summary&feedback. urban beers Nov'15 / Next event begin 2016

[Jaime Benavides]

Dear all, 

On Friday November 27th we celebrated the Urban Beers Barcelona event! Here, we share a summary of the event, including your feedback. Feel free to send Daniele and Jaime the bit of information you think we miss out in this e-mail. Then, we will share the collected contributions.

For your information, the next urban beers will be celebrated at the beginning of 2016.

Pictures

Thanks Ione and Adriana for sharing pictures of the event. Some urban beers images can be found at:http://www.meetup.com/es/Urban-Beers/events/226721771/

Summary

Irene Eleta transmitted that citizen science is much more than giving sensors to citizens. In the project esaire, Irene and her colleagues are facilitating the necessary interaction between citizens and researchers connecting them in workshops and sharing projects like smartcitizen or citisense with civic organizations like Plataforma per la Qualitat de l'aire.  

Edgar Pons explained how The Social Coin (TSC) team creates chains of favours around the world. Their company has just received an European Commission  prize for SME companies (link to TSC blog), making TSC a reference in the SME european ecosystem.

Didac Ferrer Balas is working to create an energy bank filled-up with energy savings to fight fuel poverty (link to banc d'energia web). His paradigm shifter social innovation made the audience ask questions like: How do you transmit energy from the saver to those in need? Didac explained that the savings (in euros) are then invested by the bank to fight energy poverty.   

Rossano Schifanella "wears emotional lens" to explore the city using social media information (link to goodcitylife website). As soon as he showed the maps coloured by emotion, all the attendants got impressed with this innovation and some motivated the speaker to explore the potential to apply these maps in urban planning.   

 

Conclusions

To change cities for the better we need to integrate efforts. Citizen science and community building can be helpful to empower individuals and civic organizations with the necessary tools and information. Chain of favours are essential to unlock the potential of applying new technologies in the urban domain, let's give social coins to public administrators! ;). Novel approaches to endemic urban issues are needed. These approaches have to be validated in order to be robust enough to achieve changes in urban dynamics.

Feedback   

Josep Lascurain shared that he perceives common issues between some of the topics treated in the event. He suggested to follow up the evolution of the event. This email is a reaction to his feedback.

Michele Trevisiol suggested to limit in some way the duration of time for questions after each presentation. The time for questions is the unique "space" in which the attendants can discuss all together a topic. We will integrate Michele's feedback by trying to mantain the questions until they help us to understand the presentation and to provide interesting feedback to the speaker. It is preferable to have a dynamic and short questions time than a more static and long one. Let's find the urban beers rhythm! 

Nikos Mylonakis  said that most of the discussed topics were not related to his work. However, he finds the event very inspiring and he recommends us to enhance the diversity of perspectives of the urban beers community.

More feedback?

If you want to help us improving urban beers and building its community, please share your feedback of the event with Daniele Quercia and Jaime Benavides (both copied in this email) who will update the post-event information with new contributions. 

Together, we can shine a light on the Urban Beers community!

Best regards

Daniele Quercia

Jaime Benavides