SMARTDEMA KICK-OFF MEETING

As the applicant organisation, Dr. Metin Kozak made the opening session, welcomed all the project partners’ representatives and congratulated them all for the acceptance of the project. The meeting started with partners’ presentations who introduced their organisations – in reference to their project contribution. Timing per each presentation took around 15 minutes.

Firstly, Dr.Kevser Çınar started to introduce her institution and made the first presentation representing Necmettin Erbakan University (NEU). There were 2 persons representing the NEU in the meeting. She shared the history and major monuments of Konya. Then she gave general information about NEU and discussed her previous experience and expertise on EU projects by presenting the recently finished projects of NEU particularly in the area of tourism. Secondly, Daniel Weiss gave the presentation as the Director of Stichting for Education on Agility Liberating Structures from Netherlands. He presented the overall experience and his journey to develop Miro and the way that goes to SMARTDEMA.

Thirdly, Dr. Joumana Boustany made an introduction on behalf of Université Gustave Eiffel by presenting this young and highly growing institution which takes a multidisciplinary approach. She said that they were in the land of Disneyland and they have developed close collaboration with Disneyland. They will contribute to the Project storytelling part how Disneyland convey the message to the audience and the storytelling, which is part of one of the modules of the SMARTDEMA training.

Dr.Nathalie Fabry who is in charge of innovative services from the same institution continued to speak about the opportunities that Université Gustave Eiffel is providing. Foça District National Education Director presented a video of the city.

Michel Mohor presented various activities carried out by National Gallery of Slovenia who is also experienced about digital storytelling. They have equipped around 775 works of art with QR codes of the description of the work that could be used by audio guides into a mobile App.That App enabled interactive quizzes, puzzles so that it's like a gamified guided tour throughout the collection. They have been involved in two European projects. One was called accessibility of cultural heritage for vulnerable groups such as people in wheelchairs, blind people or with visual visual impairments.

Dr. Metin Kozak introduced Dokuz Eylul University (DEU) and the city of Izmir where DEU is located. Following the all the partners’ presentations, the launch of the intellectual outputs and next steps in the Project with the project timeline was presented to all participants. Our first task in terms of IO1 from January to March 2021 is about USERS' NEEDS.

User Needs: We will work on the understanding the "users needs" that will define the App features. Based on the feedback the APP is iterated and the interface improved. A survey will be developed till the end of February with the collaboration of the all partners. Then each partner except will collect data from users based on that survey to be sure the application we will design fit the needs of the user. Why we need that survey is because we are using a principle of design thinking, where we need to understand what is the user’s needs in terms of graphical interface and the design of the App and then we are prototyping a model, which is going to be the part of the iteration process. SEALS has already started to receive some comments from the experts and users to get feedback for user analysis.

The survey will be prepared by Dr. Joumana Boustany, Dr.Kevser Çınar and Daniel Weiss getting the opinions of all the partners. We also invite other researchers in tourism field from different countries and institutions which are not in the Project. Everybody has the right to use their own data to publish a "research paper" about his own country which means what is the user needs in Izmir or what is the user needs need in France. For the participants who would like to be part of the joint comparative research, we will set the rules that need to be followed through the research. Then, Daniel Weiss discussed SMARTDEMA app features and introduced MIRO. He also proposed all the team members to create a communication group (Telegram) to speed interactions only for project implementation.

The Project team arrived at a decision to make all documents accessible through both Google Drive and Miro Board. Daniel Weiss will also collect and upload all official project meetings in the Vimeo channel specific to the project. Then useful information about Financial & Administrative official documents was explained. Each partner has to pay attention to these official documents throughout the project:

Financial & Administrative Documents

-Bilateral Agreements (already signed by each partner)

-Proof of the Nature of Staff and Beneficiery (each partner needs to get those documents to deliver with the first interim report to the applicant)

-Project Contract with each staff (each partner needs to get those documents to deliver with the first interim report to the applicant) Virtual /Real-time Meeting Documents,

-Meeting Agenda -Participants' lists

-Multiplier Event Participants' list

-Minutes of the Meeting -Recording of the Session & Photos

- Certificate for the Participants These documents need to be delivered to the applicant by each partner and to keep them in a folder till the end of the Project.

-INTERIM REPORT will be prepared by each partner:

First Intermediate Report Explanation (Deadline:21st of March)

The Partners shall provide the Coordinator with the five interim reports, and where appropriate, with copies of all the necessary supporting documents completed and signed by the legal representative by

• 21/03/2021 (1st report),

• 21/05/2021 (2nd report),

• 21/11/2021 (3rd report),

• 22/03/2022 (4th report),

• 22/07/2022 (5th report) at the latest.

With today’s growing technology, Internet usage has significantly increased. People use the Internet and digital tools, particularly APPs, as an expressive platform to share their feelings and emotions in terms of stories. How people perceive their surroundings depends on a variety of dynamic and static context factors such as road traffic, the feeling of safety, urban architecture, etc. Such subjective and context-dependent perceptions can trigger different emotions, which enable additional insights into the spatial and temporal configuration of urban structures in terms of destination management. Although many studies have analyzed people’s sentiment using various digital tools, there is still a shortage of applications in analyzing the emotions of people’s personal and experiential stories about themselves and the city. There is an absence of informative tools that can show how people in Turkey, France, and Slovenia are feeling about their cities.

The construction of collective imagination through the development and the visibility of a new digital tourist product through thematic maps and citizens’ shared emotions is needed. This brings to light the idea of “GEO-DEMA APP < Stories that move you> which is a web- based application aimed at providing real-time visualization of people’s emotions from different cities of these three countries based on mining their stories and emojis used taking into consideration the different country / cultural settings. The solution applies a set of language- processing techniques in order to preprocess the stories.

The involvement of the citizens to create the features of the App and thematic maps based on user experience through geo- referenced emotional personal stories in the territory that can be retrievable via mobile App, open the possibility to understand the city from citizen’s point of view as never before and at the same time it creates a new tourist approach. Thus the new information layers for Destination Management creates a unique visualization to create citizen’s emotions plays a role. As a pilot study, a survey will be developed and applied to understand the users’ needs in GEO-DEMA App’s context for capturing the emotions and feelings of the citizens based on their stories connected to the places.

GEO-DEMA APP is a kind of mobile application that will be developed throughout the project. It will be designed as an online word-of-mouth branding due to the vast amount of opinions. Although it does not allow writing more than 280 characters for each story, like in Twitter and Instagram, it enables an easy way to see what is going on in the city in real-time. Moreover, it allows people to express their emotions, opinions, and stories about different places in their cities or other cities worldwide. Thus, it can quickly reflect people’s feelings, fears, and emotions.

Many studies have been conducted to explore people’s emotions on social media platforms. The results showed that individuals’ emotions and moods affect their decision-making process, leading to a direct correlation between ‘public sentiment’ and ‘market sentiment’. Destination Managers can use it to find their cities’ public opinion, tourism assets, and products to examine customer satisfaction. Visitors and citizens can see people’s opinions and feelings about a particular place in a city or a service even before visiting and can even interact with other people who visit those places. All these studies clarify that emotions play a central role in many life aspects.

AFTER DEVELOPING THE APP BASED ON THE SURVEY RESULTS & COLLECTED STORIES AS DATA

Small data analysis via different software pieces is conducted based on the stories and emojis of the citizens. Then, thematic emotional maps will be created for each particular part of the city, enabling searching and filtering of the data. The results are displayed on a dynamic, colorful map of these three countries, and the colors of specific parts of the cities change according to the dominant emotion. The website presents the associated trending hashtags for each city along with some exciting emotion statistics. Developing these thematic emotional maps unravel the cities. The stories, the emotions, and thematic maps are the backbone of the new digital training program on Destination Management.

Learn about SMARTDEMA PROJECT

Destination Management faces the challenge in an ever-changing environment, dominated by the new digital economy, with a tourist profile that is much more demanding and informed, hyperconnected and multi-channelled. Therefore a new training program on Digital Destination Management (SMARTDEMA) is needed to create and manage the new demanded digital experiences. The new training program enables to add/co-create/reinvent the city with layers of information and services that do not exist today.
The project supports the transformation of the city and the actual teaching of the tourism model at Destination Management. It implements new learning skills and digital assessment.
Introduces concepts of innovation, technology, sustainability and accessibility to guarantee the present and future of tourism.
The project proposes an innovative implementation of the vibrant tourism experience of the partners' countries and increases citizens' sentiment of sharing local tourism-related values
co-creation geo-referenced stories.Very connected to SMART TOURISM CITIES.
The project design and create a custom made free download mobile Apps named GEO-DEMA and implement training on Kumu and other software for "SMALL Data software analysis"
to perform new SMART TOURISM related services, called here as SMARTDEMA. Instead, BIG DATA that is driven by machine interpretation, the project addresses SMALL DATA to understand the real needs and behaviours of the visitors.
A series of thematic maps are created based on the stories (DATA) created by the citizens (own sentiment of shared valued), and the insights of the visitors (DATA) collected in the app while unravelling the digital stories.
The project develops a new way of Digital Rewarding excellence skills (Open Digital Badge). At University level; Directory of Education, National Gallery, Stichting on Eduagility.

Disclaimer

''Funded by the Erasmus+ Program of the European Union. However, European Commission and Turkish National Agency cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.”