Permanent education and training in the most advanced technologies is the way to make the general public more familiar with emerging technologies. This empowers people and also helps to foster a general public that is aware, active participative and better-prepared for the tasks of the 21st century. The priority areas are creativity and technology in the classroom in order to foster scientific and technological vocations in children (STEAM), digital technologies for inclusion and future employment in order to train young and active people in digital skills, and to provide training as a tool for social, inter-generational, territorial and gender inclusion.
Access to new technologies defines a new type of social fracture in cities, often with a high correlation with economic and educational differences. We must work to reduce this digital gap and facilitate skills, abilities and access to new technologies, by means of educational programmes and coordinating the wide range of city players that are working to maximise the impact of these actions.
The digital society should be built with citizens. Barcelona encourages the use of technology to facilitate active democracy. This means developing new models of engagement in digital environments (open, secure and free) for new forms of policy-making that are open, experimental and able to build in the collective intelligence of citizens. The democracy platform Decidim.Barcelona will help us experiment with new ways and methods for a genuinely participatory democracy.
By putting citizens at the centre, we also aim to increase their digital sovereignty, enabling them to fully exercise their freedom and digital rights, including their right to data protection, privacy and information self-determination.
