A participatory and cross-media approach to civic engagement: the experience from Medialab UGR

A participatory and cross-media
approach to civic engagement: the
experience from Medialab UGR
Photo by Denys Nevozhai on Unsplash

Research Laboratory for Digital Culture and Society
MediaLab UGR
@MedialabUGR
Directorate of Participation and Social Innovation

http://medialab.ugr.es/what-is-ugr-medialab/

Medialab UGR
Medialab UGR - Laboratory for the Research of Culture and Digital Society (http://medialab.ugr.es/) is a
lab created in 2015 within the Vice-Rectorate for Research and Knowledge Transfer at the University of
Granada. Medialab is a meeting place for the analysis, research, and dissemination of the possibilities that
digital technologies create in the culture and the society in general. It develops its activities in different
University spaces around the city, as well as in other places that do not belong to the institution. This
distributed concept mirrors the way the Lab develops projects in the internet and connects different
nodes of knowledge. It maintains ﬂuid relationships with other institutions at a local, regional and
national level.

Why social innovation labs?
A social innovation laboratory is an instrument to think together with an
experimentation and prototyping approach, combining reﬂection and
orientation to action, thinking openly about our communities with awareness
of the global, with the aim of generating responses to the complex challenges of
our time, whether in neighborhoods, in public institutions, in companies, in
organizations in general, in society as a whole.

Our social context
● Uncertainty: managing ignorance and multiple knowledge.
● Need to strengthen democracy: participation and the institutional.
● Connections on multiple dimensions: physical and digital; reconﬁguration
of vertical and horizontal relations.
● Integration of multiple forms of intelligence to create stronger institutions:
collective, expert, algorithmic, political intelligence.
● Commitment to the local and the global.
● Ethics of care.

Labs
Laboratories can be understood as:
● Institutions. For example: Medialab UGR, LAAAB or Medialab Prado.
● Projects. For example, those resulting from a speciﬁc call for laboratories.
● Attitude, methodology, philosophy.
Types of laboratories:
● Citizen laboratories.
● Government laboratories / Govlabs.
● Living Labs.
● Fablabs / Makerspaces / Medialabs / Hacklabs.
● Other types of social laboratories.

Our values
● Proactivity and oriented towards action. From consumer to prosumer but
within a citizen perspective.
● Culture of participation and care.
● Diversity and inclusiveness.
● Digital culture.
● Open source projects.
● Local action and global connection. Scalability.
● Different types of knowledge.
● Way of learning: process and results go hand in hand.
● Documentation of the process as part of the learning.
● Cooperation versus competition.

Reference
ROMERO FRÍAS, E., & ROBINSON-GARCÍA,
N. (2017). “Social Labs in Universities:
Innovation and impact in Medialab UGR”.
Comunicar, 51 (2017-2).
https://www.revistacomunicar.com/index.ph
p?contenido=preimpreso&doi=10.3916%2FC
51-2017-03&idioma=en

Medialab UGR projects
Medialab UGR award
http://medialab.ugr.es/what-is-ugr-medialab/

https://facultadcero.org
How to
redesign higher
education?

Facultad Cero
This course the Universities have had to transform their teaching in a very few days into a completely
virtual model due to the lockdown imposed by COVID-19. This has allowed a multitude of teaching
experiences and innovations in the digital ﬁeld to emerge on a scale unthinkable just a few months ago.
The 2020/21 academic year will in all probability maintain a mixed model between virtual and
face-to-face teaching, so it is inevitable that we ask ourselves: how do we design the next course?
In response to this, we launched the Facultad Cero (Zero Faculty) initiative, the objective of which is to
generate a digital space to share experiences and organize virtual meetings to learn from the hundreds
of teaching innovations that have been developed in recent months. Facultad Cero places the university
faculty as protagonists in this process in order to collect and exchange experiences, both positive and
negative, as well as recommendations and proposals. All of this aims to constitute a shared and dialogical
learning process that allows generating knowledge in the most diverse ﬁelds of university education:
teaching resources, digital platforms and tools, evaluation, emotion management, organization of
activities, etc.

Facultad Cero
All universities that wish to participate in this initiative, as well as all faculty who individually wish to do
so, are called upon to participate. We also wanto to hear the voices of the students.
The values of this project are: innovation, openness, collaboration, critical thinking, and a clearly
proactive and constructive approach.
Two main characteristics:
● Bottom-up approach to complement the institutional approach.
● Participatory approach.

Facultad Cero Conference at UGR

Facultad Cero Conference at UGR
https://facultadcero.org/encuentrougr/

Facultad Cero Dialogues Program

Facultad Cero Dialogues Program
https://facultadcero.org/estudiantes/

Facultad Cero Workshop Program
https://facultadcero.org/talleres/

Facultad Cero Laboratories
https://facultadcero.org/talleres/

UGR en casa || UGR at home
LabIN #UGRenCasa is an initiative of the University of Granada in order to create a meeting space for the
university community and citizens in order to:
● propose ideas to live better during these weeks of lockdown; and
● share experiences on how this crisis has affected our lives and what we can learn from it for the
future.
You can follow us on Twitter @medialabugr and @UGRenCasa, where we will collect everything that is
published with this hashtag #UGRenCasa; as well as through Instagram @ medialabugr.
You can also send us your audios or videos through the public channel on Telegram #UGRenCasa or send
us an email to ugrencasa@labingranada.org.

Knowmetrics Network
The Knowmetrics Network for Digital Social Sciences and Humanities is a network with an academic
focus aimed at giving visibility and recognition to these emerging lines of research. Through the
RAQMYAT project it is extended to the French-speaking community. It is an open, independent and free
network whose objective is to give visibility to the work of the academic community in the area
of Digital Humanities in order to enhance the value of research through digital media and encourage
collaborations. It combines two approaches:
● Traditional approach, fundamentally quantitative and focused on contributions in classic formats:
article, book, etc. Google Scholar has been taken as a benchmark so that a researcher, having a
profile on this network, can automatically incorporate their contributions and metrics.
● Digital approach, so that each researcher can upload digital artifacts describing and visualizing
their work. It also allows the inclusion of profiles of other non-scientific digital networks,
particularly Twitter.
The network generates a global map that allows researchers and their projects to be geolocated.

Key issues
● Organizational culture: Working Out Loud
● Synergies
● Constancy
● User orientation
● Cross-Media Communication

Cross-media
Communication and Dissemination

OK, so that’s how this story
started...

Digital Territories Conference

Hacker ethics
Openness
Transparency
Autonomy
Equality
Horizontality
Excellence
Self-demand
Civic and citizen

Hacker Culture
Prosumers
Producing ←→ Consuming

Communication strategy in an
environment of fragmented
audiences → Trying to reach the
audience through multiple
channels

Some impact and engagement
metrics

Since 2016…
1,052 suscribers
+ 66,700 visualizations
+ 8,000 hours
+ 570,000 impressions

Last example: innovation labs 2020

We were connected
but now we have to re-connect

Thanks for your attention!
medialab.ugr.es
https://medialab.ugr.es/what-is-ugr-medialab/

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