Think beyond social innovation: focus on social infrastructures.

Intervalle #8 : Think beyond social innovation: focus on social infrastructures.

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This Interval is part of the programming of the next edition of the Ouishare Fest, which will take place from June 23 to 25, 2021, and will focus on the issues and transformations of our world through the prism of time. The Intervals are times to initiate meetings and reflections, anchoring the Fest in the long term.

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In the past 20 years, the digital tools and services developed by startups, NGOs and tech companies have allowed people across the world to interact, collaborate and work together. At an individual or collective level, those technologies could be seen as “social technologies” since they have fostered unusual meetings, unseen actions and unprecedented movements. But at a globalised level, those technologies are not social at all. Put together into systems, they rely on rare environmental resources, they accelerate inequalities, and they allow some companies to concentrate so much power and wealth that they are today more powerful than states and international bodies. 

The topic is complex but one thing is clear: despite the rise of social innovation initiatives in the last decade - including Tech for good movements - those social technologies did not allow the emergence of social organisations. And changing the system appears to be out of reach as social and environmental issues are getting worse... To radically impact the societies in which we are living in, we thus need to change our perspectives.

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But how? And can technologies still play a role?

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On Thursday 3 June 2021, we will host a conversation with :

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- Marina Gorbis (Institute for the Future),

- Javier Creus (Ideas for Change),

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on the necessity to move from social innovation to social infrastructures, through the help of imagination, examples of initiatives that work and concrete steps to engage in. 

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Registration required here.