The first year of the project was used to carefully and methodically plan out the foundations of the project, based upon an analysis of the target users' needs, technological capabilities, research objectives, content limitations, project objectives and available resources. In order to create a stable planning for the implementation of the hard- and software components, as well as all parts contributing to the successful completion of the project and its future sustainability, state of the art analysis on several levels was performed and implementation of the first system functionalities, ahead of GA planning, was achieved. The Consortium felt that these first component iterations were necessary to support other project goals, such as the upload functionalities for content and metadata coming from the FHI partners.
The second year of the project was used to make the necessary adaptations to certain planned project parts. and saw a selection of those carefully planned project parts actualized and tested. The technical partners were heavily engaged in implementing and integrating the first versions of several project functionalities, while also training and developing others. These first versions were immediately tested and evaluated by all partners in the first cycle of the Living Labs, after which a prioritized list of improvements was drafted and incorporated into the implementation schedule for the first development cycle.
Meanwhile the archive partners had to finish the first stage of their content preparation work, while the research partners had to launch into the work schedule of their research planning, which starts with content enrichment and content research. Locally, all FHI partners prepared the content files selected for the project and made sure they had all the necessary licenses for them to be used in the project, before uploading them, and providing the necessary relevant metadata files to the project repository. As soon as the pilot was launched, both partner groups started with the annotation enrichment of the content.
The third year of the project was mainly spend on using and testing all implemented functionalities, reporting back on them, evaluating the portal and business cases through the final Living Lab cycles, and organizing major dissemination events such as the 4 conferences of the project, as well as writing, editing and publishing an I-Media-Cities book. During this last year, several unforeseen functionalities had to be analysed, designed and implemented, which impacted the general implementation schedule. The partners also analysed the Living Lab results to decide on a governance, exploitation and sustainability plan for the post-project period, which was installed and activated on April 1, 2019
