Our work on the Health and care cluster focuses on engaging people and organisations (based mainly in Italy, and particularly the Lombardy and Piedmont regions) in a peer-to-peer learning journey. In this journey, practitioners share their experiences and lessons through a series of webinars and offline events which aim to engage groups of DSI innovators with complementary skills such as social innovation, social entrepreneurship and making and entrepreneurship. We’re also gathering stories of DSI in healthcare, exploring how democratisation of technologies can change the way we deliver health and care services.

Our cluster focuses on bringing DSI closer to the world of education. We want to raise awareness about DSI among different stakeholders, such as government, policymakers, educators, educational institutions, parents' and students' associations. We’re engaging these stakeholders in different ways - discussions, debates, conferences, workshops and educational programmes - and focusing on three broad aspects of DSI within skills and learning: how DSI can be used to cultivate future skills and encourage socially-oriented education; how DSI can be used in the classroom to enhance learning; and how DSI can be used to better include disadvantaged and underprivileged groups.

Technology will not save the world but it may improve it in many ways. The same holds for our democracies, where the emerging field of digital democracy offers several solutions while also posing several challenges. Our peer learning programme consists of a series of webinars and offline meetings in Warsaw, with the ultimate aim to support practitioners to share skills and learning, but also to raise awareness about the potential of digital solutions to improve modern democracies at both the central and local levels. We want to support initiatives to scale and popularise them more widely. We’re also engaging with the European Commission to influence policymaking and help raise awareness about the potential of DSI in this field.

We’re focusing on engaging people and organisations operating in the wider area of Amsterdam, but also involving some of Europe’s most successful DSI initiatives like Open Source Circular Economy (for circular economy), REScoop (for community energy) and Luftdaten.info (for air quality). We’re organising a series of sessions in Amsterdam between September and January looking at how DSI can be used to tackle environmental challenges and climate change and improve food systems. Through these and other events, we also hope to involve initiatives from across the Netherlands.

DSI within the field of migration and integration is rapidly developing. With this in mind, we’re engaging the actors working on DSI for integration in Berlin and beyond through meetups to share learning, successes, failures and challenges. Alongside this, we’re facilitating peer learning between different “refugee coding schools”, and, finally, working to promote diversity within the DSI community, specifically greater representation of those with migrant backgrounds.

As a leading city for DSI in Europe, with a socially-focused digital innovation strategy and a number of initiatives in place, we’re working with other cities to share and facilitate learning. We’re doing this through events like the DSI Fair, Maker Faire, WeMakeThe.City, Smart City Expo and Matins Makers, but also through broader engagement with city policymakers around Europe.