Englobal
Civic participation channel
Master Thesis Project
2018
Englobal is a community channel made to engage, promote and enable citizens living abroad to co-create together with resident citizens of Medellin city. The civic participation tool enables people to bring successful ideas and models to the community towards the development of the city. Inspiring the abroad community, despite the distance, to continue contributing to the development of their hometown.
Why
From my own experience as a citizen of Medellin residing abroad, I have felt that there is no way to contribute to my city being so far away. It is very difficult to find out and be part of what is happening with the development of our city and there are no forms of communication that connect us as citizens.
Living abroad is a great opportunity. It is an experience that inevitably opens your mind to a new culture, new knowledge, and new ways of seeing things. It is an adventure filled with cultural learnings that at the same time create more culture and different behaviors in us. I have had the opportunity to live in three countries much more developed than Colombia in every way. Where the levels of education, respect, and living standards are very high and completely different from my hometown. Every day I have the opportunity to learn, see and be part of many initiatives, spaces, ideas, concepts, and behaviors that leave me stunned wondering, would it be possible to have something like this in Medellín?
I know I’m not the only one. For this reason, this intention was created to shape a new channel where citizens residing abroad can have a voice and act as ambassadors in the development of their own hometown. Providing ideas, concepts, initiatives, and ideals for the development of our culture, society, and city.
Partners
The civic participation channel will be created for the center of innovation Ruta N a public entity directly linked to Medellin’s City Hall. The intention is to design a service that merges with the platform “MiMedellin” strengthening the Colombian community abroad.
Viajeros
visualize all the citizens from Medellín in the world who are part of the platform.
Nearby viajeros
Visualize nearby people by location who, despite distance, also seek to transform Medellín.
The idea
Join the ideas and see who has taken part. The categories of the ideas are defined by Ruta N.
Discussion
Join the discussion together with other citizens to challenge the idea and face other opinions.
Journey map
The user journey map is the step by step route that a user takes to reach a goal. It is a tool that helps to visualize the user’s experience designed to provide insights into the overall journey.
After collecting all the journeys defined by their rate value, all variables were overlapped to better visualize the differences between the journeys from the different users.
SUS
The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a simple scale tool for measuring the usability, in this case of an interactive prototype.
During the test participants were asked to score ten statements based on the interactive prototype of the platform with one of five responses that range from Strongly Agree to Strongly disagree.
Chalmark test
Chalmark is a screenshot based click testing tool. The test provides data about how people are using the platform by giving tasks and recording the first clicks that the users interpret on the wireframes.
Th test gives valuable insights to understand where users will expect to find content on the site and possible changes to the site structure and content.
From the world to my hometown
From... I would bring to my home town...” is the last activity in the usability test for Colombians living abroad. In the activity they had to contribute an idea, initiative, event or action that they admire of the current country and would like to implement it in their own hometown. This action aims to give an example of possible ideas that could be shared with the community by means of “englobal”.
This initiative is born from the same idea of the platform. By living abroad, we are surrounded by millions of new ideas, new ways of seeing things, new cultures and behaviours from which we can always learn the good things and transmit them. This activity seeks to make people understand that there is always something we can contribute to our city.
“I would bring to my hometown the effectiveness of the public transportation, it gives a lot of benefits in terms of quality of life, the culture and the respect on the streets, the safety feeling that you have here when you walk at 2:00 am.” From Milan to Bogotá.
“I would bring a system where people can give away every month things that they don’t use anymore (e.g. electronic tools, furniture, clothes, etc.). In Basel there is a calendar and there are specific days when you can bring these things out and an NGO picks them.” From Basel to Bogotá.
