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This weekend we took part in this hackaton called Hack4Culture: https://officineonoff.com/hub-up-hack4culture-noi-siamo-rigenerazione/

On Saturday morning, we all met up in the main hall of Laboratorio Aperto, where we shown “inspirational examples”, which were Chiesi Gardens, Start Working Pontremoli, and Kilometro Verde Parma (the latter sounds mostly like green washing to me).

Then, there was a brief lesson on strategic planning. It started with the impact we wanted to see in the community. Working backwards, we defined what resources we needed to perform activities, what outputs these activities needed to have, and what would be the outcomes that would lead to the desired impact.

This “canvas” was really not as backwards as it first looked, but it’s very much one of those “you’re selling holes, not drills” kind of things. Following the canvas scheme was one of the 5 parameters that we were told we would be graded on.

Participants could choose between three case studies, and we had to come up with a project and a communication strategy for it. Two of the case studies were about co-working spaces operated by On Off, one in the city, and one in the plains.

The third was brought forth by another participant, and it was called Radio Pablo, a community podcasting project aimed at giving a voice to the youth of the Pablo neighborhood, here in Parma. As soon as we heard about this, my mind started swimming with lofty ideas of decentered and geo-located audio distribution systems (I had in mind something like https://blind.wiki/).

In practice, it was all about making a good pitch for the project, so we started filling out the “canvas”, and checking every box in the evaluation scheme.

What was interesting was working with people we didn’t know at all, and finding a synthesis between their genuinely original ideas, and the strategic elements that the judges commented positively about. At one point, we pretty much restarted from scratch when a teammate pointed out that our approach was to have the youths perform work that we deemed important, and to assume that they needed to be taught, almost like they needed to learn a job.

Saturday evening, we presented our improvised pitch to the mentors, who had very kind things to say, and who pointed out what questions were left hanging.

After that, Benedetta redid the slide show with coherent graphics, incorporating the advice of the mentors, and we headed to the pub.

On Sunday morning, 20 minutes before we were supposed to present our pitch, the team hastily changed the tone and order of the presentation, making it more energetic, and switching from just one speaker to a more dialogic format. In the final scheme, the presentation started with a fierce appeal to emotions, followed by Benedetta explanation of the planning and practical steps needed to bring the project to fruition.

Here is the presentation with which we won the first prize. An NGO (APS) will have to be formed for handling the project and actually getting the money. We’re excited to work on this project for real, for now we have this tiny demo of how we want the public history part of the website to look: https://e-muse.it/portfolio/pablo/

Honestly, if I were a judge I would have voted for Team 3, which did end up winning both the second prize and the special prize for projects targeting “interior areas”.

A big thank you to the organizers, and to all other participants, it was great meeting people with such a wide array of skills and perspectives.

There’s also an instagram reel about the event: https://www.instagram.com/p/DPve_DDDBXx