DAY 45: The Power of Sharing, the City is a Playground

By Mohamed Rahmo, Casablanca, Marocco, 1 October 2017

The Day of Learning is a result of many brainstorming sessions we had to take to choose to combine it with the project we designed in the beginning, and we shared in this sense the proposal: “The city is a playground”.

As a result, we developed an alpha version of the platform to gather knowledge, the kind we don’t find in books. And in order to make it easy for people, we developed a crowd map, in which you can share knowledge only by pressing one button: RECORD.

This is what we started doing during the Day of Learning Casablanca, and this is our story.

We sent the first proposal to the team of the Age of wonderland after sharing interest to be part of the project of this year, which is making 100 Days of Learning all over the world.

I had the first course with the Age of Wonderland last year 2016 during the design week, where the artist’s exhibition and project of the residency was “Big Data big Data”. I was impressed by the quality of the project and the artistic and creative side that gather very special profile. And I really hoped that someday we will share something with those people.

As an NGO, madNess works a lot on data and how it can serve the creativity and the society in general. So since we started officially this year we are trying to kick off a project with the name of “The city is a playground” where people especially creatives and artists but not just professionals can storytell about the city and gather infinite knowledge.

The Day of Learning theme of the year matched at 100% our way of doing things which is finding knowledge and wisdom as they call it in places where it’s not supposed to be or where books doesn’t really care about it.

We sent the proposal and we got a positive answer, it was really a great feeling, so we started brainstorming on how the Day of Learning should be, the value we have chosen around sharing. Our Day of Learning is called: “Day of Learning: The power of sharing, the city is a playground”.

Here in our country people don’t like to read, and don’t like to write, so the idea was how we can gather knowledge and wisdom from people without making them write? The first challenge is answered by the platform, with one button, press record, pick the location and then release the knowledge…

We thought of applying crowdsourcing and stories about:

- Why streets have different new names compared to the original ones in Morocco?

- How we share directions in Morocco?

- What were the games we play?

- How we pick names for people?

Those are the kind of knowledge we don’t find stored anywhere, so the launch was really smooth and people understood what we were doing even if no one knew about the crowdsourcing map we were building.

We set up the entire process, we made a beautiful poster, date, time, and we communicated about the event online, on social media.

During the D day people interacted positively with the concept, and more questions raised:

● Why we have so many marabou?

● Where the lyrics come from to the popular songs?

● What are the legends and fairytales in Morocco about?

● What is our relationship with sugar?

● Why we do tea this way?

● What we used to play as kids?

● How we can store the geographical data?

● What are the stories of places and space?

● Tell me a story about thieves?

● What are the different interpretations of the number 7?

After discussing the different subjects, participants shared their interpretations, explanations, remarks, questioning on the platform. Then we discussed how to use the map itself to pin different kind of knowledge linked to the city, from mobility to different monuments.

The follow up was collecting 100 materials to share knowledge in the platform.