The Digital Equity Living Lab, known as Digital Doveton, has now come to a close.
You can read all about the outcomes from this program here, or click on the infographics below to learn more
Digital Doveton Festival
Casey's first Living Lab - Exploring innovative ways to address Digital Equity challenges in Doveton
We are looking for industry, research, community, and public-sector partners to collaborate with us in exploring how we might solve a variety of Digital Equity issues in Doveton, namely:
What's in it For You?
The Living Lab provides an unique opportunity test and trial new concepts with the community. The trials will be funded by Casey to a certain value, with the potential for scale up ventures. Partnering with a leading innovative Council will also increase brand exposure and provide pathways to scale solutions in other regions.
See "Living Lab Details" below for more benefits.
Apply to become a Digital Equity Living Lab partner by January 14th 2022
About Casey Living Labs
A Living Lab is a community centred co-design test environment. The Casey Living Lab model is an iterative approach to understanding problems and delivering community-led solutions through a process of co-creation.
By creating a network of public-private-people partnerships, Living Labs integrate research and strengthen innovation processes in real communities.
The result is an increase in trust, transparency, and value creation for our community.
What is Digital Equity?
Digital Equity means to embed fairness in the development and implementation of digital systems. It is to recognise that individuals, groups, and communities are situated differently in relation to access, affordability and the skills needed for these digital platforms and systems. To read more about what this means for the City of Casey, read our Digital Equity Framework.
Find Out More
What challenges are we trying to solve?
Through this Living Lab we are trying to address Digital Equity issues, in particular ones across the domains of Access, Affordability and Digital Abilities.
- How might we enable all people in Doveton, particularly those who are digitally excluded, to access the internet so that they are empowered to get on-line regularly for a range of activities?
- How might we invest in and/or advocate for alternative means of accessing affordable internet and devices, in order to ensure the best value for digitally excluded communities?
- How might we empower and motivate digitally excluded people to build digital skills, increase confidence to get on-line, and to safely use the internet in an ongoing way that improves their lives?
Why should you become a Living Lab partner?
By being a Living Lab partner, we can offer you the following:
- Testbed environment - the opportunity to test your solution in a live environment with real people
- Direct community feedback on your innovation
- Potential to scale up your solution down the track
- Case study to point to (to help you secure future funding)
- Access and integration with Casey's Open Data platform
- Opportunity to network and secure new partnerships
- Access to larger funding opportunities through co-authored grant submissions
Where is the Living Lab located?
The physical Living Lab will be hosted at Autumn Place Community Hub in Doveton (29 Autumn Place).
The Living Lab concept encourages us to work through community challenges in practice with our community, so what better place than here at the community hub to address Digital Equity issues for this area.
That means, Autumn Place will be the host of co-design engagements, such as user testing with community, partnership events, hackathons, makerthons, and pitch nights.
Just because our lab is hosted at Autumn Place, it doesn't mean that your proposed solutions must be constrained to the hub. Depending on what the Living Lab partners come up with, solutions may be rolled out across wider Doveton as well.
Why Doveton? What does the data tell us?
According to the Australian Digital Inclusion Index (ADII) 2020, which measures three key dimensions of digital inclusion, the Outer South-East region of Melbourne (which includes the City of Casey) was found to be the most digitally excluded region of all the Melbourne regions and is below both the Victorian and Australian averages.
What are we looking for?
We are looking for Living Lab partners to pilot innovative solutions that may not necessarily have been seen before, which address the Digital Equity challenges.
The solutions should:
- be community focussed
- leverage existing council assets where possible
- integrate with Casey's Open Data platform
- be cost effective
- catalyse industry partnerships and economic development in the region
- deliver evidence-based or research-informed outcomes
Multi-partner collaborations will be looked at more favourably during selection. We encourage partners to collaborate and form teams to more holistically address the challenges. To facilitate this, we will be offering a partner networking event on December 14th (you can register your interest to attend the event on the right of this page, or the bottom if viewing on a mobile device).
We expect our partners to deliver the outcome of the pilot within 3-6 months.
How will partners be selected?
To apply to be a Digital Equity Living Lab partner, complete an application form found on the right of this page (or at the bottom if viewing on a mobile device).
Your application will be assessed by Casey staff (Smart City and Innovation team) according to the criteria below, and is subject to council policy (e.g. procurement policy, risk assessments, vendor due diligence, data governance etc). Shortlisted applicants will be invited to pitch their proposal to a panel consisting of Casey staff, community members, and industry representatives, after which each proposal will be open for public voting.
Selection Criteria
We will assess applications on the following (80% weighting):
- Community Desirability - will this deliver value to the community? Does it address digital equity issues in the community?
- Alignment with Council vision*
- Level of dependencies and risk
- Technical Feasibility
- Organisational Viability
- Ability for pilot to scale
- Cost-effectiveness
Additionally, the following will be looked at more favourably (20% weighting):
- Multi-partner collaboration
- Addresses more than one challenge statement
- Community voting preferences
*To understand more about the Council vision, refer to these documents:
To submit your application, click the "Apply" button on the right of this page (or at the bottom if viewing on a mobile device).
You will be required to submit contact details and a brief summary of the proposed solution you wish to pilot.
You will also be asked to upload your detailed proposal in the form of a document, such as word, powerpoint, pdf.
Your proposal should address the following areas (questions provided for guidance):
Solution Overview
- What is the proposed solution you wish to pilot?
- Does your proposal make use of any existing Council Assets?
- Describe the technical feasibility of the pilot?
- How will you ensure the outcome is fit for purpose? How will you validate the solution's effectiveness?
- Describe the overall cost model. Include breakdown of partner co-funding and any in-kind support. Please be clear about pilot costs for council and cost of potential scale up across additional sites.
Strategic Alignment
- How does your proposal align with the Council Vision?
- How does your proposal address the challenge statements?
- How will your proposal deliver value to our community? What are the opportunities for local business and community members to get involved in co-designing and testing your pilot?
Project Plan
- Does your project have any identified Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies, or Constraints?
- What is your proposed pilot timeline/roadmap?
- How might your pilot scale up? What is your proposed roadmap for delivery and scale?
We request that proposals be no longer than 15 pages.
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Feel free to ask us a question here. Alternatively, send us an email to smartcity@casey.vic.gov.au
