Eleonora Riva, a professor and BloRin project manager, tells Smart Regions how her team overcame the challenges of persuading locals to participate in the testing of innovative green technology.
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ADVERTISEMENTIn the Sicilian islands of Lampedusa and Favignana, residents are testing energy 'microgrids' based on renewables and blockchain technology with BloRin: a secure system for transferring data between users without intermediaries.
Eleonora Riva, a Professor at the University of Palermo and Project Manager at BloRin, spoke to Smart Regions about how her team overcame the challenges of persuading locals to participate in the testing of innovative green technology.
"We understood soon that the compliance of people to the project was a crucial issue because we had to make the testing on sites and we had to install these devices in the houses of the people. And this was not so easy.
"And so for this reason, we started to do some activities with them that we called focus groups where we explained the project and we tried to understand what were the problems with this experimentation.
"What we found out is that when people don't have the possibility to really go deep in understanding some technology, they need someone to rely on that tells them that it is safe and that they will gain something," Eleonora concluded.