The OSS is been created as a piece that provides all necessary resources for community energy projects, in a way that it is easy to navigate and easy to find the right information. It is designed to be a space where groups can find guidance and advice for their projects with more experienced groups, highlighting common issues to be aware of. Overall, the site is designed to ease collaboration between communities and build communications between people, projects and interests.
With the OSS, we want to build an online community of communities and have established groups supporting emerging groups. The OSS enables communities to help themselves and each others by engaging expertise and knowledge sharing.
While the site does not solve all the problems associeted with community energy projects, it enlarges communities to help each other overcome these problems
There are 4 main aspects.
- the community space, which connects users and provides space for communication
- a resources page with links to relevant resources, internal and external to the ecco project. The goal is to share any relevant piece of documentation to assist community energy groups progress.
- custom-built tools designed to measure the progress of community energy projects.
- The Greenhouse gas calculator will calculate your carbon dioxide savings in each year by implementing various forms of renewable energy. This tools allows users to see the potential of the renewable energy projects in term of impact on national reductions in emissions.
- The progress tool consists of a survey for Community Energy groups to gain an understanding of what stage of development their projects are. The answers from the survey are used to measure the project's progress, the results are shown on a spider diagram along with a checklist of tasks. The Progress Tool will assist Community Groups to understand what next steps to take.
- The Technology Decision Plan will suggest the best renewable energy option for a user based on the resources available in their local community.
- The timeline tool provides an in depth view of each step in the ECCO Timeline. This tool can be used to understand what stage a project is at and find relevant tools and masterclasses to assist with development.
- a forum space, which allows you to ask and answer questions. It enables peoples to guide each other.
At this moment we are testing the OSS. We want to have a better understanding of the user experience and usefullness of the features.
We will use the data collected from the OSS to understand what barriers Energy Communities are facing at the moment and to identify common issues, so solutions can be found.