Tag: Spain

“Laboratorios Ciudadanos Distribuidos” 2021 – Online Course for Community Innovators

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The Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport’s “Laboratorios Ciudadanos” (Citizen Labs) course returns this year, offering a series of online modules for Spanish speakers who would like to develop community-led innovation projects in their local area.

I’ll be joining the team to lead the module on strategic foresight, having previously contributed to last year’s session on questions of public value and impact measurement.

Si hablas castellano y te interesan las cuestiones de innovación liderada por la ciudadania, inscríbete antes del 29 de abril de 2021 para un viaje de aprendizaje y aventura. Sign up before 29th April 2021 to join us on a journey of learning & new adventures in citizen-led innovation.

Planificación personal con sistemas de creación de valores: una introducción

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This is a Spanish language edition of my “value-creating systems” blog from December 2020. Find the original post here.

De vez en cuando, comparto herramientas sencillas que pueden ayudar a las personas a pensar en el futuro al hacer sus planes personales.Hoy me quiero enfocar en las relaciones interpersonales y los valores.

Esta es una época extraña y difícil para muchas personas. Actualmente pasamos una gran parte de nuestra vida en línea: reuniones en Zoom y conferencias telefónicas, pruebas en línea y reuniones en entornos digitales nuevos, y a veces incómodos. 

Tratamos con flujos constantes de información de innumerables fuentes. Hay más estimulación, pero también más distractores que nos pueden hacer perder concentración, ser menos conscientes de nuestro entorno, y menos capaces de procesar las cosas cognitiva y emocionalmente. Todas las emociones, frustraciones y oportunidades de estos espacios se magnifican aún más por las presiones del COVID-19. Esto puede hacer que no cuidemos nuestras relaciones como deberíamos.

Entonces, ¿por qué no tomarse un momento para trazar un mapa enfocado en usted y sus relaciones, para ver qué diferencia están marcando en la actualidad? Ya que hacer esto podría guiarlo en las decisiones que tome. Lo mejor del caso es que para usar esta herramienta no se necesita nada más que lápiz y papel.

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The Important Thing Is Elsewhere

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The Family Tree

Before all this, I went to my grandfather’s house in Spain. I’d never really liked it. It wasn’t the house he’d lived in as I grew up, which was just down the road from the new place. That had been the house of memories, the place where my grandmother had died before I was born.

He bought the new place when it was time to find a smaller, more manageable property, as he entered his eighties and I my twenties. I worked with him on both houses, helping him to do up the old one and improve the new. I painted walls white and coated tiles with red rubber sealant; mixed cement and ferried endless wheelbarrows of it to wherever he was working that day. He chided me for my cement mixing technique, for the way I handled a paintbrush or a pickaxe, the way I clambered up and down ladders and scaffolding, fetching tools and materials. It was the happiest time.

He died, digging over the garden of the new property with a rotorvator, when I was 23. He’d have been glad to go that way; he’d always talked of “falling off his perch” rather than a dreaded slow decline, and even when we were working together on the new place, he’d still pull stunts like climbing into the tree he was pruning, clinging to the branch above him while standing on the one below, which he was sawing off, jumping up and down to speed the process.

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Laboratorios Ciudadanos Distribuidos: Questions of Public Value

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Spanish speakers can now watch a short public video from my contribution to the Laboratorios Ciudadanos Distribuidos course developed by the Spanish Ministry of Culture & Sport and MediaLab Prado.

The recording offers a brief overview of new approaches to public value. It outlines a number of practical tools that allow you to map the value created by your organisation or team, then consider ways to transform the value and impact you offer to the community you serve.

Find out more about the full Laboratorios Ciudadadnos Distribuidos course here.

“Laboratorios Bibliotecarios y Redes de Colaboración” Online Course for Community Innovators

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LabCiudadano

“Cómo montar un laboratorio ciudadano“, a new online course for people and institutions who want to experiment with citizen innovation involving libraries and other cultural institutions, has just been released by Medialab Prado and the Spanish Ministry of Cultura and Sport.

I contributed the course module on evaluation and impact, in collaboration with Pascual Pérez of the Office of Civic Innovation and Nora González of Civicwise.

Spanish-speakers interested in taking part or knowing more can find out more from both the Spanish Culture Ministry and Medialab Prado.

 

Debate: Las bibliotecas durante y tras el confinamiento

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The fiction of normality has just been exposed by the coronavirus pandemic, so why are we constantly talking of a New Normal?

Normality was only ever a comfort blanket, and one which didn’t even stretch to cover all of those in our society who needed it.

How will we change through, and allow ourselves to be changed by, the crises of 2020 – and those future crises that surely await?

I’m so grateful to Spain’s Ministry of Culture and Sport, and the “Laboratorios Bibliotecarios” team, for hosting this discussion, and tolerating my imperfect Spanish in a really lively debate with Laia Sánchez Casals, Alicia Sellés Carot, Diego Gracia Sancho, and Javier Perez Iglesias.

You can watch the recording, in Spanish, here.

Perspectiva colaborativa en las bibliotecas: Challenges & opportunities for Spain

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Poster for the "perspectiva colaborativa" event in Spain, showing scissors and a silhouette of a human head full of gears on a cutting board

Courtesy of the Spanish Ministry of Culture & Sport, plus the Ubik Tabakalera library in San Sebastian, I’ll be joining librarians, architects, culture professionals, and other stakeholders in the future of public libraries for a one-day workshop exploring challenges & opportunities in community collaboration.

What does it mean for these institutions to join forces with organisations, institutions, businesses, non-profit entities, users and potential users, when designing & delivering the services of the future?

How might libraries serve as spaces of collective creation & learning, and how would this service relate to their traditional mission and brand?

How could awareness of the wider transactional and contextual environment affect the way libraries define and negotiate their own future?

I’ll be joined by librarians from across southern Europe to explore these issues in an open, participatory, multidisciplinary format. In addition, our host venue is Ubik Tabakalera, one of the most fascinating public libraries in Europe, headed by the fiercely impressive Arantza Mariskal.

Spanish speakers who love their library and want to help shape its future should join us  in the Basque Country on 30th May for a day of discussion and debate.

Read more at the Spanish Ministry of Culture & Sport’s website.