Work life balance is always difficult and for parents in particular, engaged into ‘acrobatic’ efforts to combine two domains with often diverging rythms and needs, and in a socio-economic context featured by unstable job conditions and welfare cuts.
We are proud of being one of the promoting partners of the Families_Share project which was recently approved and funded within the H2020 CAPS (Collective Awareness Platforms): it will tackle the above mentioned challenges leveraging on a model based on ‘alternative economies’, and stimulating families to share time and collaborate through digital technologies in their neighbourhood networks.
For this purpose, an Open Source platform will be co-designed with families in 7 EU cities (Venezia, Bologna, Trento, Salonicco, Budapest, Hamburg, Kortrijk) and tested jointly with a series of communication campaigns and raising awareness events.
Families_Share will be targeted to all working parents (or in search of a job) with a special attention to low income families, precarious workers and all those who are struggling in affording paid care services. The project will have a focus on including migrant people and all type of families (single parents, all sexual orientations, elderly people living alone). A cross cutting issue will inevitably be gender equality, translated into the goal of an equal involvement of mothers and fathers to challenge stereotypes constructing childcare as a female task only (or mainly).
The project will last 34 months starting in January 2018 and in such a time it will have to leverage on the potentials of digital social innovation to show the co-created technology solution is appropriated and sustained locally.
Families_Share rappresents for us at Smart Venice a piece in the jigsaw puzzle of our action research agenda on inclusive and gendered smart communities: in the project we’ll have the task of leading the Families Share City Lab in Venice and to coordinate partners in the testing phase of the platform, making sure the entire process will follow the Responsible Research and Innovation approach.
The consortium is lead by Università Ca’ Foscari -Department of Computer Sciences and includes as other partners Vilabs (CY), Fondazione Bruno Kessler (IT), IMEC and De Stuyverij (BE), REC (HU) and Ergani (EL).
Smart Venice 