Vibra: Your cultural agenda in one app

Vibra is the mobile app launched by the Government of Catalonia to centralize the cultural agenda in the region and provide intuitive information to citizens. With 1,000 daily cultural experiences, the App provides data on 4,500+ facilities.

Challenge

Provide Visibility to City's Cultural Offering

To create a digital service that encompasses an entire cultural offer in only one product in the most complete and comprehensive way possible. This way, the citizen gets a search tool that provides visibility to all cultural performances and acts from everywhere in the region. The citizen experience marries real-time updates, and all content is customized according to the user’s preferences: cultural interests, preferred areas or location of interest, to name a few.

Solution

Opentrends Agile Transformative Teams led the design, architecture, development, and implementation of the digital product.

Service Design to build a User-Wanted Product

The initial phase was led by a service design where the goal was to understand the needs, detect new opportunities, and generate room for innovation. To achieve this, we applied:

Co-creation: Workshops with users and stakeholders where they are invited to collaborative dynamics.
Ecosystem vision: A study of the general context in which digital products should live,
User Experience: Analysis of user needs and goals.

Based on the results and conclusions during the Service Design, we studied the technological feasibility of developing Vibra. Once both conceptual and technological objectives were aligned, we developed an initial MVP followed by a series of evolutionary processes that have been adding value to the user.

This evolutionary approach is still valid today, making Vibra ever-evolving, adapting to the current needs of users. The established deep collaboration, trust, and transparency between the Dept of Culture and Opentrends allowed working closely with Vibra's vision as a product and not a mere project.

Technology to build the Cultural App

Vibra is not only a mobile application, it is an entire system with a strong data engine.

Due to the systems integration nature, we opted for an SOA (service-oriented) architecture, where its main services are:

Aggregator: Data integrator and consolidator, which is responsible for integrating data from different sources, transforming them into a model of cultural experiences, and consolidating them.
Web API REST: Cultural experiences publisher.
Web Application (Backoffice): Vibra’s internal admin web.

The app pulls data from multiple data sources. For the data aggregator, we used open-source NodeRed, which allows the implementation of data streams from the source extraction (SOCRATA and other web services) to the transformation and upload to the Vibra database server. The main data source comes from the Cultural Agenda, through the Generalitat's Open Data service, making Vibra also a digital project for reusing and transparency of open data. Other data sources are information from Heritage, Equipment, and meteorological data obtained from Meteocat (Meteorological Service of Catalonia).

Each element of the system is self-contained (container), which means that it has the ability to be deployed on any of Generalitat's cloud platforms, guaranteeing a scalable system at all times.

The Web API Rest provides all the services the mobile app (iOS / Android) will use. When committing to native app development, we ensure better performance and user experience - a key element in this project.

Outcome

Vibra - the new way of discovering and experiencing culture in Catalonia.

Facilitated access to Catalan culture by gathering around 1,000 daily cultural experiences from 4,500 facilities in one single app.
Increased engagement between the Government and its population. Since its launch, it has had great traction:
- 5k downloads on Android with an average rating of 4.1 stars
- 4k downloads on iOS with an average rating of 4.6 stars
Opentrends played a critical role in Generalitat de Catalunya’s evolution toward a digital open government.

"Vibra allows us to see the great cultural wealth we have, it covers the full range of the offers being produced."

Francesc Vilaró, Secretary-General of the Department of Culture.

Contact us

The Technical Cabinet of Catalonia's Gov Department of Culture trusted Opentrends for its:

Service Design allows for understanding needs, detecting new opportunities, and generate innovative solutions.
Proven extensive experience in architecture and mobile application development.
Ability to analyze the technical feasibility of the project.
Proximity, empathy and sensitivity toward the needs of the public administration and citizens.