A one day co-creation workshop was held on the 16th of April 2012 at SDS offices in Brussels and gather a range of 19 varied European experts focussing from different points of view the questions of Multilevel Governance and Charter definition.

Participants were involved into 3 successive design exercises regarding respectively usages, forms and content of the Multilevel Governance Charter:

• in pairs they imagine new situations of usage of the MLG Charter and capture them in short written stories they share in plenary;
• in 4 subgroups, they choose one or more of the previously built stories and mock-up with rapid paper prototyping technique the form they assume the MLG Charter should have to better enable story(ies) they focused. They presents to another subgroup their work and respectively assess if and how the proposed design of the MLG Charter would effectively facilitate the use, appropriation, dissemination, etc. of Multilevel Governance Charter in the situation their start from;
• finally, a Flying Wall was installed in the centre of the main meeting room and a proposal for the core content of the MLG Charter drafted by the Committee of the Regions was hung as an improvised exhibition. Participant provided with 3 types of coloured stickers were encouraged to tag the content draft with what they agree with, disagree with and what they suggests. This tagging process done contemporaneously by all participants starts exchanges in informal subgroups first and then a general discussion allow to wrap-up the lessons learn during the day.

This series of exercises hold in this order allows not only enriching the catalogue of situations of use imagined for the MLG Charter and the correspondent ideas of online and offline forms able to support and prompt these situations, but it allows also to change the participants perspectives on the content of the Charter.

As one of the participants very clearly summarized: “[…] the very fact of starting by building scenarios of use and envision possible material forms the new Charter could assume, changed completely my approach to the content.” Experts, that otherwise would tend to refine and detailed Multilevel Governance in the content, recommend to keep it short, accessible and explicit.