Digital Active Community
Core Objectives
- Collect, curate and create digital content: Research and organize high quality digital content about outdoor and indoor recreational activities and infrastructures for physical exercise as a basis to more effectively and efficiently inform and inspire people for more movement and exercise in urban areas.
- Develop an open digital data infrastructure framework: Organize the provision of all relevant information about recreational activities and opportunities for physical exercise in urban areas and make them easily accessible as open data, using open standards and interfaces to enable third party innovation and to increase outreach.
- Develop a digital community platform: Provide a social content and networking platform that can be used to publish, find and share information on recreational activities and opportunities for physical exercise in urban areas, including tools that enable people to organize joint activities
Measures, Methods & Approaches
- Collaborate with universities, city management organisations and stakeholders, who organise recreational activities or operate and promote infrastructures for physical exercise in urban areas to collect, curate and create digital contents featuring stories, activities and infrastructures as a basis to provide high quality digital information through different channels.
- Research and evaluate open data standards, interfaces and technologies in the area of recreational activities and infrastructures for physical exercise to develop recommendations for data types, data structures, interface specifications and data hub technologies that could be utilised to provide open access to relevant data through a structured open digital data infrastructure.
- Develop intuitive digital applications that enable people to easily access, contribute and share information on recreational activities and opportunities for physical exercise in urban areas and implement triggers that nudge and motivate people to move more.
Opportunities & Challenges
- The digital transformation has already changed how people access, process and share information. More people than ever before can potentially be reached through digital channels at low cost. This opens up great opportunities for communication and the provision of convenient access to information and stories that inspire people for physical exercise and support them to establish healthy habits through frequent movement.
- Although a lot of information on recreational activities and opportunities for physical activities in urban areas already exists, it is still a major challenge to make them easily accessible in a structured way. Data often lacks the level of detail required and expected by users of digital applications or is simply not yet available in digital format, not findable or even locked away and consequently cannot reach people.
Lessons learnt
- In collaboration with the University of Applied Sciences Munich it was found that convenient access to stories, which include detailed information on recreational activities and opportunities for physical exercise presented can be a great means to inspire people to get active.
- Close collaborations between city management, universities and other stakeholders with a shared mission to actively change and improve the status quo with regard to the availability of information on recreational activities and opportunities for physical exercise can quickly lead to profound results. As demonstrated by the results of the collaboration between Outdooractive and the University of Applied Sciences Munich, great inspirational digital content to promote physical exercise can be easily created using digital tools that already exist and it can immediately add value, for example by inspiring international students and other people to explore the skate parks or the city districts of Munich by foot or bike.
Recommendations to the world
Convenience wins. The more convenient it is for people to start recreational activities and to take up opportunities for physical exercise, the more likely movement will actually happen. While attractive physical infrastructures in urban environments constitute the foundation for movement, it is equally important to provide convenient access to digital information about recreational activities and opportunities for physical exercise and to reach out to people to inspire them for movement. This can only be achieved with a joint effort. A shared vision for an open digital data infrastructure for recreational activities and opportunities for physical exercise can be a sound basis to spark innovation and to create a sustainable impact for more movement and healthier populations in urban areas.
Need more information?
If you are interested in this topic in general or the project in particular, please feel free to contact us or to inform yourself about our Digital Active Community.
Experimental Scenarios
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