Good start!
Well done, Simone, it sounds like a good start. I am no expert in this space, so this is basically your decision. I can see several possibilities:
- Spot The Future Italy. We run an instantiation of STF in Italy; we try to make the changemakers at the edge emerge, and through them we try to make sense of what kind of future people are building.
- we try to engineer some kind of activity around the unMonastery. For example, Elf and Cristiano are doing really interesting work, documenting closely consumption patterns (for example, we know that 65% of the food consumed by unMonasterians is locally produced; they weigh waste divided by fraction – so many kilos of wine bottles, so many kilos of non-wine bottles, so many kilos of compost etc.). Another thing that would be needed is an evaluation activity of the unMonastery. New voices, check; new format, check; stakeholders, check, as this is a horizontal project on a territory; but of course Telcos are viewed with a lot of suspicion. We would need something to do together, and that brings me to...
- this. We wrote this downstream of a meeting with Fabrizio Barca (!), who visited the unMonastery and asked for a proposal. New voices, check; stakeholders, check; new format, not so much, because this is a conference. But if we make it in the unMonastery is going to be very... uncorporate.
- picking a project from the community and scaling it. For example Makerfox (network barter to restart liquidity constrained economies – this project won last year's European Social Innovation Competition); or the Viral Academy (teaching people to code, with the twist that students, in order to complete the course, need to trach other students – also seed funded by the Nominet Trust in the UK and looking for opportunites to scale); or Moove (peer-to-peer coaching app for young job seekers). There are many more.
- Maybe the most interesting things of all is this: they could support... Edgeryders, with you as project manager! The job would be to help digital innovation to spill over to the social level. This is what we do anyway. We do it by means of a global online community, that empowers individuals wanting to do relevant stuff through peer-to-peer support. This could be done by creating a Telecom-branded interface to Edgeryders: we would man this and guarantee that people that come into contact with the program get peer-to-peer access to the whole Edgeryders community. It could get quite sophisticated, because in a matter of a few months we are deploying Makerfox on top of Edgeryders – we will be the first community to test it. This means we can support projects in various ways (voluntary work against "thank you vouchers", deferred paid work, time-bank style, contingent paid work etc.), and have some kind of accounting device for the collaboration. We hope that, in this way, people will collaborate more. Matthias and I explored the theme some time ago in this thread, and finally agreed to deploy Makerfox on top of Egderyders and test it. The main idea here is to "turn work into capital" for young people who have no money but plenty of time and skills. I guess this is the evolution of an older project called Social Capital 4 Social Venture.
What do you think?