This year Somero offers between two and six days of activities. We know that few of you can come the whole time, so it’s organized into topics and conversations so you can choose the ones that interest you most, and you can get the most out of your visit to Gijón. Of course, we’ve done everything possible to make each day the most interesting, to make it hard for you. ?

Wednesday the 7th and Thursday the 8th are the “GNU social Camp” and the “Sharing Cities Seminar”

• “GNU social Camp” will interest you if you want to discover the Swiss Army knife of the distributed web and learn to develop it. This is the most “techy” part of the event. You don’t have to develop software professionally to benefit from it, but it is recommended that you at least have a basic level of PHP.
• The “Sharing Cities Seminar” is a work group of a dozen experts in the participatory transformation of cities. The idea is that they will work to give us a guide to transform cities based on the experiences of places like Seoul, New York, or Bologna. Initially, it will be a closed, by-invitation meeting, but if you’re very interested or believe that you can make a difference, please write us.

It’s safe to say that you’ll be interested in the official opening of the event Thursday the 8th at 8:00 PM. We’ll interview Mikael Nordfeldth, who will tell us the conclusions of GNU social Camp, we’ll discuss the results of the “Sharing Cities Seminar” with Neal Gorenflo, and, along with Juan Urrutia, we’ll give context to ShareableLab and make an important announcement about las Indias that will certainly interest you. We’ll conclude the opening with an espicha [informal talking over local drinks] in which you’ll be able to chat and exchange ideas personally with the speakers from all of Somero, and with other participants, in a relaxed and festive environment. While all of Somero is based on collaborative work and conversation, this will be our main “networking time.”

Friday the 9th, Saturday the 10th, and Sunday the 11th are days of “ShareableLab,” the days of the most daring proposals and most didactic seminars. They are the most like a summer university… the kind that could and would transform the world.

• Friday, we will dedicate the day to production. Alex Simon will tell us how to set up a company like Kano.me from crowdfunding to globalization in less than a year. He will be assisted in his seminar by Lucía García, the manager of Laboral and promoter of FabLab Asturias, who will show us how to use Fablabs and their prototyping systems to materialize our ideas within that process. In a parallel program, Natalia will propose an incubator of a new kind in which, for the first time, you’ll be able to reserve your place before public calls are made.
• Saturday will be the day of resilience. With General Asarta, we’ll learn to design our cities and think of our projects in terms of the pure logic of resilience: thinking where we need to start from, in the case of disaster, to be able get back on our feet right away. With him, Gijsbert Huijink, creator of Som Energia and member of the directorate of ResCoop.eu, will teach us how to create an energy cooperative that produces clean, local energy for tens of thousands of people, with social objectives and without giving up being competitive with big electric companies. Meanwhile, in the parallel seminar, with the help of Neal Gorenflo and the leaders of GNU social Camp, we will co-design and develop a GNUbnb, a free (in both senses) hospitality service that is an alternative to big businesses like Airbnb, the first step towards a Sharing Economy, which is grassroots and based on sharing.
• Sunday is the day of the next revolutions. With Enrique Goñi and Jurg Müller, we will discuss the “end of banking” as a necessary intermediator.

During the seminar, Jurg Müller will design with us the application that is capable of replacing a bank that he presented in The End of Banking, and will then give us a seminar about how build it, and finance the development of a typical city with a system rather than with a formal institution.

In the last seminar, Paul Blundell, one of the most relevant figures in worldwide communitarianism, will tell us how people in the US are going from co-living to productive urban communities, and what we can learn from the experience accumulated by productive agrarian communitarianism.

And of course, we’ll have our evaluation and closing party starting at 6:00 PM. And the whole next day, Monday, for those who don’t want to go home Sunday, will be dedicated to get to know Gijón, Asturias, and the new ciders of the year a little better.

Have you chosen your favorite activity? Is it clear which days interest you most? Reserve them now!!

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)