Values: OrganiCity is Underpinned by a Series of Values and Principles
ORGANICITY
OrganiCity, as a project, is underpinned by a series of principles. We believe our cities should be built around these principles too, so we encourage our experimenters and participants to embody these principles themselves.
Experimentation
We learn as we do. Prototyping in a real-world setting is the best way to understand the effect and value of an idea.
We experiment with a critical mindset and evaluate results. It takes a daring spirit to release new ideas, and humility to continue when things don’t turn out as expected – but it’s worth the effort to gather valuable insights and results.
Iteration
We improve as we learn. Every action is documented and evaluated to be able to extract learnings, which we can then act upon.
You can see some of these learnings in the Journey section. Since we are involving people in ideas (which are not fully tested), we need to clearly communicate that they should expect to encounter drawbacks and failures; but that it’s only through their involvement that we can improve.
Co-Creation
We collaborate with others to build this vision. We encourage anyone in a city to be active in this discussion, whether that means becoming an experimenter or taking part in other people’s experiments.
We expect experimenters to co-create their work too, ensuring that their innovations deal with real local issues and are built with a collaborative approach. Having people with different skills and perspective at the core of innovation ensures that we future-proof our solutions – everyone is invested in producing a positive impact, so they become the best critics of the process of how that is achieved.
Transparency
We have nothing to hide and make an effort to be clear.
Instead of creating information overload, we try to select the right time and message to keep people on the same page along the journey. We write in the same tone as if we were speaking with a friend. We are building relationships with a very wide variety of people, so it’s essential that we ensure that what we explain is easy to understand for everyone – avoiding acronyms and jargon and explaining complex words.
Inclusivity
We aim to engage everyone in a city.
As technologies evolve, they tend to leave many people behind. Given OrganiCity is in the early stages of development, we expect that most of our users will be technology enthusiast or advanced users. However, we have framed our development so that people from different backgrounds and skills can join. For example, we encourage collaborations to allow data scientists to work with communities and help them achieve impact. Likewise, we try to create processes with a low threshold and invest resources in taking users by the hand.
