Welcome to the GECO Project's facilitation app Wiki!

Background

Energimyndigheten funds the project and includes project partners from Energicentrum Gotland and sustainability researchers from UU. The project application promised a design-thinking double-diamond approach (discover, define, develop, deliver). We aim to help rural communities start and operate energy communities more effectively. An energy community is a group working together to accomplish an energy project. An energy project can be anything from organizing carpooling for trips to town to equipment sharing in the local, rural community to communally building and operating a solar park.

So far, we have:

• conducted close to 20 interviews with members of rural communities on Gotland,
• created a literature review of research into the challenges that rural communities face when creating energy communities,
• ran a one-day innovation day (hackathon/game jam) with sustainability students,
• 4 teams worked for 6-8 weeks on building prototypes for a different problem case.

Philosophy and Purpose

The project was inspired by Malcolm Gladwell's concept of "capitalization rate": What factors in a societal system influence (positively or negatively) the rate at which that society capitalizes on the talent within it?

The philosophy behind the project is that we can identify a challenge that rural communities face and, by building a product, ease it to the extent that the capitalization rate of rural communities starting and operating energy communities increases.

Through our research, we have found that establishing and maintaining productive group dynamics is challenging. Of course, there are other challenges (regulatory complexities, effective community engagement, and accessible and maintained community spaces, to name a few), but we believe that enabling communities to collaborate more effectively empowers them to solve many of these challenges independently.

Current working hypothesis

In the spirit of the Lean Startup (a book by Eric Ries), our job is to form a hypothesis about how we can be valuable to potential users, build MVPs, and get users to use them to test our hypothesis. The current working hypothesis we are testing is:

• The vast majority of teams either lack an educated or experienced facilitator, or the person in charge of facilitating has other duties in the team and can't dedicate the time and energy required to facilitate team activities effectively
• Such users would benefit from having an app that coaches them through effective facilitation methods ahead of and during team activities A small number of facilitations (exercises) benefit the team's group dynamics and productivity if implemented correctly and used regularly.
• Enabling teams to perform facilitated exercises asynchronously can lead to them performing facilitated exercises more frequently and diligently (think Mentimeter/Jackbox games/Kahoot for facilitation).