Overview

The challenge "M-Volunteer" is a follow-up to the "Capacity Finder" challenge. As a component of the City of Munich's "Digitalisation Radar", the goals of the capacity finder are to promote community as well as inclusion and participation within the city's society. One aspect of this is the promotion of voluntary work in cooperation with various incorporated associations in Munich.

Problem

Currently, the City of Munich is asking itself how it could promote short-term voluntary work better to support incorporated associations in their contribution to promoting the community. Initiatives such as "Munich says thank you" and the Bavarian Volunteer Card already support people that commit long-term to institutions such as the voluntary fire brigade, rescue services and other emergency services and thus contribute to public recognition of their work. However, short-term voluntary workers in particular are needed in many places, e.g. to support events or to help out in social institutions.

The problem doesn't seem to be a lack of motivation on the part of the citizens, but the organisation. Citizens who would like to volunteer often seem to lack access to the necessary information, e.g. how and where exactly they can get involved, and the institutions, mostly incorporated associations, are lacking a platform where they could publish their offers.

Within the capacity finder, the "scarce resource" of volunteer work is now to be made visible and accessible to the city's society. It was the task of several students of the Munich University of Applied Sciences to find a feasible solution for the City of Munich with the support of their professor and the DTLab.

Procedure

M-Volunteer is based on the challenge "Finding and inventing capacities" from the winter semester 2019/2020, in which new ideas for the capacity finder were developed using the innovation method "Working Backwards". Two of the resulting ideas were then merged, detailed and prototypically implemented. As in the first challenge, the innovation method "Working Backwards" was used again.

From the feedback round of the first capacity finder challenge, two key questions were addressed:

• "Where and how can citizens find out about opportunities for voluntary work?"
• "How could the City of Munich promote voluntary work?"

With M-Volunteer, the solution proposed by the student team, associations are to be enabled to publicise offers for volunteer work. Furthermore it allows citizens to collect points (so-called "M-Points" with each voluntary commitment, which could then be exchanged for a certain number of city services. Offers from the city would be, for example, free museum or MVG tickets.

Innovation in action

With the support of Amazon Web Services the prototype was implemented as a web application. Generally available technologies such as vue.js as well as AWS-specific services such as AWS Amplify were used. The prototype was presented via a role play staged by the student team during the online presentation of the project for the challenge partner, the City of Munich.

Next steps

The presentation of the results was very well received. The combination of voluntary commitment and reward mechanisms still raises a number of questions though, including the role that the City of Munich can and wants to play here. In addition, the project's target group, the associations, still needs to be included. Here, too, the role and task of the City of Munich need to be clarified, e.g. what incentives could be created for the associations to make use of the offer.