Finding stakeholders and solution owners
Finding stakeholders and solution owners
During Code for Europe 2013 we learned the importance of commitment from stakeholders and the need of owners of the solutions that we developed.
Among the three apps developed during the 2013 Fellowship, Samenspel resulted to be the one that managed to be carried on, receiving additional funding and support by its adopters.
There’s no “secret ingredient”: we’ve chosen to work closely with the (future) end-users of the application. During development processes we showed them the result of the design to make sure that it was what they were looking for. This was made possible by the commitment of the people in the District West in Amsterdam, who became the owners for the project and cared for its development and maintenance.
On the 3rd of June Code for Europe hosted a meeting to find adopters of the Civic Engagement platform we are working on at De Waag in Amsterdam. This meeting is the follow-up of the previous workshop we held a couple of weeks before (on the 21st of May) where we laid the basis and gathered use cases for our development.
We were happy to have Directors and representatives from well known organizations in who play important roles in the citizen participation scene in Amsterdam. They includes Egbert Fransen, director at Pakhuis de Zwijger and Marleen Stikker from Waag Society, as well as Dick Glastra van Loon from Eigenwijks. Martijn Arnoldus from Kennisland/VoorJeBuurt, Marc Schoneveld from Stadsdeel Centrum and Hettie Politiek from the City of Amsterdam.
Dick expressed his interest of adopting the platform for the community he is leading in Nieuw-West better organising local projects and creating on-going channel between citizens and city authority. We were hoping to build up the conversation and create support to this specific case in Nieuw-West.
We are particularly happy because we managed to flip the discussion from talking about how complex the situation is toward what actions we still can do in order to make this project meaningful for current ongoing evolution of the city governance and citizen bottom up movements. Presenting this stakeholder map illustrating all the people we’ve met so far to them actually helped
We are far from being able to provide a comprehensive solution to any problem, but we are proud of our research so far and our strategy for positioning this new software tool among all the existing offerings and in a way that fits the way the City of Amsterdam is currently evolving.
In next weeks we will deep dive into Amsterdam Nieuw-West area, meeting with potential end users at Eigenwijks community.
