Transcription

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Welcome to the Efus podcast, a podcast produced by the European Forum for Urban Security in collaboration with the IcARUS project, Innovative Approaches to Urban Security. I'm Elizabeth Johnston, the Executive Director of Efus, the European network of 250 local and regional authorities dedicated to urban security policies. I'm very glad today to be joined by Eleonora Fiori, Project Manager, City of Turin, and Ravinithesh Annapureddy, Researcher at IDIAP. Research Institute and EPFL. Welcome, Eleonora.

• Eleonora Fiore

  Thank you.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  And welcome, Ravinithesh.

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  Thank you, Elizabeth.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Today, we'll learn more about how the city of Turin seeks to better coordinate people and organizations working on youth delinquency through a digital platform set up with the support of IDIAP in the framework of the Icarus Project. To start off, Eleonora, can you tell us a little bit more about what issues you were trying to address when you conceived the Spocamo Torino Tool?

• Eleonora Fiore

  In the last years, in the city of Turin, there has been a great increase in the attention given by crimes committed by young people. It became a media trend. Actually, we realized that the city's attention was more on the newspaper superficial narration and not so much on understanding more in-depth the phenomenon and collecting the relative data. So let's say that our main issue was the fact that we didn't know what the issue with juvenile delinquency was in the city of Turin. And it was just a concern for policymakers, for society. And we realized that we needed first more information about it and then more comprehensive policies that would promote inclusion and prevent social, economic and political marginalization of youth.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  So what did you set up to gather this evidence and to use this evidence?

• Eleonora Fiore

  Well, we created a committee of stakeholders with different backgrounds. They were both from the private sector and the public sector. And they did. didn't all work with juvenile delinquency issues, but they did all work with youngsters. So in this way, they were gathering data. We helped them collect more data or more useful data and to share them together on a platform so that we could all benefit from it. And most of all, we could have more policies based on data.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  So this is where Ravinithesh comes in and IDIAP. You supported the city of Turin in establishing this platform, right?

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  Yes, that's correct. We worked with the city of Turin and the stakeholders together to co-design this tool.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  In your opinion, how does data sharing improve decision making?

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  Firstly, visual representations like charts, heat maps, or graphs can make larger data sets easy to interpret by showing the trends, outliers, or correlations among the data sets. Then also displaying this data set and making the same information available to all stakeholders. will give a shared understanding of the problem to everyone because everybody has a different view of the same problem. At the same time, this also promotes openness, accountability, as decisions are made based on evidence. And then visual data makes it easier to communicate between different stakeholders when dealing with complex problems, such as prevention of juvenile delinquency in this case, not only to the other stakeholders in the committee, but also to a broader set of audience who are probably not part in this field. And lastly, it will also allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your decisions you have taken in the past and improve them for the future.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  One thing that's always surprised me is how much data people have, stakeholders have, without knowing it sometimes. Did you find that as well, Lenora?

• Eleonora Fiore

  Yes. Our stakeholders are of very different kinds. For example, we had religious organizations, we have the prisoners'guarantor office, and social services, schools. So... Some of them are actually very used to collect data and they know what is the data that is more important to collect, while some others not. So maybe religious organizations actually focus on different information that might look not that useful for us, but it is also important to know why they're collecting this data. So the reason behind it, what they're seeing when they check this data. So we had to work together and we still are working together to understand what. actually can we collect, what can we look for, what is the information that is more necessary to think about possible policies.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Do you think some of the stakeholders were surprised by the amount of relevant data that they actually had to contribute?

• Eleonora Fiore

  Yes, for sure. At first, I think they were also scared. of the amount of work, but we were able to let them know that we will help them. It was a training in the end. I think they saw also all the benefits from it.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  So, Ravinithesh, you did talk about sharing data, but also about data literacy and trying to analyze together this huge new amount of data that was produced. Can you tell us a little bit more how you went about that training process as well?

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  As we know, the tool is also about collaboratively producing interventions together with all the stakeholders to prevent the juvenile delinquency. One of the biggest tasks in using the tool is this collaborative data analysis, which is also called participatory data analysis. To go about the training part, first we have conducted a pre-test to understand the data literacy levels of the participants and what their understanding of data is. We have not only asked them about their own data, but we also asked them about the data from the others. The training process involved six steps after the pre-assessment, which was to understand their own data, then to communicate to the others about their own data. And then the next process involved many groups of people collaboratively analyzing small pieces of data. And then the last step was all of them coming together to analyze data collectively together. And this way, we repeated this in a couple of iterations for all of them to have a shared understanding of the problem. And then they started. thinking about the solutions or potential interventions possible. This was not only part of the training but this also became part of the tool because they have to collaboratively do this process to keep on having the same understanding of the problem. And then later at the end we also conducted a post-assessment to understand how their understanding and how their literacy levels have changed.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Since we're not looking at individual information, what we're really looking at are trends, right, Eleonora? Trends about juvenile delinquency in Turin and about the responses.

• Eleonora Fiore

  Yes, we're interested in just the trends, whether it would be about the neighborhoods or about school dropouts. So what is the difference between one school and the other one? Where do we have more public parks where youngsters can hang out? Where do we have theaters and so on? So this is a very interesting, I think, data trend that can be mixed with the data shared by each stakeholder.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  So there's a strong visual aspect. Is that right? To the platform with a lot of maps?

• Eleonora Fiore

  Yes, I think this actually being more visual, it makes it easier for those who are not actually the use to work with data. And I can also bring myself into this group of people. So it is actually more easy to understand, to use colors, to use different charts. And sometimes the stakeholders, of course, they usually work with people and not with data, let's say. This is what got their attention some more. And this is also what helped us probably also have them happy to work with data, to share this data.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  How did you find the platform helped with community engagement?

• Eleonora Fiore

  The platform or maybe the committees Sbocciamo Torino helped more with community engagement because we realized that sometimes these stakeholders didn't even know what the other stakeholder was doing, what was happening in the other neighborhood and what activities were carried out by the city or by the religious organization or by the scouts group or whatever actually. We had to do a big big work of just trying to find out what was happening in the city, who was working with youngsters, and what types actually. And to bring them all together, it was actually a very enriching experience because they wanted to collaborate with each other. They wanted to have more activities. They find out that they were working maybe on the same neighborhood or in the same group of people. So this was very nice to see.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  So the project really had both physical and digital outcomes.

• Eleonora Fiore

  Yes, absolutely. Most of our stakeholders... work just on the physical layer. So they were very used with the physical outcome. And then the platform, we integrated this new feature, this new digital feature, this possibility to share data and to talk with data and to communicate and to find solution using data.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Ravinithesh, what surprised you most coming from IDIAP when you started working with all of these stakeholders who are, as you say, had varying levels of... digital literacy?

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  Firstly, we all recognize the importance of stakeholder collaboration. The journey through Turin makes us realize that it's not as easy as it's said, because each stakeholder has their own line of work, has their own line of analysis to approach the problem. However, the need for collaboration is asking when they all understand that it's the same problem that they are trying to solve through different mechanisms.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  I think that combination of lived experience and evidence through hard data is really difficult, but... Very, very precious, as you say, Ravinithesh. Were people surprised, Eleonora, when you presented the results? And by people, I mean the stakeholders, but also the administration and local elected officials in Turin.

• Eleonora Fiore

  The tool is very young. I think that it is needed more technical time to see actually. the outcome so we still do not have any let's say successful stories or just successful outcomes or public policies that came from the tool but certainly in the last meeting of the committee was very successful the fact that we had all the stakeholders and the deputy mayors they were involved and they were agreeing to use these methodologies specifically to focus on one specific aspect connected to juvenile delinquency. So for example, decided to work on the abuse of alcohol, drugs, psychotropic drugs. For us, this is a confirmation of the validity of the tool.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Is this tool enable you to zoom in on certain subtopics that are very concrete within the big issue of juvenile delinquency?

• Eleonora Fiore

  Yes. We realized that we had to focus on some specific topic because otherwise the topic of juvenile delinquency would be too wide for us to be able to work.

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  I want to draw back our attention to the process of tool development. This is one of the important outcomes of the participatory process that we have followed in designing the tool. As Eleonora mentioned, we embarked on this journey using the border order theme of preventing juvenile delinquency. However, our participatory sessions, which are like a design thinking workshop or a prototyping session with the stakeholders, made us realize that they all have different priorities and they all have different opinions of the same topic at different time. based on what their current work entails. So we also made changes to the design of the tool where every meeting has a different theme. Based on this feedback, we also have made changes to the tool where the tool currently requires to set up an agenda based on a theme that is selected together with all the stakeholders.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Super interesting. Can you give us an example of one of the changes that were made thanks to the participatory meetings?

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  One of the important changes that we brought through the design process, through the participation of the stakeholders, was the aspect of involving supporting members in the committee. The stakeholders have quickly pointed out that the difficulties are their lack of expertise in analyzing data or having a sociological view of the problem during the prototyping session. And then we went back and redesigned the tool to create a support system along with the project coordinator. Now there will be a data scientist and a sociologist as part of the supporting committee. And that would take off the load of having to analyze the data or having to have a sociological perspective on it.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Many of our cities have coalitions of different stakeholders. Very few have the data visualization support. So I think this is a really innovative and huge added value. Can you tell us a little bit more about the collaboration between the two of you also? Well,

• Eleonora Fiore

  the collaboration between the city of Turin and IDIAP. was essential for the success of this tool. We worked a lot together. We collaborated a lot. We had weekly calls with Ravinithesh, but it was actually necessary to have this great tool. We had to understand together what was the data that we was going to have into this platform, what were the stakeholders that we were going to engage with, how would the policy template look like. So it was a communication that was just building week by week. It was nice to see this tool come in and take just form by this daily collaboration.

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  It's important to have a common frequency of language between two organizations that are working for a common goal. In this case, it was important for me to understand the sociological and also the collaborative aspect from the city of Turin along with Eleonora. And at a personal level, It reinforced my belief in the communication and enforced my belief in establishing the human connection and empathizing with the users, which is a long process, than developing something quickly on a computer and giving it to them.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  You both talked about how difficult it was to find a common language between the digital and the physical. but also between stakeholders. You were mentioning, Elenora, of different fields working together towards a common goal. So thank you very much for sharing your expertise and your insights on how this type of tool can really support us. What would be your advice or your key findings that you would like to share with cities that face the same sort of issues and that are interested in this solution?

• Eleonora Fiore

  For me, the advice that I will give would be to actually communicate with the different stakeholders to gather a group of valid stakeholders that work. within the city, the work with the youngsters or with the population that you're more interesting in and to make them participate, to make them actually build this tool together with you and with the policy makers.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Ravinithesh, what would be your words of wisdom for cities with the same issues?

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  One of the things that we would suggest from our side is to have clearly defined rules and outline the contributions or what each stakeholder should contribute. in the decision-making process and setting up this tool. In addition, by providing supporting members like the data scientists or sociologists, in our case, you take off this burden of having these technical capabilities on non-experts because they are not experts in analyzing data, but they are experts in their own field of public health or security. Then on the practical side, I would also suggest to have regular communications with the stakeholders. And then the other important thing is to involving them in participatory processes. not only at the final stage where they have to meet, but through the whole journey of defining the problem, brainstorming the solution and co-designing it so that at the end, the tool not only reflects the needs and the values of the community that they're part of, but also it will have an wide acceptance among the community.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  Thank you to both of you.

• Ravinithesh Anaparedi

  Thank you, Elizabeth.

• Eleonora Fiore

  Thank you, Elizabeth.

• Elizabeth Johnston

  And thank you to our audience for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this episode, which was produced in the framework of the IcARUS Project, funded by the European Commission. We look forward to sharing more insights and discussions with you in the future, so don't forget to subscribe to this podcast and visit our website. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Efus podcast.