Economia Social i Solidària

Gina Planas:
Welcome to Voices from the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), the new podcast on social and collaborative economies.
In this episode we enter the world of digitalisation, always in relation to the social and solidarity economy. 
First of all, we need to clarify what we mean by digitalisation, what resources we have to improve the digital processes of our initiatives, and how we can do it from an SSE perspective.
Núria Vega and Beatriz Sánchez are with us today to explore these issues.
Núria is a member of the UOC Digital Commons research group, Dimmons, and in the context of the Open Chair promoted by the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, she has worked as a mentor for the MatchImpulsa programme. She has extensive experience in the world of technological consultancy from the field of strategic communication and has taken part in different projects related to the agro-ecological sector and the social and solidarity economy in the city of Barcelona.
Beatriz collaborates with the Open Chair and MatchImpulsa, the cross-feminist programme for the digital promotion of the social, solidarity and collaborative economy in Barcelona, supported by Dimmons and Barcelona City Council. She is an expert in social and solidarity economy initiatives from different perspectives and, moreover, she has recently created Alquimia Social, a cooperative that supports transformative projects.
We will also have Pau Roldan, an expert from the Directorate of Social and Solidarity Economy Services and Sustainable Food of Barcelona City Council, who will talk about how digitalisation is being reflected in the framework of public policies.
We’re then going to learn about some real cases of initiatives in the field that have used the resources we offer, and we will be given an insight into the experience gained and into the application of the different tools in specific initiatives. 
We welcome Bea, Núria and Pau. Thank you for being part of this episode.
If you like, let's start by defining what digitalisation is and why it is so important.
Núria, if you want to start the debate...

Núria Vega:
Hello, Gina. Thank you for inviting us. 
To answer your question briefly, when we talk about digitalisation, in broad terms we are talking about improving the processes, functions and operations of a company by making the most of technology. More specifically, we could understand digitalisation as the adoption of systems and/or platforms, and digital transformation as the transition to a digital business model. In other words, it is not the same to buy a computer as to move towards a change of organisational culture, to change work processes. As a consequence, digital transformation involves a change in the way... Let me give you some examples, in the way a company uses technology, the way people relate to each other, or for example, it also involves a change in the way an organisation is sustainable in its performance. Therefore, digital transformation has a cross-cutting impact on organisations and on the different work areas that make up a company.

Gina Planas:
Núria, would you say that this is a special moment for digitalisation? Are we at a turning point?

Núria Vega:
Yes, in a sense we are.
Over time there have been different waves of digitalisation, but what we can say is that the impact that digitalisation, digital transformation, can have on organisations is now evident. 
And here we can talk about different positions, such as that of the Spanish Economic and Social Council, which stresses, for example, that digitalisation is an instrument of growth for stable, sustainable and inclusive development, and that it can reflect a change.... reflect cost savings, greater efficiency and improvements in the competitiveness of organisations.
And there are also some other recent studies that show how the pandemic has also had an impact on the need to go digital. For example, 76% of social organisations state this in the recent study published by the Third Sector Round Table. Notably, however, in contrast to this figure, 61% of social economy organisations say that they are allocating 2% of their budget to digitalisation.

Gina Planas:
It is indeed an interesting fact, the contrast between the will to innovate and the final reality of organisations.
We'll come back to this point later, if that’s OK. And we will also find out what resources are provided by the institutions. But first, Bea, would you like to explain what digitalisation implies, specifically for the social and solidarity economy?

Beatriz Sánchez:
Well, as Núria said, it is important to point out that digitalisation can affect almost the entire activity of a company. I’d like to comment now on some examples and challenges we find in SSE organisations. But I would also like to stress that not everyone has to do everything: each organisation must first take a look at itself and think about its value proposition and strategy, and from there think about what and how to digitalise.
For example, internal communication can be digitalised. Other examples are having the files in a shared cloud or creating a Telegram group. A cooperative can have a Telegram channel to pass information to each other more easily and thereby be more easily available in case of emergencies. But we have to be careful not to end up resolving emergencies while we are having dinner: it’s a social economy and that means thinking about these things too.
This brings us to a challenge: if we put people at the centre, we must take care not to generate adverse gender and health impacts, and be inclusive in how we digitalise everything. 
What else? With regard to internal management processes we can have a PR, which is an application that allows us to create an invoice, send it and submit it to accounts with just five clicks. I am such a big fan. But until I reached that five-click moment, it took me a while. The second challenge, then, would be to dimension learning corridors when we incorporate new system applications, so that we can take full advantage of them and so that they are not a problem rather than a solution.
We can also have digital sales channels, e-commerce. For example, a friend's company has one and it's great because more people come. But the process of setting up e-commerce took them two years, they changed supplier three times...
The third challenge is when there is no in-house expertise to know what should be commissioned, and from whom. It's like if I go to a hardware store, I buy the wrong drill bit, I go back, the wrong nails, I go back... 

Gina Planas:
It is a whole process. 
Let’s go back to what you said at the beginning about the importance of first reviewing what our value proposition is to see what we want to digitalise. Could you tell us more about it?

Beatriz Sánchez:
OK, I was referring to the importance of thinking about our strategy as a company and what we want to contribute, and seeing how we can move in a digital world. It’s a great advantage to have the possibility of using the digital world to see, in real terms, what our customers are interested in and to consider this when we are thinking about what we are offering. 
In the digital world we can offer information about people's real lives; we can take advantage of this to refine what we offer or how we offer it.

Gina Planas:
And would you say that these challenges you’ve mentioned are the key to understanding what Núria said earlier: why do 61% of the SSE initiatives surveyed invest a maximum of 2% in digitalisation?

Beatriz Sánchez:
What you just said makes me think that I would like to add another one: investment aversion in general.
Of course, incorporating one or all of these dimensions of digitalisation is a process that requires time, energy and money. This, in every sense of the word, is an investment, and to assess whether it is an investment, one has to look at the long-term benefits and apply the resources now. And this, in general, seems to be costly. 

Núria Vega:
Perhaps to Bea's comments I would add as a challenge to think about what role social economy organisations play.
Can the social economy assert its practices and its values? I’m thinking about guaranteeing access and promoting free and open technology as opposed to technology that is more typical of the privatised world, and incorporating a gender perspective into the digitalisation process of an organisation.
Fortunately, we have to say that public institutions are already tackling these types of challenges.

Gina Planas:
Let's stay on this point, then. Pau, as a representative of the public sector, to what extent is digitalisation a strategic priority for Barcelona City Council? 
 Are specific public policies being developed?

Pau Roldan:
For us, digitalisation has a strategic and priority dimension. In fact, it is not only one of the cross-cutting challenges of the City Agreement for the Social and Solidarity Economy Strategy of Barcelona 2030, but it is also included in the Barcelona City Council's Plan de Impuls itself.
We have to bear in mind that there are many agents involved in digitalisation: companies, universities, the general public and the administration too, and therefore we have to take a broad view to determine where to place our focus and energy.
And not everything that is technologically possible is advisable. What I’m saying is, not everything works. We’ve also taken advantage of everything that is being worked on in the social and solidarity economy itself, in other areas of the City Council and in other public administrations. And, where possible, we’ve tried to complement it.

Gina Planas:
What instruments are being used? What resources do users have? 

Pau Roldan:
Well, in 2020, based on the work we were doing with the UOC and the expertise we had, we created the Chair in Digital Economy, which was a collaboration agreement between the UOC, Barcelona Activa and the City Council to address some of the challenges of the platform economy and take advantage of its opportunities.
The Chair has carried out different actions and generated various resources and also a lot of knowledge. However, it is worth highlighting the contribution to the promotion of the platform from the MatchImpulsa programme, with initiatives such as Matchfunding last year, and digitESSt and digiDieta, which have just been launched. 
Núria, do you want to comment on the day-to-day running of the programme?

Núria Vega:
Yes, OK, I’ll give you a bit of an overview of these tools.
DigitESSt is a tool designed for the self-assessment of organisations. In other words, an organisation can assess its level of digitalisation based on a questionnaire. It takes 20 to 25 minutes to do it and it gives you a complete overview of all the key items for the digitalisation of an organisation. What’s more, you don't have to do it all at once, you can save it as a draft, and I think it's important to share it too.
Then, once the digitESSt has been sent, organisations can access an hour’s consultation for social and solidarity economy projects provided by Barcelona Activa. They also have the chance to join the UOC's Hubbik incubator, which offers, among other things, the chance to find out about calls for grants, subsidies... funding channels, and so on. And last, the entities that make the digitESSt can also access different training programmes: the digiDieta, etc.

Gina Planas:
And specifically, what is digiDieta? Is it a kind of procedure to follow?

Núria Vega:
More or less.
DigiDieta is a tool made up of a list of resources and a personalised training programme based on the answers produced by digitESSt. We believe that it can be a useful tool to support social and solidarity economy organisations in the city of Barcelona when they want to go digital. The training programme, to give you an idea, has 64 teaching hours and when you’ve completed them, consumed these lessons, then the organisations can answer a questionnaire to see if they’ve understood the content. I think it’s also important to share this because the completion of this questionnaire will also facilitate... it will allow you to access a certificate of recognition signed by the entities that make up the Open Chair.
Oh, and it is also important to say that digiDieta is a resource that is open to the whole ecosystem of the social and solidarity economy: all organisations that have developed useful resources along these lines can share them and add them to this tool.

Pau Roldan:
Of course! For us, the ecosystem is vital for digitalisation.
From the City Council we also work with entities in the field, as we mentioned, and we have just created a working group within the Social Economy Strategy for 2030 to create a roadmap on digitalisation as a priority for the coming years.
The lines explained by Núria will also help us to see from a more general perspective what the needs of the field are, or in other words to have a picture of the state of digitalisation of the social and solidarity economy, and thereby be able to better define together this road map.

Gina Planas:
And finally, Pau, an important issue for organisations: are there any subsidies?

Pau Roldan:
Of course. It is one of the most important instruments we have at the City Council. 
From 2021, also from the new Impulse Plan, the grants from the Social and Solidarity Economy Forum include a specific modality for the digitalisation and digital transformation of social economy companies and organisations.
Approximately 75 projects have already been subsidised to the tune of almost a million euros. In this regard, we would like to remind the audience to find out through the CIDO's calls for proposals how that they can create their own filters and receive notifications, and even follow our social networks or sign up to the newsletter.

Beatriz Sánchez:
And, on subsidies, I also wanted to talk about the Digital Kit, which is very interesting. This is a state-level support, and all the information is on the website acelerapyme.gob.es.
It is basically a huge list of suppliers in digitalisation issues, who are called digitalisation agents, and as an SME I can access an amount of between 2,000 and 12,000 euros, depending on the staff I have, to order things from the digitalisation agents free of charge, from social networks to artificial intelligence, whatever I need.
Efforts have been made to certify SSE companies as digitalisation agents and there are already quite a few that have done so. You can ask them about budgets and for guidance. Not all of them have been certified, because there are minimum invoicing and seniority requirements and because it’s a very long validation process. My friend's coop (cooperative), though, which is dedicated to making websites, is already a digitalisation agent and they are waiting to be asked for their services.

Gina Planas:
So take advantage of this channel to raise its profile. 

Beatriz Sánchez:
And finally, apart from the subsidies, I would like to highlight Barcelona Activa's Socio-entrepreneurial Advisory Service and the training they offer in this area, which is in fact free of charge. It’s what I was saying before; It’s about knowing the what and the how.
And Barcelona Activa also provides general assistance to support the digitalisation of any company that requires it, and from the Directorate of Socio-economic Innovation, it also offers specific support to social and solidarity economy initiatives, also in the area of digitalisation.

Gina Planas:
Thank you very much, Bea, Núria and Pau, for joining us today and explaining in such detail all the resources and tools available to promote digitalisation in the framework of the SSE. See you soon.

***

Beatriz Sánchez:
Great. In this next section of the debate, we will talk to three women from cooperatives that have included digital media to find out how they see it.
So, please introduce yourselves. 

Joana Ariet Porta:
Hello, my name is Joana, from Opcions, and I'm here to talk about the La Zona project, which is our great digital platform. 

Mireia Sanglas i Noguera:
My name is Mireia Sanglas, I work at Suara Cooperativa and we are here to explain our experience with the Som Benestar platform, dedicated to the care of workers.

Núria Alonso Cortina:
My name is Núria Alonso, from the Cooperativa Colectic. We are a cooperative that works on educational and community projects incorporating technology, and for many years we have been helping social and solidarity economy organisations to incorporate digital tools into their work. 

Beatriz Sánchez:
All these projects sound super interesting. Well, we’d like to know about Suara’s and Opcions’s experiences with digitalisation, Mireia and Joana.

Joana Ariet Porta:
Well, I would use a metaphor: at first it was like starting to run a race without having done much training. We took on the challenge of filling a digital market without quite knowing where to start. 
However, above all, our main aims were to have a good team of computer scientists and designers, which were necessary and essential to develop this platform; and then, above all, to incorporate new ways of working within the cooperative itself, within the working team, because we believed that it was extremely important to be very efficient and to work hard because the time we had to develop this platform was very short. So we had to work very hard. 

Mireia Sanglas i Noguera:
Our experience came about as a result of the pandemic. Our work is people’s care, we were working 24/7, but we had to be supported somehow because it was a very, very complex situation. 
So, in one week we set up an online platform called SuaraCasa, which we made available to psychologists and physiotherapists to help people in a different way. We couldn't do it physically, but we opened a window, because in the campaigns we always say that we learned to caress with our eyes.
From therein, we now had experience in assisting companies so that workers could be looked after in a different way, and we said that now we have the opportunity, and we have developed an online platform to care for professionals with emotional, physical and nutritional support, meditation and support during serious illnesses, in a very easy online manner.
And what makes us different from others is that we do not do therapy, we provide support, let what is happening to us be known, and make people feel supported by their organisation.

Beatriz Sánchez:
Great. 
And what do you think helped you? Because we from the administration often worry about what we can offer. How can we help? In your case, what was key to being able to develop this matter? 
You mentioned a team capable of doing this. What else?

Joana Ariet Porta:
Yes. We have been fortunate enough to receive subsidies from the public administration, and this is something I would like to emphasise, because undertaking digitalisation processes is a costly, lengthy and difficult process, and what I was saying is important: we need to have a team that really knows how to do what really needs doing, which is why it is important to find people who know how to do this. And in this case, it is important to be able to have a budget to provide for all the teams you need on your side.

Beatriz Sánchez:
And in the case of Suara, you are a very large organisation. Did you have this online experience or has anything else helped you?

Mireia Sanglas i Noguera:
We were already making our way online, little by little. Yes, it is costly, and as you said before, it is an important economic undertaking. We are taking steps forward, but the pandemic has really hindered us in this regard. 
So, although we are an important organisation, we only have the budgets we have and we need help, mostly because these are important issues.
We have helped each other, first of all, and in the case of Som Benestar, with our own resources. But when we wanted to grow, as Joana said, we had to look for external  to be able to promote ourselves. We have also taken part in the MatchImpulsa programme to see how we can finish structuring the project, but we are still looking for subsidies both at state and European level to be able to promote and evolve in this regard, as far as digitalisation is concerned.

Beatriz Sánchez:
As much as it has helped, let's say that it has been a challenge that has caused enormous headaches in the process of generating...

Joana Ariet Porta:
Well, I don't know whether to talk about them as headaches or to talk about them as challenges and opportunities, to give it a more positive angle.
Yes, it has really been a major challenge because, as my colleague has said, the digitalisation process may have been more incorporated, while we were doing it little by little, and we saw that the moment was coming, especially after the pandemic, when we either had to adapt to this new situation and move towards where we were heading, or we would be stuck in a deadlock. 
So, yes, it is a difficult process, but it is very worthwhile, and above all the reinforcement of having the support of other entities nearby to stay informed, to cooperate. Advancing hand in hand with other projects is also a very enriching thing and it also helps a lot and is mutual assistance, mutual support. Therefore, I very much encourage carrying out processes as a community as well.

Beatriz Sánchez:
Of course.
Núria, as a digitalisation agent, do you think that what they say about grants and difficulties resonates with you? What are your thoughts? 

Núria Alonso Cortina:
Sounds familiar, sounds familiar. 
As a digitalisation agent, we do see incorporating digital tools as a great opportunity for social and solidarity economy initiatives, but we can also be quite critical of the way this Digital Kit proposal has been launched.
Because we do see that the fact of generating a great deal of bureaucracy to become a digitalising agent, as has been mentioned, has meant that small initiatives of the social and solidarity economy that could have been more closely involved in digitalisation, in the incorporation of digital strategies by other initiatives of the solidarity economy, have not managed to become a digitalising agent.
These initiatives, although they have the knowledge, perhaps do not have all the requirements the administration is asking for. And also these requirements have not facilitated something we mentioned just now, which is the inter-cooperation between initiatives. We tried, we studied different technological initiatives in the social market to be able to group together to present ourselves jointly and offer a solution more along our lines, but it has been impossible to achieve this inter-cooperation between technological initiatives.
We see that this enormous amount of bureaucracy, accompanied by this deployment of resources, basically benefits large monopolistic companies, which have little in common with ourselves.
This has been one of the first stumbling blocks we have seen, but we have also seen an underlying problem, which was also mentioned in the introduction of this podcast, which is the issue of not understanding digitalisation as the incorporation of these structural changes in an organisation but just as the creation of a web page or the inclusion of new software that makes X or Y easier.
This lack of strategic reflection is something we have not seen encouraged by this line of grants. In other words, we are basically providing aid for the acquisition of tools, but not for the organisational change involved.
A couple of years ago at Colectic, together with Pam a Pam, we carried out a study in which we wanted to analyse the use of technology among organisations in the social market in Catalonia. In this study we carried out an analysis, we found some data, which I’ll share with you: we saw that 80% of the organisations used cloud-based tools, such as Google Drive, private ones, but only 15% used free solutions, such as Nextcloud or CommonsCloud. There was a volume of approximately 50% that did use some open-source tools, but in general they did not hire suppliers from the social market to provide these technological services: there was very little investment and, when there was investment, it did not go to the social market. And finally, one piece of information that we also collected that surprised us very much is that we asked why free software tools were not used in the social market, and 32% of initiatives responded that they had not thought about it. This lack of strategic thinking is precisely what we believe to be very relevant.

Beatriz Sánchez:
Well, I could not agree more about strategic thinking, and I said before, for me it is one of the challenges. Because when supporting initiatives, they already come to you as a plan: "I want to do a website". And what you’re thinking is, "But you're a neighbourhood yoga academy!” 
So yes, what you say and the challenges you mention resonate with me.
In digiDieta there is a whole section on why not to use free software. Let's see what comes out, which I think will be updated because it is quite detailed. So that we can understand it, do the digitESSt and explain it to us. 
OK. What Núria says, does it remind you of things that you’ve been able to deal with? What I mean is, regarding your latest additions, which are the Suara platform for female workers and La Zona's collaborative e-commerce, what have you added recently? Have you been able to make the most of... have you been able to engage in strategic thinking?

Joana Ariet Porta:
Yes, in fact, what my colleague mentioned about free tools is something we have kept very much in mind throughout the project. We wanted La Zona to be transformative in many aspects, and the technological or digital topic was one of them.
However, we work with free software, and we are very happy to be able to do it this way, and we tell people this because we believe people must know that there is free, non-privatised software available to everyone so that they can access it.
And as new things that we have incorporated or have appeared and have remained, it is really this attempt at organisational culture, which is what has already been examined throughout the podcast, which not only means creating the platform, but also means incorporating a working method to make this platform grow and nourish it.
And then, well, we should remember that La Zona is a digital marketplace where we can buy the products we may need for our daily needs online; and what's more, the most recent addition we have made and which we have just launched is a booking centre to also provide this support to the catering industry, to tourism and to responsible tourism experiences to be able to make digital bookings as well. We see that restaurants and hotels frequently have their own platform to make reservations, but we also find that others, precisely because of the cost and the difficult journey of digitalisation, that there are many entities and projects that cannot afford it, and so, once again, La Zona is there to support these organisation... I don't know whether to call it a luxury or an opportunity, of being able to digitalise in this respect. So we are also able to provide a response in this regard.

Mireia Sanglas i Noguera:
We were very lucky: we were going through a process of strategic thinking in the organisation during the... well, before the pandemic, but then the pandemic struck right in the middle. And the experts started saying that we are not in a time of change, but in a change of era, and this led us to having to make this reflection.
One of the challenges that then came up, one thing in our planning, is point 4, which is innovation and digital transformation, and here as an organisation we decided that we are in favour of innovation, we are in favour of digital transformation, but we have to make it accessible to everyone in the organisation. We are Som Benestar, an online platform, where people have to make an online appointment via mobile phone, so if we have companies that do not know how to use the telephone it makes no sense.
In this regard, we want to be an organisation that empowers people during this era of change and who have the digital capabilities of the digital world to be able to use it all. In this case, we are Som Benestar, but this means being able to access payslips and deposits through the platform, and via all the different tools we have.
And we, as something different we are doing in Suara, within Som Benestar, we now have a very friendly web page. A group of programmers created it, and now we are looking for a tool that can give us an answer to what we are looking for. And we are now also in the process of analysing the platform with the expertise of these last two and a half years, and we are looking to the future to see if we can provide a response and achieve what we want as a project with free programming or other tools.

Beatriz Sánchez:
Very interesting.
Then, overall, we could call them challenges. One aspect of the social and solidarity economy that I didn’t mention in the first part of the podcast is the notion of intercooperation. In all the projects you’ve pointed out that we can make more comparisons. In the groups and things we take part in, we will look at how to buy things, and you have already commented on how you have used intercooperation in your projects. In the case of Colectic, I’m sure you’re also working hard to resolve this issue, even though it has been challenging, regarding Kit Digital, to structure intercooperation issues as I understand that in the end it wasn’t possible to do so.

Núria Alonso Cortina:
Yes, precisely when we talk about social and solidarity economy, we are talking about values around the generation of an economic value, about projects that are to generate a profit, but basically what we want is to do it with specific values. 
This is precisely why we rely on free software. We see that the use of private software is often an option that veers away from the values of the solidarity economy. Our understanding is that private technologies focus on growth and profit, that they continue to use this technological development to generate these benefits, and that they fail to consider the limitations of current resources, whether natural or human. And it is a technological model that is way away from the perspective we have as a social and solidarity economy.
We also rely on free software, in part, for this commitment to intercooperation. When we are talking about free and open technologies, we are talking about technologies that have been developed with a community model, in which different initiatives come together to provide specific solutions to specific problems.
Nowadays, we hardly see...obviously, we may be able to find some, but it is often the case that we have similar problems, and if each of our initiatives is searching for its own solution and we do not pool our efforts in searching for joint solutions at the technological level, what we are doing is a waste of resources.
In this regard, solutions that promote working together and pooling technological solutions, such as La Zona, which provides a solution to different initiatives, the same solution for different initiatives, are models that should be emulated. At Colectic, we remain committed to working together to find a mutually beneficial solution.

Beatriz Sánchez:
Yes, I really like the technological model because I see it like Lego. What I mean is you make one thing and it's like a Lego piece, the next person takes it and adds their own piece. So, this is at the root of a different technology model that is aligned with values of intercooperation. 
Another thing I noted down was free software, like you already explained, and what Suara commented, to not leave anyone behind. What I mean is, many of our organisations, of course, are engaged in the third sector, especially in working with the elderly, who tend not to be very mobile-savvy.
So, I find this is a really interesting value because there is a whole narrative behind digitalisation of “let's go in that direction and let the best follow us”. And how do we ensure that no one is left behind?
Can you share with us what this has entailed in practice?

Mireia Sanglas i Noguera:
Of course, we are talking about this, but we also have one of the objectives within the organisation, which is how to digitalise care.
Som Benestar is one piece of the puzzle, but there are others as well.
And we must always seek to ensure that technology is there. What they said to us was that if I said to my great-grandfather  that I have a fridge at home, my great-grandfather would probably freak out saying: "What’s that? At home we used to carry coolers with ice bars".
Therefore, technology is there, and each age has its own specific technology, and it seems that we have already made a lot of progress. Well, we can also see how we can take advantage of the technology that we already have at home to get closer to it.
In the other sense, within Suara, as you asked me about, we have a digitalisation programme for our female colleagues that gives them a basic lesson on how to use a mobile phone, because sometimes we have as many mobile phones as we have and sometimes we can't find potentialities that we are able to use. 
Therefore, use the spaces or simply connect to the general assembly we do, which we hold online. We hope to hold them face-to-face again. However, because we are a large organisation, with 1,300 members, it is difficult to access, and since the beginning of the pandemic we have also been involved in the Decidim platform programme, which will enable these assemblies to be held online and ensure the entire process is followed. Besides accompanying colleagues who are also connected via video calls, registering, casting votes and doing everything in a straightforward manner so that no one is left behind, as you so clearly said.

Beatriz Sánchez:
And at La Zona, have you done any platform usability studies? What was this process of making it accessible and inclusive like?

Joana Ariet Porta:
Yes, that first year, when we launched, we did put out a more basic platform, so to speak, but as the months have gone by, it's something that we've really insisted on, on the subject of usability.
In this regard, it is important to stress once again how important it is that professionals are the ones who take on the corresponding tasks. What I mean is, there is often a lot to discuss: "Oh, but I prefer that in this colour and shape. I would like to do it this way or that way." But the fact that you like it may not be a valid criterion for developing a platform.
We have been supported by designers and web programmers in this regard because they have the knowledge needed to really understand how this works and how individuals interact with screens, which side of the screen is most appealing to us, how we like it, whether it is the purchasing process, whether we prefer receiving emails, whether the categories are clearly defined, whether we prefer drop-down menus... A web page is the same whether it is accessed via a mobile phone, tablet, or computer; we see how simple and easy it is, but behind it all is a very complex intellectual process.
There is something I think happens a great deal with digitalisation, namely that everything seems so simple. It's like a little cloud with beautiful designs, everything is so smooth, the mouse movements and everything; you click, and boom!..a huge world opens. We may not be aware of the complexity behind it, of the network, of collective intelligence and everything behind a platform with these characteristics, regardless of how simple it may seem.

Beatriz Sánchez:
I totally agree. Núria gestured her agreement with her head. 
Of course, there are professionals leading the way, and the difference between a poor result or a great result is that it has to be well thought out.
And it's lack of knowledge, I think. People don’t know what it entails.

Núria Alonso Cortina:
Funnily enough, I wanted to finish by pointing out this issue.
We often talk about digitalisation as the incorporation of these technologies, but if we do not incorporate, or do not give support in all this part of the process and digital literacy, it has no chance of working. 
The level of digital literacy is often not limited to technical capabilities, such as the ability to connect and so forth, but to conceptual capabilities, such as what it means for me to be connected to a certain place, what it implies for my data, and what it implies for my digital rights, because incorporating a perspective of digital rights into this process of digitalisation is essential.

Beatriz Sánchez:
Well, I think it has been a very interesting and enriching debate. 

Núria Alonso Cortina:
Thank you.

Beatriz Sánchez:
See you next time.

Joana Ariet Porta:
Thank you very much for this space.

Mireia Sanglas i Noguera:
Thank you.

Núria Alonso Cortina:
Many thanks.

Beatriz Sánchez:
Thank you.

***

Gina Planas:
Today, in the Voices from the Social and Solidarity Economy podcast, we have focused on the resources, tools and support available to help in the digitalisation of companies in the SSE world. We have also learned first-hand about the experiences, difficulties and challenges involved in the digitalisation process in this area.
We would like to thank all of you who have taken part in this episode, and all of you who have been listening.
We hope that once again you have enjoyed these shared experiences. We encourage you to subscribe to the department's monthly newsletter, at barcelona.cat/economiasocial, to keep up to date with the latest news about the programmes and all the activities available.
We hope you’ll join us for our next podcast. See you soon!