Smart Cities Marketplace focuses on people and their stories – bringing to life best practices and lessons learned from smart city projects. Through storytelling, Smart Cities Marketplace portrays the “human element” of changing cities. It restores qualitative depth to inspire replication and, of course, to spread the knowledge of smart ideas and technologies - not only to a scientific community, but also to the broad public.
The ‘story telling’ approach aims at collecting stories from a maximum of demonstration areas in the projects that are part of the Smart Cities Marketplace. The stories take various forms in which people directly involved in a project express their personal experience of its implementation. By sharing their experience, we aim to connect to the targeted audience (city representatives, smart city stakeholders etc.) at a personal level, bring them to a situation where they could relate personally to the story told. Reaching the audience on an emotional level and sharing experience about participation in such projects and initiatives, while at the same time transferring technical facts, could trigger interest in using the Smart Cities Marketplace platform. The tools used for storytelling in the Smart Cities Marketplace were videos, podcasts and interviews.