On 7 July 2025, the CONVIVIUM project (Task 7.1) organised Workshop C: Family Food Heritage – Co-creation of a digital platform with citizen scientists. The workshop advanced the participatory design of the Family Food Heritage (FFH) solution, focusing on the architecture of the interface and user functionalities.

Methodology:
The workshop used a structured participatory methodology combining validation exercises, group discussions, brainstorming, benchmarking, and live drafting. Participants first revisited and validated the operational definition of Family Food Heritage emerging from Workshop B. This was followed by a collective brainstorming exercise in which citizens proposed and refined essential documentation fields: recipe name, associated history, category, ingredients, preparation method, contexts of consumption, origin, transmitters, and forms of transmission. Participants also identified preferred formats and media for documentation, including texts, photographs, videos, audio recordings, and digitised manuscripts. A benchmarking activity introduced examples of culinary platforms, which were critically discussed in terms of usability and applicability for the FFH context. In the final stage, researchers drafted a live interface proposal projected to participants, who commented, corrected, and validated the structure collectively.

Results:
– A collaboratively validated definition of Family Food Heritage as a body of intergenerationally transmitted practices and traditions valued as heritage, adaptable to innovation, and shaping present-day identities.

– A detailed set of fields for documentation within the platform (recipe identity, historical background, preparation details, contexts, origin, transmitters, and modes of transmission).

– Identification of multimedia resources to support inclusive and dynamic documentation (written text, structured recipes, audiovisual records, digitised archives).

– Agreement on categories of users and roles (administrators, contributors, visitors), with differentiated permissions and levels of access.

– A co-created draft of the interface architecture, validated during the session, that will be delivered to developers for implementation.

This activity strengthened citizen engagement and ownership of cultural heritage, promoted ethical and FAIR-aligned data practices, and demonstrated the contribution of participatory and citizen science methodologies to digital heritage innovation. The documented outcomes will directly inform the technical development of the Family Food Heritage platform within CONVIVIUM.