Gov/en/Portal:R&D/Living-Labs
💡 In simple words: This page is about real places where people try out new ideas together.
🎯 In 20 seconds (scientific summary): Living Labs are real-world research environments where WikiDeal's economic and governance models would be observed, tested and refined. The anchor is the Ecopol Living Lab, linked to the European Network of Living Labs, complemented by thematic labs (payments, AI, legal, commons) producing observations, syntheses and pilot proposals for Open Calls.
| Network | European Network of Living Labs |
| Anchor | Ecopol Living Lab |
| Outputs | Reports · Pilots · Blog |
| Content | Human + AI-assisted |
| Themes | Payments · AI · Legal · Commons |
New economic models rarely fail on paper; they fail when real people use them. That is why WikiDeal's research aims to happen where users actually live and exchange: a family testing a childcare contract, a community sharing energy, a market stall accepting Karma tokens. Living Labs are designed to capture that lived complexity, with the users themselves as co-researchers, rather than reducing it to a sanitized laboratory setting.
What Living Labs are
WikiDeal's Living Labs are intended as research environments where the platform's economic and governance models are observed, tested, and refined in real-world conditions. The term "living" is deliberate: these are not controlled laboratory experiments but dynamic, organic environments where real users engage with real services under real conditions, and the research captures that complexity rather than sanitising it. The approach follows the broader living lab methodology developed in European research.
Ecopol Living Lab
The anchor Living Lab is Ecopol, a sustainable community project that operates as WikiDeal's primary pilot environment. The community is a member of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), a network dedicated to research and development in the context of social innovation. This membership gives WikiDeal's research outputs formal recognition within the European research community. Ecopol provides a multi-service context (food, energy, mobility, care, education) where multiple WikiDeal User Groups can be tested simultaneously, and where interactions between service domains can be observed.
The Ecopol Living Lab publishes regular reports on platform performance, governance experiences, and community dynamics. These reports are written by human researchers, by community members, by AI-assisted synthesis tools, and by hybrid processes, always with full disclosure of the authoring method. The reports feed directly into the Open Call process, providing empirical evidence for proposals.
Thematic Living Labs
In addition to Ecopol, WikiDeal intends to run thematic Living Labs focused on specific research questions. Illustrative and planned themes include: Transactions, Payments, and Crypto (exploring solutions including GNU Taler, Deblock, and CHF stablecoins for at-cost payment processing); AI Strategies (monitoring and evaluating AI tools for cooperative platform management); Contract Law and Free Legal Resources (developing free-licensed legal templates for new jurisdictions); Commons Communities (studying governance models from Ostromian commons, platform cooperatives, and DAOs); Legal Watch (monitoring regulatory developments relevant to cooperative platforms, including FINMA sandbox rules); and Time Banks and Alternative Currencies (exploring how Karma tokens and Rewards could interoperate with other community currency systems).
Each Living Lab would produce three types of output: observations (what is happening), synthesis (what it means), and pilot proposals (what to try next). The pilot proposals feed into the Open Calls, keeping the research agenda practically grounded so that Living Lab findings directly influence the platform's evolution.
Who does what
- Community members live the experiments and document what they observe.
- Professional researchers provide methods, synthesis and quality control.
- AI-assisted tools help with synthesis, always with disclosed authorship.
- The Open Call process receives pilot proposals and turns findings into platform improvements.
The Living Lab as democratic science
WikiDeal's Living Labs are guided by the principle that the people being researched should also be researchers. Community members at Ecopol and in User Groups would be trained in basic research methods (observation, documentation, analysis) and contribute their findings alongside professional researchers. This democratises knowledge production, a direct expression of WikiDeal's aim of citizen participation, and helps research findings reflect lived experience rather than only external observation.
See also: R&D Portal · Open Calls · User Groups