The purpose of the study has been to execute an investigation on digital collaborative services, and their connections to onsite activities, throughout empirical experimentation, with a combined participatory design methodology and lab approach. The research focused on how an online platform, in addition to onsite events, could seed a public collaborative service. The chosen context for prototyping the service was the Rome’s library network, where during a phase of economic and job crisis, the library role is even more crucial, as one of the most locally active user centered services. The library wants to readdress its mediation ability towards educational activities who present an unsaturated potential, aimed at increasing users long term job potential and labour market orientation.
The workshops with local students, library staff, and local NGO, highlighted the need of an online platform in combination with onsite events, that could fill the main gaps that prevent the building of continuos relations with the users, adding a new core touchpoint will change the user experience of the current service, generating a new service flow.
The online and onsite service was tested in the month of July 2014, with 5 seminars, and a decent online participation, focusing on the main feature of the service: directly influence the service, to actively choosing its contents, the most voted events’ themes that become seminars.
The users are able to adapt the service to their personal needs, making the system modifiable, creating dialog between the users and the service, sharing many communal traits with a meta-design environment. 
The current state of the service prototype can not be considered a collaborative service, since the users can reach the role of co-designer - even if can be considered a social innovation project. However this service prototype has the potential to seed a transformation towards a public collaborative service. The user could gradually build a continuos relation to the service, as far as becoming a co-provider.