On this page you will find access to the PLUS City Communities. It is a section for the stakeholders of the participating cities where they can get involved in the co-creation processes to analyse the challenges that the platform economy present us.
There are two interliked co-creation processes. The Social Policy Labs and the Community of Practice
Social Policy lab is an innovative methodology of co-creation among different stakeholders. PLUS adopts this technique in order to combine theory, research and practice. As the project focusses much attention on key-actors’ agency, we will involve such subjects into the process of evaluation of the research and production of solutions for the mentioned challenges of platform economy.
The main characteristics of these social labs are (Hassan, 2014):
Social labs are platforms for addressing complex social challenges that have three core characteristics:
They are social. Social labs start by bringing together diverse participants to work in a team that acts collectively.
They are experimental. Social labs are not one-off experiences. They’re ongoing and sustained efforts.
They are systemic. The ideas and initiatives developing in social labs, released as prototypes, aspire to be systemic in nature.
Z. Hassan, The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving our Most Complex Challenges, «Stanford Social Innovation Review», 2014
SOPO Lab will bridge the research with the practice, gathering platform economy’ stakeholders with local and European policymakers in order to co-create policy guidelines to face challenges and opportunities of such transformations.
SOPO Lab to co-create will be articulated into three different sessions – grounded both on local and European level – that correspond to three axes of challenges and opportunities in the platform economy:
- Session 1 – “Local and European regulation and taxation of Platforms”
- Session 2 – “Labour Rights and organization in the Platform Economy”
- Session 3 – “How to innovate Welfare for Platform Workers”
These physical encounters will also be backed up by a digital space where the participants involved in these dynamics can access to a different set of resources like policy briefings, reports, news, blog posts, etc. about the impact of platform economy in welfare and emploment.
Communities of practices are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do, and learn how to do it better together, collaboratively, as they interact regularly.
Thus, a Community of practice (CoP) is defined as a group of motivated, supportive and active members that coheres through sustained mutual engagement creating a common repertoire of knowledge to be shared and improved. CoPs can provide a social and political container for linking and learning between practitioners, knowledge producers, academics and policy processes to set, analyse, address and explore concerns, common questions, problems and possible solutions to problems. They can bring together a range of perspectives on a problem, and ensure that relevant knowledge is accessible to those who need it.
In PLUS project then, the CoP is expected to lean on members able to interact and be active throughout the whole project in their specific contexts (the city) to set, analyse, address and explore problems and possible solutions. The CoP responds to the need to have a stable network of involved, topic-related and active people in all the partner cities. PLUS Community of Practice will focus on social protection issues related to platform economy and ways to ensure continuous social rights such as the individual activity account and possible ways of implementation at city-level.
In this way, a CoP is expected to actively run throughout the project’s timespan and even beyond, on a twofold way: on one hand within the cities, to consolidate, support and promote project’s activities and, on other hand at the European level, to promote trans-national interaction between involved actors in the project and to feed and share knowledge in the PLUS network.
