Today@Costantino and I had a Skype call with people in the City of Milano. The bottom line is: there is an ongoing collaboration between their innovation/smart city and social policies departments around what they call “community welfare”. They are deploying pretty cutting edge stuff, from neighborhood-shared long term care for elderly people to social innovation incubators in the dodgiest areas of the city. They are very interested in playing ball. They will try to come onboard as a full partner, but they may not have the time for this (they need a formally approved political decision, as per their internal processes). If it turns out they don’t, they will write us a very specific letter of endorsement and pre-agree some activities that will be carried out by WeMake. The letter of endorsement will refer to such activities. So, the city will act like an “internal client” to the project.
This is great, because all of this social innovation activities around welfare is dictated exactly by the situation we describe in the proposal: dwindling public sector resources and erosion of the capital of social cohesion. They are living out the European nightmare of having to roll back the welfare state. I think their presence makes the proposal much stronger. Within 36 hours they will confirm whether they will come in as full partners or with this “structured endorsement” formula.
Meanwhile, Noemi and I have finished almost everything on sections 1.1., 1.2 and 1.3 of the proposal. There are just a couple of unsolved questions posed to @Lakomaa, @markomanka and @Costantino: please help us finish them and move on.