On December 4th and 5th 2018, Co-Inform multidisciplinary Consortium gathered in Stockholm to track the progress of the project and to define a common methodology for the workshops taking place in early 2019.

The Consortium aims at developing tools to foster critical thinking for more engaged communities and ultimately for a better-informed society, which constitutes the foundations of a healthy democracy.

Co-Inform’s mission is to make people aware of the consequences that misinformation has on democracy and of how much it affects our lives. The Co-Inform team believes that it is extremely important to raise awareness of the misinformation phenomenon and that only by researching both the technological and the behavioural aspects of this issue, they will be able to develop tools that can have a real impact on society.

By providing people with co-designed tools to verify sources, the Consortium hopes to help them develop a critical approach to news online and to reduce the spread of misinformation on social media.

As recent research and surveys have demonstrated, most people think they can differentiate between true and false news and that they could not be easily deceived by trolls, bots, and ‘fake news’. Co-Inform Consortium wants people to understand that believing in false news is however not that uncommon, especially since everyone can, nowadays, be a victim of native advertising and of disinformation campaigns specifically targeted at their social media user’s profile.

Co-creation workshops: the methodology

The concept of co-creation is different from the more traditional push and pull approaches, as it implies that different parties ‘create’ something together, instead of one part developing something for the other one to use (push-approach) or expressing a clear request or need to the other (pull-approach).  When parties are expected to create together, they must be equal partners with a similar level of resources and speak a common language towards a shared goal or value. The ideal contexts for this co-creation process to emerge are test-beds. The purpose of a test-bed is to create a shared arena in which digital services, processes, and new ways of working can be developed and tested with user representatives in a real-world context. A test bed is therefore active in stimulating increased innovation with the public sector, the business and with opening academic research.