The fourth and final Maker Mornings session for 2018 focused on best practices and lessons learned from eight successful local DSI projects.

On the 26th November, FabLab Barcelona housed the fourth and final Matins Maker (Maker Morning) session of 2018, bringing together the local-manufacturing community, digital social innovation practitioners and others interested in Barcelona’s maker culture.

The day focused on sharing lessons from some of the projects funded under “Impulsem el que fas 2017”, an open grant programme rolled out by Barcelona Activa to stimulate the local economy and promote social and digital innovation across Barcelona’s neighbourhoods.

During the first part of the event, which was focused on data and education, Beepath, Eticas Foundation, Ambaixadors Maker and Makers for Inclusion spoke about the difficulties they have encountered along the way, as well as shared their achievements and impact they had on Barcelona’s communities.

The Eticas Foundation explained that the grant has helped them work with fifteen groups in the El Raval neighbourhood, stimulating the creation of a local data ecosystem and noting how far there is to go to raise awareness of the value of data among civil society organisations”.

On the second panel, focusing on sovereignty and recycling, eReuse.org discussed how they used the grant to strengthen the ties between project collaborators and prototype a series of methods that have been used in Madrid and in Kenya.

Timeoverflow have also increased their reach and launch in Barcelona thanks to the grant. The Things Network have used the grant for communication and dissemination purposes and to provide technical support and training for their users.

The last part of the event was dedicated to community projects. We heard about CommonsCloud, an office open source tool platform; Lleialtat Santsenca, a locally established organisation that works to democratise the uses of technology; Àgora 4.0 — Pompeu Fabra & Escola d’Adults de la Verneda, a project working on providing unemployed people with skills in 3D printing modelling and in basic Scratch & Python programming; Ateneu de Fabricació Ciutat Meridiana, a digital manufacturing creative space available for the community, organisations, universities and companies to come together and turn ideas into physical products for the benefit of society; DIY Bio Barcelona, who aim to bring biology and science to the community; 3D Coworking Barcelona, who provide office spaces for sustainable and scalable innovation projects; the card-game promoters (Des)vestint aliments whose aim is to raise awareness among children of the importance of a varied, ethical and sustainable diet, and Barcelona Civic Tech House, Barcelona’s coworking space for civic technology.

Together, these projects are working to make Barcelona a better place to live for its citizens, and by bringing them together to share lessons we have been able to help them increase their impact yet further.