EU-MACS Helsinki Stakeholders Workshop

On March 7th 2018, the EU-MACS project partners FMI, CNR-IRSA and ENoLL organized a Stakeholders Workshop aiming at 1) testing a prototype for a collaborative planning process for climate change adaptation and 2) at evaluating its suitability for urban planning in Helsinki. The Stakeholder Workshop was organized at FMI. The workshop had 20 participants from various organisations working on climate change adaptation in Helsinki.

The proposed collaborative planning process involves different institutional actors, and is based on the use and sharing of climate-related information between these actors. In the workshop, the participants went through the process by playing a role game. By observing the process and based on the participants’ feedback we have defined the main characteristics of a web-based collaborative planning platform as follows:

i) Need to have very specific problem definition: Generic issues could lead toward endless discussion without achieving a solution.

ii) Opening team should structure the problem definition in a way that could be easily understood by the support team and allows easy retrieval of relevant information

iii) The initial knowledgebase should contain exclusively information and data that is needed to solve the specific problem at a certain decision making stage. Participants should have access to this knowledgebase well in advance.

iv) The participant roles need to be well structured, shared and understood. It has to be clear who is participating in the discussion, what are the roles, the tasks and the objectives each participant holds.

v) The actor involvement in the process has to account for the different phases of the planning process – i.e. from the strategy definition, to the actual action selection and implementation – and determining the roles and responsibilities of the different actors.

vi) The availability of an information dashboard, where all the participants to the process can find out who-is-owning-what information is of utmost importance. This dashboard will allow them to gather all the information they need to perform their tasks.

Next steps: The EU-MACS research team will define the architecture and main characteristics of the collaborative planning platform based on the above feedback. The updated process has been already repeated in Bologna in a similar WS. The final results will be widely reported at the end of the project.