CONCEPT phase review 2/2: ideation workshop

Introduction

The challenges and needs obtained from the first round of interviews the interviews showed a clear need for (1) responsible sharing (data, knowledge, etc.) and (2) reliable peatland condition monitoring at national level. We then identified what our solution could be: an All-Ireland, AI-enhanced peatland conditioning map built on top of a data and knowledge infrastructure (a network) which will facilitate networking activities among users/stakeholders.

Few questions suddently arise:

• How to implement such network infrastructure?
  • What could be shared and how?
  • How to facilitate network growth and resilience?
• How to handle data?
  • How can we encourage sharing?
  • Who owns the data?
  • How do we facilitate data standardisation?
  • How to address data quality?
• How to compute?
  • How to make a condition map?
  • Is there a need for other maps? How can these be combined?
• How to.. governance?
  • Who has a voice in all that? 

To address these questions we realised that the best way is via the good old stakeholder engagement. We decided to organise an ideation workshop and to invite all interviewed stakeholders. The date was set to 22nd May, just one month to the end of the CONCEPT phase: that would give us enough time to process the workshop outcomes and scope our works for the next SEED phase.

The Attendees

Despite the late invitation, 11 people joined our workshop (33% of interviewed people). Remarkably, the attendees are quite influential with respect to our stakeholder network: if we sum up them with the number of first neighbours – i.e. nodes directly connected with each other via the “mentioned by” link/relation – our workshop has the potential to reach 36 stakeholders straight ahead, thus covering 41% of our network.

The Workshop Format

We conducted the workshop in a hybrid format, as some stakeholders attended in person and others online. This allowed us to easily split the attendees in two groups.

The workshop was composed of two breakout sessions. The first session aimed at identifying requirements and priorities and the two groups worked in isolation. The second session aimed at bringing the two groups together by allowing them to present and discuss their work of the first session.

The first breakout session was the core of the workshop. Two activities were conducted. First, the groups had to create a mind map of requirements, risks, features, etc. of the PoC based on 6 macro topics:

The second activity aimed at prioritising/categorising the mind map items via a MoSCoW approach (Must, Should, Could and Won’t).

The Ouctome

By leveraging the expertise and input of the attendees, we were able to establish a comprehensive and partly priorities list of requirements for the AI2Peat platform which will serve as a guide for the development process. Here are some highlights:

• AI2Peat MUST enlarge our stakeholder network (which would ideally be stored/accessed in our PoC’s network infrastructure) and find ways to include landowners, representative communities, but also industry
• AI2Peat MUST set the basis to link the conditioning map with emission factors, habitats, but also other related initiatives
• AI2Peat SHOULD chase old terminated projects and follow up: can we access their data and findings and share it in our platform?
• AI2Peat SHOULD implement good validation mechanisms of our condition map (and relate them with in-situ validation) and also estimate its modelling accuracy
• AI2Peat COULD build capacity in the citizen science space
• AI2Peat COULD extend the concept of “conditioning” to e.g. detect failures in upland areas
• AI2Peat WON’T reveal all underlying data to public (privacy preserving of sensitive information)
• AI2Peat WON’T be a forum for discussion (in the online forum sense, we do want to discuss our work with our stakeholders!)

These and many other items will be taken into consideration in our forthcoming planning activities.