The OpenCare consortium consists of:
- The University of Bordeaux
- Edgeryders
- ScimPulse Foundation
- The City of Milan
- WeMake - Makerspace and Fablab
- The Stockholm School of Economics
We formed around a need that emerged within the Edgeryders community in the course of an event called Living On The Edge 4. The main idea was, and still is, that hacker culture and the availability of cheap and open but advanced technology (not only software, but hardware and wetware too) can contribute to ideating and providing care services – at a time Europe badly needs innovation in this domain. Furthermore, services designed and deployed by skilled communities of hackers are likely to be very different from those provided by the state and the private sector. The discussion proved that tackling the issue of community-drive care required a strongly interdisciplinary approach, covering many areas of expertise. We identified the main ones as follows:
- Collective intelligence: how can a community function as a knowledge engine?
- Domain expertise on care: how can communities interface with the academic debate on what constitutes care and how it should be done?
- Design: how can we bring state-of-the-art design for sustainability and service design practices into designing care provision?
- Open hardware: how can rapid prototyping and open hardware platforms be used in the participatory design of care services?
- Public policy design and evaluation: how can community-driven care services be integrated in the highly sensitive, highly regulated landscape of European care provision?
The team adopts a working out loud practice throughout the project and coordinates in an open group. Join here.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688670
