B5 Bachelor Berlin for Future

Our group was tasked by the Berlin Senate with creating two concepts to encourage climate conscious behaviour in students and young people alike. Consequently, this is not just a programming project we’re embarked on this semester.

Thus, our project does not only consist of features, but also of:

• climate situation analysis
• target group, literature, market and app research
• survey and focus group interviews
• idea visualisation
• concept presentation for the Berlin Senate
• implementation

As specified by the Berlin Senate, we were to target students specifically. With this in mind, we focused our research on the needs, wishes and constraints of fellow students.

Our research and survey have revealed, among other things, that the respondents representing our target group of Berlin students want to live more climate friendly and get involved, mostly with the principal motive to leave a livable earth behind. To make this possible the students would most likely adapt their everyday lives, engage in climate communities and access information.

BUT the respondents

• don’t have a lot of free time to engage ecologically
• barely ever use print media for information, but rather digital media, especially social media
• don’t know many approaches to take action that are compatible with their limitations
• find it difficult to quickly access required information

With the results in mind, we needed to focus our work on specific goals to be able to cater to our target group’s needs.

The resulting goals are:

• Providing information To solve the problem of lacking information and the speed with which one could get access to it, our first goal is to provide information. While providing information is a relatively simple task, we wanted to make sure people would find it interesting and engaging enough to keep coming back for more content without feeling overwhelmed by long texts. Thus, we decided to add a gamification elements.
• Supporting networking As our survey shows, there is quite a number of students willing to take action themselves, but they lack the time or means of easily finding communities in which they can participate. Therefore, our second goal is to connect numerous Berlin based organisations and communities with students and vice versa.

The concept that supports networking

Community Finder is a central and collective digital platform to connect those who are interested in the climate situation and are ready to take action. It is also a platform for climate initiatives, communities and organisations seeking to get more young people involved in their cause.

What makes Community Finder special

Our Community Finder concept is distinguished from other event or community finding programs because it focuses especially on the climate protection mission. Instead of a long search through a comprehensive database, which contains various entries of all kinds of categories, this app concentrates only on events and communities that support climate protection.

It turned out in our survey and interviews that even though our respondents are very interested in saving our planet, they also have very little time and want to participate mostly in events that are not too far away from their own location. Thus, our app offers the possibility to quickly find communities and events using filters and sorting algorithms.

It also turned out that our respondents would most likely contact a community via social media or mail. This led us to the functionality of including not only mail and phone as contact details for a community but also Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts as well as the community website.

It’s also very important to mention that our app is usable by everyone and it’s not necessary to initialize an account to discover the details of upcoming events or local communities. An account brings the advantage of being possible to create new communities or events online and is necessary to avoid that everyone can upload random events.

We also considered that some people may pay attention to the participant number of an event. An account makes it possible to increase the event participant number and to store entries of the app to access them later.

Existing alternatives

• Meetup
• Volunteermatch
• München Coolcity
• SPOYU, Spontacts
• Nebenan.de
• Facebook
• Zwopr

Implementation

We chose to implement Community Finder as a web app with the following features:

• Newsfeed with all climate related events in Berlin
• Newsfeed with all (local) climate related communities
• Search functionality to find a community or event for a certain category like food, mobility, second hand and waste, a specific Berlin district, or at a specific time
• Sorting functionality to order all events depending on the date it will occur or upload date
• Detailed information on communities including the name, an extensive description and the logo
• Digital contact possibilities, including the social media accounts and website of the community
• Detailed information on events including the name, an extensive description, a descriptive image, the date, the location and the participant number
• Opportunity for communities to create a representation on the platform using a form
• Opportunity to create new events for people to participate in using a form
• Registration/Login to create events or communities

Business model

In order to check if a new community or event really fits with the concept of climate protection, a solution can be to have different user roles like admin and editor.

An admin could check if a certain new community or event should be uploaded on the platform or not and send a confirmation to the creator of that entry that it was successfully uploaded or not. However, an editor could vice versa request the admin to upload an event or a community.

This process could also be handled that checks if certain terms are contained or not contained in the fields of the community or event creation form. We thought about giving some students the admin rights or doing that by ourselves. We also thought about cooperating with another platform like nebenan.de which could take over the maintenance of our platform.

The concept that provides information

Quiz focuses mainly on providing information about climate-friendly everyday decisions. Therefore, the content of this concept is categorized into the sections trash, household, travel and shopping, which were the most inquired of our survey respondents. Each category contains several quizzes and an information part.

What makes Quiz special

Our survey and research revealed that the two biggest challenges of our respondents to get involved in the climate protection mission is missing knowledge about approaches how to act climate-friendly and the lack of time.

At first, we had the idea to solve this with an information app, which enables to get the kind of information for a certain topic (like Berlin public transport) of a category (like travel) without a lot of detours and research through a separation into the sections “general info”, “apps”, “links”.

At this point, our idea was pretty similar to the climate savings book idea of the Berlin Senate, which is a digital book informing about climate-friendly everyday measures. In order to adapt our idea to make it more contemporary, student addressing and less consumption stimulating than the coupon part of the climate savings book we extended our concept with the quiz part, which opens up a new way of getting information for a certain topic.

In contrast to other (climate) quizzes, this concept and its included questions are specialized on the lifestyle of students and on offering solutions that are directly applicable in everyday life by every one of us instead of general information.

Consequently, we have on the one hand the information part, which makes it possible to get particular information fast and on the other hand the quiz, which supports becoming more conscious about a certain climate related topic.

Existing alternatives

• Quizduell
• München Coolcity - Klimaquiz
• NABU Klimaquiz
• Quizizz

Implementation

We chose to implement Quiz as a Figma prototype with the following features:

• Every day tips
• Categorized content, for now in 4 categories: trash, household, travel, shopping
• Quizzes on different topics and useful information to each topic
• Information contains detailed information about a certain category separated into general (every day tips), links and apps (useful articles and applications)
• Search for information on a specific topic
• Points system for correct answers
• Review the result of every quiz to learn from the mistakes

Business model

In order to generate permanently new content for the app, we thought about asking for a collaboration with editors. Another possibility that we see is that users themselves can upload the questions and information.

Consequently, it would be necessary to check that new content for correctness, which can be done by admins. It can also be done by asking other users to check new questions. E.g. if a question was confirmed 5 times it can be uploaded in a quiz.