I travel a lot, see quite a few places and people, so I have to be spare with my enthusiasms, but I want to make an exception to honour the wonderful people who invited me to Barcelona, or more precisely, to the suburb Cornellia.

So far, my model for city-based digital empowerment has been the French team of Michel Briand in Brest (see the P2P Cities page on our wiki for details), but Citilab come close. The dynamic team behind the project uses digital technology and culture to empower and enable the local community to be part of the new digitalized society. So it’s a Citilab which does not simply cater to an avant-guarde artistic community, or to already active geeks, but to a broad population of potential users which can learn skills, use state of the art material surrounded with helpfull assistants, etc… The place is full every afternoon, with kids, teenagers and seniors.

Check out their english-language material here, and this is the conference I attended.