovered interesting materials and tools for working between them and with their students. Then,
they are arriving to start some educational projects in their matters. Finally, they got official accreditation
from the Department of Education, because Citilab signed an agreement with the department that is
interesting in this new way of “training” their teachers in ICT. This project is not solving the education
problem but it is a first step in starting an innovative collaboration between the educational system and
the local community through a new institution of innovation.
Another complementary project, this time focusing in students also in secondary schools is Relatos
Digitales, Digital Stories. Conducted by Prof. Jose Luis Rodriguez, from the Faculty of Pedagogy of
University of Barcelona, this project has explored the use of ICT and storytelling methodologies with a
group of conflictive students for recovering their interest in learning process. Spain has a critical problem
with its educational system. This project was based in new didactical approaches based in a student-center
and project-based model where the student learns creating it own pedagogical materials (Rodriguez, J.L,
and Scofet, Ana, 2006) With Portugal, Spain has the highest rate of drop out in Europe. Around 30% of
people in age 18-24 has not completed the secondary education, mandatory in this country. If we
consider that we are talking about the Net generation, this presents an interesting problem. The results has
been “spectacular” as one of their school professors declared. These students, most of them immigrants,
have worked with an intense dedication to write, learn social media applications and services, produce
and edit their own personal stories, some of them really tough.
2.6 “Sense Tinta”: Peer to peer self-learning groups
One of the most interesting areas of Citilab is the first floor, where typically people of all ages come in
and use the computers just for accessing the Internet and socializing. This is a legitimate use but, again, it
just stresses the access aspect of the users involvement. The staff of Citilab developed a different
approach for the users of this first floor facilities that started with a series of group activities around the
concept “0123” where people started with no knowledge about how to use technologies and ended up
combining different technologies to advance in their use of digital environments. However this approach
was still heir to the “training course” mindset. So, by the mid-2009 the group of Citilab staff involved in
education, felt that with this approach people just moved from the “access” perspective to the “use”
perspective. Something else was needed in order to people actually start innovating. A whole new
approach was devised in order to break this block. It combined two things: firstly, a user-centric approach
and, secondly, a project-based approach. Design techniques were used to elicit the real interest of people
in changing things in their lives. That was the start of a co design of new projects between citizens and
Citilab staff in response to these needs. The projects had to respond to some interest or need not just of a
single individual citizen but of a group of citizens. In the first phase of this activity co design process the
most important things were to know what people knew and what they wanted to do, no technological
aspect to that at all. That is, the elicitation techniques used were centered on the common interests, needs
and abilities of a group. The facilitators of the groups proceeded then into step by step training in the
relevant technologies but not just these but also the co design and collaboration patterns that are typical of
group innovation processes. Step by step the facilitators took good care to support the learning of each
and everyone on the group but also step by step they gave support to mutual knowledge transfer, i.e.,
teaching and learning from the citizens that were going faster or learning a complementary ability towards
those that where lagging behind or just had another set of skills, in the process effectively creating a Peer
to Peer learning environment. The details can be seen in (Domínguez, 2010).
As an example, one group decided that they wanted to create a new communication platform, a magazine,
about their subjects of interest. The result is “Sense Tinta” (“Without ink”,
http://sensetinta.projectescitilab.eu/). It is worth remarking that most of the meetings of the collaborators
are currently held online with just a few face to face meetings at Citilab, a remarkable feat for a group that
had no computer or internet training at all six month earlier. One can say they have not created an ex-
novo innovation, in the sense of a technological or business breakthrough. However the editors of
“SenseTinta” are true innovators, since they have created a new social media communication platform
that integrate text, video and image (well beyond their usual concept of “magazine”) and new social
patterns and uses by combining off-the shelf 2.0 technology and new skills into a significant product. That
product is relevant to them and changes their lives turning them into active contributors to the 2.0
phenomenon.
The continuation of these projects probably will led the group in the direction to cooperate with other
groups within Citilab. For example, a significant possibility has been spotted that could be the connection
between those editors interested in “home tinkering” (bricolage) and those other “citilabers” active in
other, more technically-oriented, groups of citizens at Citilab interested in open hardware Arduino
projects. This would be very much in the spirit of the emergent process of design that leads the general
adaptive cooperation pattern of Citilab, inspired in processes of emergent models such as “SER”