Challenges in Designing and Scaling-up Community Services

This paper is based on two EU funded projects: one recently completed, Life 2.0 and an on- going project, MyNeighborhood (MyN). The former was aimed at creating location based and socially networked services to support elderly people independent life. The latter is developing a platform to activate hidden or latent resources in neighbourhoods. Both the projects are based on the activities in four pilot locations. They are an application of service design to the public sector that provide interesting insights about designing and scaling up highly localised and personalised services and platforms of services. Both projects are highly related to a real life context for senior people (Life 2.0) and people with brain injury and their assistants (MyN). Several analogies could be found, between the existing generation of social networking platforms and the services proposed in these projects, however several important differences can also be found, that challenge the way those platforms should be designed and scaled up in different contexts. Being at a more advanced stage, the Life 2.0 project obviously provided more insights, whereas MyN gives an opportunity to verify the hypotheses coming from Life 2.0. This paper analyses the lesson learned from the work undertaken so far and proposes criteria and hypotheses for the diffusion of this kind of services.