Overview

The partner of this challenge, the City of Munich, has big plans for the future. One of its main goals is the digitalisation of all current administrative processes. Currently, long waiting hours, missed deadlines for documents and an unbalanced workload are the biggest challenges for hte organization. In addition to that, the City would like to offer its citizens a better access to what is offered within its community. There seem to be a lot of scattered and unused resources that could – if the offers would be structured well - build a better connected and stronger community within the city. These resources range from free day care spots to language support or an exchange of craft skills between neighbors.

Problem

So far, the problem was that these non-administrative resources had not been documented anywhere in a well-organised way yet. Neither does a digital solution for the administrative processes exist . To solve these problems, the City of Munich has to find out, what exactly is on offer, where is it offered and what exactly the citizens need. In addition to that, it has to find ways to motivate the people to take part in what is offered online.

Approach

With the help of Amazon Web Services, the students launched a brainstorming event to come up with proper solutions for the problems stated above. They started with the „Crazy-Eight-Ideation“-method, that helped them to come up with some first ideas that they then tried to structure. After that they made use of the "Working-Backwards"-technique, that involved thinking about the needs and wishes of citizens as well as of the authorities and the City of Munich. That way, they were able to focus on three final ideas – each team came up with one main idea. These ideas were then specified with the help of a storyboard, a fictious newspaper article, FAQs and a non-digital prototype.

The first team was thinking of creating an online storyboard, the so called „M-Point“. It would allow citizens to post requests and the more often a request would be heard, the higher in a ranking list it would show up. That way the City would be made aware of what its population is currently looking for the most and could react with possible offers.

The second team developed a non-digital prototype for an app they called „Tauschbörse“. The app would make it possible for the citizens of Munich to find people with skills that they were interested in and to offer skills in return. Those requests could be, for example, about wanting to find somebody with painting or building skills and offering to teach a language or how to play an instrument in exchange.

The third team tried to solve the problems of Munich's authorities that were mentioned in the start by creating an app called „Munich Office Reminder“. With the help of the app, Munich's citizens would be able to be reminded in time to renew important documents (e.g. ID-card, travel pass,...), could receive requests for appointments or could up- or download various official forms.

To create the non-digital prototypes, the teams used a video camera and editing software. The different components of the apps were either presented with the help of post-its or the tool „Balsamiq“, that made it possible to present how using the app could possibly look like for the users.

This project was very interesting for all the students, as they were made aware of new and interesting technologies, learned new innovation techniques and got accustomed to the problem-solving process within big organizations. All of this expanded their horizon widely and they would be happy to continue working on their ideas in the future. In addition they are feeling more confident now to use what they learned in possible future jobs.

Next steps

Every team came up with different possible ways tol develop their ideas as well as other future steps.

A possible expanding of the „Munich Reminder“-app could happen through the inclusion of more official documents, functions in other languages or the implementation of different options of control for the City of Munich.

The „M-Point“-team suggested to look out for possible sponsors that would reward the use of their app. In that way the citizens could be motivated to think about various requests that could then be analyzed by the city after posting. In combination with that, a marketing campaign should be planned in order to gather the most amount of users possible. To expand the „M-Point“-app, a job-search-function could be added that would allow users looking for jobs and companies looking for employees in Munich to connect.

The teams stated that in order to transform the projects into proper technical applications, the right kind of AWS service would have to be chosen as well.

There were two follow up challenges in the next semester, M-Wallet and M-Volunteer.

Supporting Documents

The documents created by the students during the challenge can be found here:

• Munich Office Reminder
  • FAQ
  • Press release
  • Storyboard
• M-Point
  • FAQ
  • Press release
• Tauschbörse
  • FAQ
  • Press release