← 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”

(Seeding-Evolutionary Growth -Reseeding, (Fischer & Ostwald, 2002)

2.7. Can seniors also innovate?

Seniorlab is another project of Citilab trying to change the cultural pattern we have about elders in our

current society. Initially called Yayolab (“yayo” is a Catalan word for elder associated mentally with a old

man black dressed with a black beret and an traditional stick), it was the initial group of people with

gathered that proposed to change the name. “We are not “yayos”, they said in the first meeting in January

2008. They preferred the term “seniorlab” as a better description of the group. This term was suggested

by Maria J. Buxó, professor of cultural anthropology of the University of Barcelona.

Seniorlab started thanks to the collaboration with another local initiative called Universitat de la Gent

Gran, (“University of Seniors”). Created in 2006 as the first Spanish university created by the own seniors

in Cornella, this university introduced for the first time a User Center Design approach. The topics and

courses were designed following the interests of the seniors instead of being created by the university

professors. The initial group of seniors came from this university, currently belonging to the UNED, the

Spanish official distance education.

During two years a group of researchers, social scientists and seniors have developed a quite broad set of

projects coming from the traditional Personal Memories ones the more technology one like

ConnectAlzheimer, a system of caring using videoconferencing and learning tools, developed by the local

Association of Relatives of Alzheimer Patients in collaboration with i2cat Foundation. In Seniorlab we

have used beyond the PBS approach other applied anthropology methodologies like “action research” y

“participatory design”, both oriented to generate knowledge on social change (Davydd J. Greenwood

and Morten Levin, Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change, 2nd ed. (Thousand

Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007). Carlos Bezos, applied anthropologist, director of Value Creation and a disciple of

D. Greenwood, has help us to develop the project

One of the more interesting aspects we have discovered is the persistent capacity of neotenia between the

seniors. (Bezos et al. 2010). By “neoteny”, scientists understand the process of keeping young characters

in the adult age . This character of some biological species, described for the first time by evolutionist

biologist Jay Gould [Gould, Jay 1977] , has been recently studied by Charlton B.G. In his paper about

Psychological Neoteny. By this terms he understand “the widely-observed phenomenon that adults in

modernizing liberal democracies increasingly retain many of the attitudes and behaviors traditionally

associated with youth” (Charlton B.G, 2007) . The Seniorlab project shows that when seniors are

engaged in innovative projects they extend these neotenic characteristics. Working in projects has helped

senior participants to start some formal and informal research. Doing projects help them start again

looking into the future, even if they search on their memories. They become more confidents. “Nobody

told me before that I could develop a project by myself”, commented a senior. As a result, seniors

activate a neoteny process . They become more excited, happy, anxious also. Seniorlab has proven that as

we talk about long life learning, this process could also be a long life innovating process. Instead of being

afraid seeing ageing as equivalent of decadence we can be in an moment just the contrary, a moment

were, for the first time in history of sapiens, more and more people can develop creative activities during

its mature years after being completed the necessary demands of the struggle for life. A real time of

freedom and wisdom.

2.8. Net media skills and the new generation.

One of the big differences we have detected between the baby-boomer generation and the millennial one

is in relation with the use of audiovisual language. Old generation is a looking-at-TV generation. Some

of them even have taken control on the broadcasting business but without changing the model: few people

producing audiovisual stuff for a mass audience of spectators. But now the combination of Internet and

cheap audiovisual technology is allowing to the young generation to express itself through this different

media generating a different communication model: may people communicate to many people using the

audiovisual language. Citilab is exploring how this new netmedia language can be learn and extended to

the citizens as the literacy on reading and writing skills was developed five centuries ago. Laia Sanchez,

assistance professor at the Communication School at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Alex

Serra, sound engineer, are conducting the social media lab at Citilab.

2.8.1.MusicLab

A local team of musicians, Sergio Ramos and Santi Sanchez from Sant Boi de Llobregat, a city close to

Cornella, detected a problem: young people were willing to learn music but their local professors are not

professional musicians. And the same time, professional musicians don’t teach. Results: school music’s

have a great levels of students’ drop out, Could Citilab help them to develop a system where professional

musicians, professors of local schools of music and its students could learn each other? Musiclab has born

in 2009 to explore these possibilities. Music has been since 1999, thanks to Shawn Fanning a member of

the Millennial generation and inventor of Naspter, the first area of convergence between Internet and the

audiovisual. Young generation has grown with Internet music, first downloading, then playing on Youtube

and finally willing to compose themselves. But training is lagging behind. Musiclab has developed during

academic year 2009-2010 a training experiment. Using audiovisuals and videoconference tools the team

has developed different pedagogical sessions between professional musicians, professors of school music

and students. Because of the low bandwidth that music school had, they have to use tools like Microsoft

XP videoconferencing package connecting Citilab with five local schools of music in different cities in

Catalonia. In parallel, a Web 2.0 environment using Ning and other collaborative tools have been set up as

social networking tools. The first results are quite positive. Next course, the Anella Cultural, Cultural

Ring, a network connecting major cultural institutions in Catalonia with local public theaters is offering

for next course MusicLab as an experimental service to be test with other music schools. If we want to

test the creative cities hypothesis (R. Florida dixit), we need to set in place a new educational system for

training the new vocations, the creative young professionals and citizens with a higher levels of music

skills.

2.8.2 Football players and media editors.

Laia Sanchez, director of the Social Media lab, envisioned another possible project. Close to the Citilab is

the football field of the local team Fontsanta Fatjo. Football in Barcelona is a local passion. Sports in

TV3, the Catalan broadcasting system, are very popular but only few sports and fewer sport teams can

appear in the news. But now, with the audiovisual Internet, why not to offer local sport groups the

possibility of producing their own programmes themselves? What if we could offer them the possibility

to learn how to broadcast the local football matches to friends and relatives? During the last months,

SporTIC, a new Citilab project, has followed a similar process than the rest of the projects: gathering the

local sport group of FontSanta Fatjo, explaining them the idea, listening to their opinions, elicit their

interest, setting the lab, (in fact a mobile media production team, made by Citilab members and local

participants) , training them in our facility, co designing new activities and getting some new results. The

first result is a collaborative audiovisual environment, Fonsanta Fatjo TV, made by this football team,

where they put their live emissions, with interviews, and gathering them in a sports media library to see

freely on demand. Sports is also an educational field where young generation can be not only spectators

but also player and protagonist.

2.9 Computational Thinking for everyone.

Innovation in the Internet era is not just putting information content on line, or getting new friends in a

social network, It is also to construct the new possibilities in the Internet. One of the necessary skills is to

learn how to create the software building blocks of new applications, services and platforms that could

expand new possibilities of collaboration and learning. The culture of technology is based in the design

patterns that evolve from this and other software activities. The way that programmers and computer

scientists think and solve problems, the way in which they design, is very characteristic of the patterns of

innovation that have evolved collectively on the Internet. Some have spotted it: “Computational

Thinking”(Wing, 2006) , approaching all types of problems with the thinking and design toolset of a

computer scientist, specifically of a programmer. This is one of the most important ability to innovate in

the new society.

This was approached in Citilab in two ways. One, expanding the knowledge of programming to the

school system. The other, creating activities that made people reflect in terms of the basic concepts and

processes of computer science. The first was called the Edutech project, the second one was the Tecnolab

project.

2.9.1. Edutech: impacting the education system via programming

The Edutech project combined the design of periodic training activities for kids in programming with an

approach to train teachers in secondary schools to use programming as another tool for their teaching (not

just teaching programming). In the first case, the Scratch programming language was selected by the

project leader (UPC Professor Jordi Delgado) to use it as an introductory environment to programming

for 8-12 year-old children. It is one of the most popular activities in Citilab. Scratch was selected because

it was instrumental in programming and designing complex systems in a very easy way and because it is

connected with a huge global community of children, parents and educators that have created more than

500 000 Scratch projects online. Scratch groups at Citilab work also around the concept of project.

In collaboration with the Catalan Department of Education, EduTech, devised a whole new approach to

secondary schools teachers training in technology. It created a website within the Education Department

“Imagina” website (addressed to a all students and teachers in the Catalan Education system) where an

online course for hundreds of professors was created. Here the key, again, was not to impose a given

structure but to adapt to the current needs of the teachers. That is, if, say, one were a professor of

Literature at secondary school, probably he or she would see no interest in learning how to program or,

even less, how programming could ever be used for a “liberal arts” course. In principle, a professor would

have almost no motivation to enroll in a course about programming. The Edutech team turned this

assumption upside down by requiring that all teachers participating in the training programme,

independently of their background and current teaching subject, should end up showing that they have

learned how to program.... by creating a class of their subject that was in fact a Scratch program. That

means not to use programming to create quizzes or questionnaires but simulations or any other resource

that is a program and that conveys the core concepts and abilities of the subject been taught. It is

interesting to see that the resulting proposals by secondary school teachers do actually show that they

have learned the usefulness of the “computational approach” to knowledge transfer in education.

Combinatory programs have been created by Literature teachers in the program to let children learn about

the rules of poem writing, for example.

2.9.2. Tecnolab: learning to discover the concepts behind the computer.

Immersing oneself in the experience of programming or robot building is a good way to get the practice

and methods of the information society. However, in the process, sometimes perspective is lost and the

deep concepts of computing and informatics are never known. That is what Irene Lapuente, a science

communicator with a strong background on activities to communicate concepts in the sciences, applied to

technology, i.e., to information technologies and computing. The result was an approach to computing

and the internet that stressed what the main contributions of computer science and the internet were in

terms of new concepts and ideas, in a similar vein as some programmes for science communication

portray the concepts behind the laws of physics or mathematical concepts. In order to reinforce the fact

that computing and the internet had to do not just with computers and gadgets but with a serious

systematic approach to learn about processes based on information and computation, Tecnolab activities

were purposefully created with no computer interaction. Tecnolab (http://citilab-

cornella.com/tecnolab/tallers/) is, basically a set of activities geared towards “learning computing

without computers”. As its creator says “Tecnolab is about computing and internet with paper and pencil”.

That means for example, that participants learn about information, computation, codification,

communication, internet, computer virus, pixels, etc. without ever touching a computer. It is also done by

means of groups games, cardboard quizzes, and, in general, play. It has been tested in several ways with

several groups and in works very well with people either if they have participated in computer or

programming courses before or not. It is mainly addressed to children and it has been used successfully in

many schools in Catalonia. Now it will be connected with international initiatives like Computer Science

Unplugged, in order to extend its possibilities.

The process illustrated by Edutech and Tecnolab is currently pushed further ahead by creating co design

workshops with teachers at primary and secondary schools to devise integrated course materials to cover

several subjects in the curricula by simultaneously working on it from the perspective of programming

and computing, concepts behind computing, and media abilities. Several new contents for children are

being developed and will be offered soon to the school system, covering subjects that the teachers

themselves have told Citilab staff that are difficult for the children to learn, from mathematics to natural

sciences and literature.

2.9.3. Redesigning museums with citizens: Expolab project.

One new development in the direction of creating new learning opportunities is geared towards other

types of centers associated with knowledge and learning museums. The Expolab project

(http://expolab.net) , done in cooperation with the Tech Museum of San Jose in California and directed by

Irene Lapuente from the Science communication company La Mandarina de Newton, is exploring the

learning dimension of co creating exhibitions with citizens around concepts of their own interest. The first

exhibition currently being on the last steps before production is centered around how people feel that the

Internet has changed their lives. The process of the creation of this exhibition is in itself a clear sample of

the whole design processes of the technological culture and adds to Citilab the dimension of physical and

online memory of the knowledge contributed, created and learned by Citilabers. It has had an

exceptionally good reception from museum professionals as it was seen by the attendance of the parallel

workshops for museum professionals, that gathered almost 200 museum professionals from all over Spain

and opened up the collaboration with institutions such as the aforementioned Tech Museum and also the

Center for the Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Centre d’Arts Santa Monica, and others.

2.10. New ways of working... out of Citilab

Citilab is still a project conditioned by the “social” approach of their founding fathers. But in last year, the

institution has been impacted by the consequences of the economic crisis. Public funding is drying up.

New activities with companies and the economic actors are needed urgently. Ramon Sangüesa, innovation

director and Jose A. Galaso, a computer engineer and a business manager, are pushing the Citilab in that

new direction. They were instrumental in setting up the Breakout project that explores new ways and

spaces for working collaboratively.

Breakout Festival started in New York in September 2009 conducted by Laura Forlano (Forlano,

2009) and other innovators. They initiated several initiatives to “escape from the office” and experiment

and do research on what new open spaces for co working could look like and which type of dynamics

were conducive to real work results. Ramon Sangüesa, while at a stay in Columbia University Center for

Organization Innovation approached Laura Forlano an her team which included members of the Sentient

City project of the Architectural League of New York, the Institute for the Future and the co working

space New Work City. They agreed to cooperate and to bring the Breakout experience to Barcelona and

compare the similarities and differences of the development of the project in two different countries and

cultures.

The Breakout perspective goes beyond the current creation of co working spaces, an international

movement inspired by developments such as The Hub (originated in San Francisco). Breakout explores

the intersection between public and office spaces and tests if and under which conditions public spaces

(squares, streets, parks) or “flow spaces” (malls, train stations, airports) can be used to develop

impromptu work gatherings. The idea is imagining that all the city can be your office.

At several times during 2009 and 2010, all the workers and teams of Citilab abandoned the building went

to public places (World Trade Center of Cornella), public transports (TramBaix), commercial centers (La

Illa Diagonal) or civic centers (Fabra i Coats in San Andrés, a popular neighborhood of Barcelona, and

met with other professionals to work on current projects for 2 to 12 hours. They established a completely

new working environment and opened up conversations, dialogues, presentations with the general public

that surrounded them. The results were analyzed critically by J. Colobrans and his team. They have been

quite positive, breaking the ice with an astonished public that first looked at and then start breaking the

ice with this bizarre troupe of professional that made think to the passers by about an ambulant circus but

then discovered that it had completely different goals and that what they were doing could have a direct

impact in new opportunities to work for all, passers-by included.

2.11. Economic crisis has come: Looking-for-a-job?

Suddenly, the crisis arrived hitting heavily the community. 2010 has been the year were the crisis has

been more dramatic until now. A recent report of the UGT, the socialist labor union, denounced that in

Catalonia 23.1% of youth between 16 and 25 years old have no job and are not studying (Jordana, 2010).

And this trend is increasing. In 2005, there were 65.900 in 2009, 154.000.

Traditional approaches focusing in “looking-for-a-job” are useless. Instead Citilab is proposing a new

approach, “inventing new kind of jobs” jointly with a joint process of training in this new professions. A

recent proposal to the Department of Labor, called Laborlab, is just trying to discover and design new

professional profiles, specially for young people.

One of the successful experiences Citilab has developed is in the area is a training course for

professionals of social networks. Led by Internet pioneer and journalist, LuisA. Fernandez Hermana,

during a full academic year, his team has developed a training course for people willing to start

professionally in the area of social networks . Using a new collaborating platform, Citiespai, funded by

Citilab and developed by a local SME, this entrepreneur is training a new group of social network

professionals beyond the traditional platforms like Facebook or MySpace. This course has been

supported by the Laboratory of Innovative Social Networks.

Creating new jobs, professions and companies by training people in new working environments is a way

Citilab is exploring to fight unemployment, specially in the young generation. The old jobs will never

come again. The new jobs are still to be designed, on of them, the professional of new living labs

organizations. The European Network of Living Labs is just putting in place the First Summer School of

Living Labs, dedicated to training this kind of new professionals all over Europe.

2.12.Is really Citilab an innovative organization?

We still don’t know for sure. Ramon Sangüesa has established an strategic research collaboration with

the Center for Organizational Innovation at Columbia University (COI), where he is affiliated faculty. He

proposed to invite them to come to Citilab and to make an assessment project about it. (Stark,D. 2009)

Monique Girard, associated director of the COI , came to Barcelona during a year and a half, (June-July

2009, October 2009 and June 2010) doing an ethnographic study analyzing the results of the project from

the organizational perspective.

Citilab started as a collaborative design project of socio-digital innovation. At least this is how the

founding group composed by a local politician, a professor in computer science, and an anthropologist

thought and still think. But how this project is evolving in reality? It is quite difficult for the researchers

and activists engaged in it since the beginning to have an objective perspective and to criticize it. Citilab

needs external observers.

Combining the two research approaches, the observational quantitative ethnography approach of the team

led by professor Jordi Colobrans and the qualitative approach of the Columbia research team we can have

more innovative and critical results. This double approach is one of the characteristics of the Citilab

experiment. The initial proposal formulated in 2007 to the Spanish government (Badenes, V, et al. 1997)

was a collaborative design project. We followed the same methodology that a computer scientist would

follow when creating new systems that already don’t exist but could. The assessment study by Columbia

University, is a more analytical one but also combines hints and proposals that help in creating new

design artifacts to tests new ways of organizing. For example by organizing internal teams of staff in

different ways and by cooperating with users in a more systematic way. The Columbia report describes

what is really happening, using the traditional fieldwork methods of the social sciences. It is based on

the sociology of innovation and on organization studies. So it studies Citilab as a possibly new model of

innovation based on the integration of citizens and remarks its relationships and differences with

established organizational models and, more specifically, with organizational models of innovation. In

doing so, it is extremely valuable because it helps in spotting the organizational successes of Citilab but

also its mistakes and, in so doing, it gives strong feedback and orientation for improvement.

2.11.1. A first assessment: “Too much control, little structure”

The Columbia researchers have produced several written reports remarking the contradictions between

the goals of the initial project and the preliminary results. In the first report, dated July 2009, David Stark

pointed in a key issue “It sounds as though Citilab has a building, it has resources, but it lacks an

organization.” (Girard,M, 2009), remarked about the incipient organization, that there was “too much

control, too little structure”. When a new organization like Citilab is set up there are two dangers: a)

simply copying the old hierarchical organizational methods or b) simply get rid of them producing a

total lack of new organizational methods. Both options have been followed in the first two years of

Citilab. As Girard describes: “Two rather contradictory statements repeatedly made by members of

Citilab: on the one hand people complain about a lack of leadership, a lack of coherent direction. On the

other, people complain of too much hierarchy and too much micromanagement at the level of top

administration. How can people be complaining about too little and too much control at the same time?

The metaphors offered by Citilab staff to describe the lack of direction are telling: “Citilab is like a group

of musicians who are trying to improvise together but do not share a common rhythm and so the result is

noise.” (Girard, July 2009: 1-2). This is a serious caveats but also clear remarks for putting in place an

organization that could cope with the ambiguity of innovation and its requirement for flexibility and

adaptation in response to new opportunities created from the interaction with users but at the same time it

has to have stability and structure to keep the whole organization from falling apart. Results in normative

emerging systems and the lessons (good and bad) of the governance of Open Source projects are possible

ways to create are more adaptable and effective organization for Citilab.

The discourse about creating a people, public, private partnership seems appealing, but managing this

new structures is almost impossible at least if we don’t consider them “permanently beta organizations”

(Neff,G Stark,D, 2002). As a result of these reports, a process of creating a more collective structure of

direction was started. Citilabs and Living Labs need their own internal projects of reinventing their

operating structures, including the managing functions, the relations between the personnel, and the

funding models.

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