21 Oct, 2008
UrbanLabs08 [01/03]: First impressions…
Posted in: Conferences / Events| openp2pdesign.org
A week after UrbanLabs 08, I can finally write a post (the first of 3 posts) with my general impressions about it while I caught the flu!
It was an event that I’ve been waiting for since several months, and that by its nature it was very quickly between so many changes in language between Castilian Spanish, Catalan, English and Italian!
I would have liked very much to participate to such an event even if only as simple participant, and I was invited as a facilitator! For this reason I’d like to thank Ramon Sangüesa, Enric Senabre and Josep Vives for the opportunity they gave me, for the hospitality and for helping me in the role of facilitator.
One of the best things about these events is always the opportunity to know a person who is behind a blog or an initiative known for some time only in the web. It’s very hard to write about all the people I met there, in addition to the organizers reported above, but I try to point out some of them here.
First of all the other facilitators (albeit with some of them we met very briefly because everyone was so involved with the event): Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, Boris Mir, Juan Freire, Carlos Guadián, Roc Fages.
One of the many features of this event is the fact that every participant really has interesting and useful experiences and knowledge, and this richness and diversity is one of the key elements now and for the future of the UrbanLabs ecosystem. It was very difficult to know everyone with so much commitment and so little free time, but with this event we are laying the foundations for building new social networks. Among the participants I met I’m especially pleased to know better Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation, who I’ve been admiring for years for the commitment and ability to analyze the P2P emerging dynamics and with which we are beginning to collaborate; Olivier Schulbaum of Platoniq, who I met in 2003 while attending the MEDIA_SPACE_INVADERS_1 workshop organized by them but that I could know better only now, Alberto Ortiz de Zárate of the Administraciones en Red blog and Domenico di Siena, one of the people behind the meipi.org project.
In a few words, this event tried to build networks between people and resources to share knowledge and to develop projects based on new technologies and social innovations for the cities. It was an event unique in itself for several reasons:
- on one side, for the issue addressed: new technologies and social innovations for the cities, which I’ve been considering very promising since long time and which I am addressing in my research;
- secondly, for attempting to offer more different forms of event for sharing knowledge and networking people (traditional conference, unconference and working groups) each one with different characteristics and therefore with greater richness;
- finally, the attempt to lay the groundwork for the generation of collaborative projects for the cities, through a participatory methodology.
An event which I believe would have been possible only in Barcelona, a city that has always shown an intense interest in reflecting on city management practices and urban transformation, and that for some years now is developing as one of the main centers for the study of the Knowledge Society and the development of related initiatives.
Its nature of an unique event make it a collective experiment that continues in the future as it was just the start of a wider process. The most important thing for me was therefore the opportunity to participate in a collective process of learning on the development of collaborative projects. I hope I will be able to translate what I’ve learned with my role as facilitator in the next posts, when I will speak about the methodology used in the working groups of UrbanLabs.
Also in these days also the UrbanLabs 08 main web page is transforming from a presentation of the event and the construction of the first working groups in a database of the contents produced during the event and in a design community of the projects proposed during the event.
Here are the pictures I took at the event, on Flickr (here the pictures of all the participants):
(…to be continued)
Tags: City, Community, Innovation, Social Innovation, Spain, Technology
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