Commonfare joined the Web Summit 2018, held in Lisbon from from November 5th to November 8th, as part of the Social Innovation Village.

The Web Summit is a technology conference held annually since 2009. The topic of the event is centered on internet technology and attendees range from Fortune 500 to smaller tech companies. This contains a mix of CEOs and founders of tech start ups together with a range of people from across the global technology industry, as well as related industries. The 2018 edition has seen over 70.000 participants, 2000 start-ups, and 1500 investors looking for promising partnerships.  

Represented by Chiara Bassetti (University of Trento) and Marco Sachy (Dyne.org), Commonfare has been one of the EU-funded CAPSSI projects that took part to the event. The commonfare.net platform has been showcased and several talks and meetings had with the diverse audience attending the summit: politicians, academics, venture philanthropists, and young visitors.

It was a very intense week, full of meetings, brief interactions, interesting projects we learned about, and insights regarding the role that research projects devoted to social innovation such as Commonfare plays in current and future European policies. In this respect, it was particularly interesting for us to join the presentation of the EU Manifesto co-drafted by the Social Good Accelerator and the CAPSSI projects attending the Summit. Social Good Accellerator is a European association born from a collective initiative created at the 2017 edition of the Web Summit with the support of former French President François Hollande and his Foundation “La France s’engage”.

With the Manifesto, the association pursues two main goals: (1) to create bridges between actors of social innovation such as civil society, non-profit organizations, collectives like those involved in Comonfare, and digital technologies; and (2) to build up connections and mutual benefit between tech actors and societal challenges. The actions undertaken to achieve these goals consist of the following:  informing and understanding by creating a bottom-up and top-down information circuit between European institutions, on the one hand, and actors in the field, on the other hand; influencing the European institutions and their Member States with concrete proposals regarding the needs and expectations of the two ecosystems to be integrated (social innovation and digital technologies); encouraging encounters and creating a shared community of values aiming at promoting social innovation and raising awareness about the pivotal role that digital technologies can play in social and solidarity economy.

One of the most engaging aspects of the Manifesto, which resonates with the values and practices promoted by Commonfare, lies in the awareness of the possibility, and the attempt to develop a different narrative for an inclusive European economy. Such a narrative intends to question the traditional idea of progress – leading to natural resources depletion, biodiversity loss, and an increase in inequalities – in order to propose a different set of practices and strategies that benefit the common goods, the preservation of natural and societal resources, and the collaboration between people and collectives. 

In this respect, Commonfare is clearly aligned with the call to establish new grounds for a European Union capable to be a model of cooperation between peoples, a peaceful and socially effective political construction, in which social heritage is valued, citizens can exercise their rights and met their basic needs (access to education, employment, health, housing) as well as desires. 

Our claim “we have so much in Common” echoes the one delivered by the Manifesto: “we won’t make it if we don’t work together”. We hope such pledge can have a positive impact on the results of the next European elections, and we are very much committed to supporting Commonfare as part of the European pillar of social rights.