WikiDeal's Living Labs are research environments where the platform's economic and governance models are observed, tested, and refined in real-world conditions. The term "living" is deliberate: these are not controlled laboratory experiments but dynamic, organic environments where real users engage with real services under real conditions — and the research captures that complexity rather than sanitising it.

Ecopol Living Lab

The anchor Living Lab is Ecopol, a sustainable community project that operates as WikiDeal's primary pilot environment. Ecopol is a member of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), giving WikiDeal's research outputs formal recognition within the European research community. Ecopol provides a multi-service context — food, energy, mobility, care, education — where multiple WikiDeal User Groups can be tested simultaneously, and where interactions between service domains can be observed.

The Ecopol Living Lab publishes regular reports on platform performance, governance experiences, and community dynamics. These reports are written by human researchers, by community members, by AI-assisted synthesis tools, and by hybrid processes — always with full disclosure of the authoring method. The reports feed directly into the Open Call process, providing empirical evidence for proposals.

Thematic Living Labs

In addition to Ecopol, WikiDeal operates thematic Living Labs focused on specific research questions. (illustrative) and planned themes include: Transactions, Payments, and Crypto (exploring solutions including GNU Taler, Deblock, and CHF stablecoins for at-cost payment processing); AI Strategies (monitoring and evaluating AI tools for cooperative platform management); Contract Law and Free Legal Resources (developing free-licensed legal templates for new jurisdictions); Commons Communities (studying governance models from Ostromian commons, platform cooperatives, and DAOs); Legal Watch (monitoring regulatory developments relevant to cooperative platforms, including FINMA sandbox rules); and Time Banks and Alternative Currencies (exploring how WikiDeal miles and credits can interoperate with other community currency systems).

Each Living Lab produces three types of output: observations (what is happening), synthesis (what it means), and pilot proposals (what to try next). The pilot proposals feed into the Open Call, ensuring that the research agenda is practically grounded and that Living Lab findings directly influence the platform's evolution.

The Living Lab as Democratic Science

WikiDeal's Living Labs operate on the principle that the people being researched should also be researchers. Community members at Ecopol and in User Groups are trained in basic research methods — observation, documentation, analysis — and contribute their findings alongside professional researchers. This democratises the knowledge production process and ensures that research findings reflect lived experience rather than only external observation.