In Barcelona and across Europe, debates around new technologies and their potential benefits are not always inclusive. Despite an increasing wave of initiatives aiming to bring technology, and specifically digital manufacturing  closer to citizens, the benefits of these movements are not distributed uniformly across different socioeconomic groups. It often that low income neighbourhoods with a high rate of social and economic exclusion are the last to reap the benefits of such programmes. The gap between the creative, innovative side of Barcelona and the digitally excluded side is expanding.

Makers for Inclusion aims to tackle this gap in the Raval neighbourhood (one of the most vulnerable neighbourhoods in Barcelona), where Colectic has been working at a community level since the start of the project. Makers for inclusion is a programme targeted at vulnerable groups at risk of exclusion, such as children and young people, women, families as well as community leaders, non-profit organisations and social education professionals.

They work on raising awareness  of digital manufacturing within communities through running information sessions and on improving practical skills through their open skills workshops and activities.  Their workshops teach Scrach programming, Arduino electronics prototyping and open hardware, sound technologies, digital manufacturing and 3D printing, video game creation, internet of things and more.

Though their work , Makers for Inclusion focus on three goals:

• Encouraging participants to pursue technology related careers;
  
• Empowering and improving the autonomy of participants through skills and knowledge acquisition, even if they don’t pursue a career in tech.
  
• Identifying new job opportunities related to technology and education based on the needs of the local community;

Website:  http://colectic.coop/ 

Twitter: @colectic_coop 

Case study date: July 2018

Main image: Instagram