One Page Summary

• Which need/challenge are you addressing with your solution?
Youth in Romania lack the necessary tools to recognize and fight stereotypes and prejudice. Engaging in political debates often appears as a boring and unappealing option. And so, many youngsters don’t get prepared to tackle the economic and social challenges of our time.
The latest advancements in challenged-based learning suggest that by adding challenges to learning environments the result is urgency, passion, and ownership - ingredients often missing in schools. However, carrying out this innovation challenges at scale in a way that is sufficiently attractive for the youngsters is not easy.
• How your solution aims to satisfy that need in practical terms?
Kuorum's multidisciplinary team of professionals has five years of experience helping organisations and governments to implement collaborative policy making and community engagement strategies. In order to support these processes, our engineers have developed a technology that was awarded Best Tech for Politics 2016 by the Washington Academy of Political Arts and Sciences. Nonetheless, technology is always regarded as a tool to allow for mass participation, but never as a substitute of offline deliberation.
In the case of the Romanian high schools we aim to involve its students in collaborative problem solving and policy innovation challenges. These challenges will be a combination of on- and offline activities and training sessions. We will provide the technology and methodology. And the content of the challenges will be agreed with Go Free and the community of high school teachers.
• What are the implications of implementing your solution? Which actors need to be involved? Are there any competitors? If yes, why are you different?
The project will consist in a 6-month campaign with 2 decision making processes (consultations or open debates). Both processes will include an online action and an offline event. The provider will implement the project in close collaboration with the client, so that the client can learn how to continue carrying out this kind of activities successfully in the future without external support.
Initially, the Go Free community engagement site will be launched. Then the provider will train the client for it to be able to carry out the workshops for the beneficiaries (high school teachers and/or students). In parallel, the provider will start the campaign to acquire new users (students of the 10 selected high schools in urban areas of Romania). And finally, at the closing events for every process, students and teachers will be involved in a workshop to further refine the proposals made online.
Finally, there are plenty of online platforms for online campaigning (like Nation Builder), and debating (like Consul). But, unlike Kuorum, none of them offers a comprehensive service, where technology is a tool to serve a bigger strategic goal.
• The solution has been already tested and deployed in another context (geographical or sectorial)? If so, what are the strengths and weaknesses you identify that could help you in scaling it into a new context?
Kuorum was born in 2013 in Madrid. In 2015 we opened our headquarters in Manchester. And in 2016, Kuorum led a 2-year project co-funded by the European Commission to foster participation of young disadvantage people in 5 cities. Since then we have worked with organisations and governments in six countries.
Currently we work, among others, with the government of Extremadura (1M inhabitants) to co-design with its citizens a new public information service, with the city council of Toledo (80k inhabitants) to foster community engagement through on- and offline district assemblies, and with the government of the Province of Zaragoza (1M inhabitants) to involve the citizenry in the co-design of solutions to depopulation.
Our technology is mature enough to assist us in every project without major customizations. But it is not yet fully scalable. With the learning we have acquired with our past clients, we are now running a 4-month tech development plan to achieve this scalability. We will finish it right before the execution of this project.