OSCEDAYS 2018 in Rome: circular economy for food, videogames, energy and more
Open Source Circular Economy is about reducing waste, and generate value, transforming what is the waste from one product into the input for other products and services.
The proposal
The public invitation to OSCEdays 2018 Rome was for everyone interested to explore if Open Source Circular Economy could be a viable solution for:
- a social problem they really care about
- a project they would like to bring to life
- making their current project or business more sustainable
Best Practices presented
We spent the morning looking at how Open Source Circular Economy practices are already present, or could help to improve, six very different projects or organizations that are either born in Rome, or have a strong presence in the city. Along the road, we explained several times the importance, for the Circular Economy as a whole, to not stop to make Open Source designs and business models but also to produce and reuse Open Data about the same activities.
In alphabetical order, these projects are (click on the “Intro” and “Q&A” links after each project to watch - in Italian - how they were presented and discussed at OSCEdays Rome 2018):
Alveare che dice S! is the italian branch/version of “The Food Assembly” (1): a network of local groups that “buy the best food available, directly from local farmers and foodmakers” because “we must put producers back in the centre, both economically, and geographically”. Intro - Q&A
EquoEvento (Fair Event) is a not-for-profit organization that collects excess food from catering of public events, to donate it to charities, shelters and the needy. EquoEvento has saved from the dumpsters about 200K quality meals since 2014 “and the best thing is that, when they discover this approach, catering companies themselves DO NOT WANT TO GO BACK. They call us”. Intro - Q&A
Nonsonorifiuti.it is a micro-network to buy back from consumers properly sorted “waste” (paper, plastic, wood, metals, exhausted oil, clothes…) in order to sell it to recycling companies. As its founder Silvia puts it “thi is a project straight from the people, that local administrators did not want to adopt, and citizens took in their hands”. Intro - Q&A
RecuperAle is beer (good beer!) made, by ex-inmates, with dry bread recovered by EquoEvento. Intro
Riu.SA Sapienza is an online platform to catalog all the hardware that University La Sapienza does not need anymore, in a format that makes it easy for schools to browse it, and receive donations of the same hardware. Beides Circular Economy, the philosophy behind Riu.Sa is that “money spent in hardware is money not spent in the community, but in a loser economy. Merely buying stuff is not innovation”. For this, Riu.SA has won the award for best project in the “Circular economy, innovation and employment” category at the 2018 ForumPA conference. Intro - Q&A
Tibex.net is a quickly growing “circuit for commercial credit” in which more than 400 businesses and professionals in the Lazio region provide goods and services to each other (for a total value of about 7 millions Euros so far) “without touching or moving one Euro”. Intro - Q&A
Other projects present at OSCEdays 2018 Rome
Besides the projects explicitly invited to be analyzed and discussed in the morning, participants also found several “information corners” prepared to present:
- Cooperativa Energia Positiva: a cooperative for collective purchase and reuse of already existing renewable energy micro-plants around Italy
- works made with recyced materials by artists Claudia Melotti - Video (Italian)
- Riciclario, a free mobile app to learn how to reuse or properly recycle domestic waste, and manage the corresponding city taxes - Video (Italian)
and then... Sensefiction!
SenseFiction is a collective creativity workshop ran using the MakeSense methodology. In the invitation, we had asked:
“Is there an issue you care about and you’d like to help a circular solution emerge? Do you run a business and wish to make it more sustainable? Do you want to create a startup that promotes circular practices? **Come, and we will help you to figure out, using Sensefiction, how to define a feasible solution, and way to implement it.
We are happy to report that, when the moment came to ask “OK, who has ideas or requests for help to develop with Sensefiction?”, more proposals emerged that we could handle in that moment. After a short group discussion, we found that the three that raised the most interest in the audience AND would be most productive to analyze with SenseFiction in that moment were the ones presented in these videos (in Italian):
The full video of OSCEdays 2018 Rome is available here.
(1) update 2019/02/11: we were just notified that Food Assembly “closed its doors in the UK on Friday the 28th of September 2018”. For details and alternatives, please see this link.
(photographs via Filomena Fittipaldi (MakeSense) and Marco Fioretti (FKI)