By Zoe Romano, WeMake.

When there’s a conversation happening around bottom-up innovation using digital tools, it's likely that the WeMake team is participating.

Next week (8th May), we're excited to be taking part in the Harvesting Innovation: open and digital innovation for sustainable agriculture and food systems workshop organised by the Capsella project at Milan's Civic Acquarium. Capsella has been funded under the European Commission's Horizon 2020 CAPS programme, which also funds the DSI4EU project.

Since 2016, Capsella has been developing innovative ICT solutions tailored to the needs of all food, field and seed related actors engaging in agrobiodiversity, primarily through harnessing open data.

Capsella is now being used by farmers, food & seed communities and networks to interact with agroecology, agri-food and ICT experts to test, validate and select the innovative applications and tools best suited to their needs.

As the project's final conference, the event will be used to present the outcomes of the project but also to open a dialogue and exchange around future innovation in rural areas.

WeMake has been invited to share with the audience the work we are doing on Digital Social Innovation, including: 

• DSI4EU;
• Maker4dev, part of the Innovation for Development programme supported by Cariplo Foundation, Compagnia San Paolo and Fondazione Crt;
• Digital Transformation for Sustainable Development, funded by AICS and starting May 2018;
• Citizen science activities through  local communities engagement around the monitoring of environments at risk of pollution and natural disasters, aiming to foster the use of open-source IoT solutions for rural and agricultural areas.

We are going to set up a demo corner where we can explore the citizen science open-source prototypes which are already in use in some local rural communities.

The event is supported by the Municipality of Milan and organised in collaboration with OPERA (Italian Observatory for Agroecology).

Download the event Programme

For more info and registration click here.