Matera makes the shortlist for European City of Culture 2019

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Matera, the seat of the first unMonastery and a city dear to all edgeryders, has made the shortlist for European City of Culture 2019. 21 cities applied for the title; 6 of them made the shortlist. It is fair to say that all of us contributed to this initial success of Matera in the following ways:

  • the unMonastery is Comitato Matera 2019’s flagship project for social innovation.

  • the unMonastery and LOTE3 have made a significant push to build for Matera an European stature. The European dimension may have been the weakest dimension of Matera’s bid, and we helped fix that.

  • several people participated to the city’s online community.

  • Matera made the news on November 13th, just as a city delegation presented to the adjudicating panel in Rome, by unleashing a Twitterstorm that made the hashtag #portaMateranel2019 trending topic n.1 in Italy for over three hours. After we were asked for help, many of us participated actively in the Twitterstorm, tweeting in English and showing that a global alliance stands behind the city; plus, we invented the Twitterstorm! It was actually me suggesting it to them. @ilariadauria was in Rome, and showed the panel the tweets coming through with an iPad.

We can all share in their joy and claim a tiny bit of credit in this success. Enjoy this fantastic video of @idaleone (if you did guerrilla knitting in Matera you met her there!) getting emotional just as the official news is given. Watch it to the end, it’s worth it :smiley:

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Video of the proclamation

is very interesting to hear the president of the jury, Steve Green, and shall state the reasons with which choices are the 6 finalists.

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This is amazing news!

Congratulations to everyone who worked to make this happen :slight_smile:

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Slow motion

Yeeeessss!!! We still haven’t gotten over it. Thank you all, TOGETHER TO-GET-THERE has never been so real and so true.

Alberto’s follow-up is right: Edgeryders are a fundamental part of Matera’s path to 2019. I hope this will become even more true as time goes by. Going through the Tweet book made me realize how much support we had all over the place, and how this Twitter storm thing is impressive when it strikes the objective. I will need some time to wrap up my head around all that happened: seems like time is never enough. didn’t get voer LOTE3 that shortlist was already out!

Kudos to all!