"From M1 to M10 PLUGGY was running through its first iteration, the creation of the conceptual prototypes. The main activities of this iteration included the interpretation of the Faro Convention to a set of ICT requirements and specifications, which would be used as the basis for the creation of the Social Platform and the Curatorial Tool. Thus, a strong cooperation between WP2 ""Social Interaction and specifications"" and WP3 ""Social Platform and Curatorial Tool Implementation"" was forged. Aside the Faro Convention interpretation a number of interviews took place in order to elicit requirements from the future users of PLUGGY and a number of personas and their respective use cases were created.
The use cases text was highlighted with different colours to indicate to which PLUGGY component (Social Platform, Curatorial Tool, apps) was most related. The results of this exercise were fed back to the list of requirements, which was updated and prioritised.
In parallel, a comprehensive analysis of several Europeana projects and also products related to PLUGGY was performed in order highlight the best practices in user's engagement. The result of this work was also fed back to the requirement list. Another important aspect of PLUGGY was also tackled during the first 12 months, namely the IPR challenges. These included both IPR related with the software to be developed within PLUGGY and how this can be implement in such way, as not to hinder future developments, as also regarding the content to be uploaded to the Social Platform. The work around IPR resulted to a list of suitable licenses to be used with all PLUGGY components and the content.
Having gathered all this information, the formation of the low-fidelity prototypes started by sketching them as mockups. The low fidelity prototypes were created and evaluated at M11 with curators, cultural heritage 'experts', and general audiences. The evaluation was executed based on the evaluation plan, created during the first 6 months.
While all the discussions were taking place around WP2 about the high level objectives of PLUGGY and how to tackle them, WP3 ""Social Platform and Curatorial Tool Implementation"" had to solve the technical challenges of the combination of a social platform, a curatorial tool, the content management services and a number of pluggable apps, where everything has to be modular and extensible. The basis for this discussion was the data model to be used, its granularity and semantic meaning. Input for this discussion was also the requirement list formed in WP2 as also preliminary discussions about the apps conducted in the frame of WP4 ""Applications design and implementation"". The discussion evolved to include the interconnections between the different component, their suitable open source licenses and concluded to the first version of the architecture.
WP7 ""Communication and Dissemination"" operates horizontally in the project, gathering information from all WPs and disseminating them to the proper channels. It started from M1 with the creation of PLUGGY's identity, used in the project website and continued with the compilation of the overall dissemination and communication strategy of the project. The activities within WP7 managed to attract an audience from the start of the project, mainly through the very active Facebook page (with over 400 followers), the dynamic participation of PLUGGY in several events, workshops and conferences and also through a focused community outreach, reaching out to over 1500 people.
Finally, WP8 ""Exploitation"" gathered information on the market conditions and on existing competitors in order to elaborate an analysis of important trends, driving forces, commercial potential and success factors for PLUGGY and produced a first draft of the market analysis around cultural heritage related apps and websites.
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