Linking Talent for Barcelona

Starting point

October 2016 saw the presentation of the “2017 - 2020 Barcelona Digital City Plan: Transition towards Technological Sovereignty”, created with the goal of moving beyond the Smart City model and making Barcelona an open, fair, circular, and democratic city. The Plan rests is structured around three ‘pillars’: digital transformation, digital innovation, and digital empowerment.

Barcelona aims to create a new and powerful vision within which technology is a tool for empowering people, and for transforming the city. The residents of a truly democratic city need freedom of access to a common bank of knowledge and open data and information infrastructures if improved and more accessible public services are to be achieved, and a better quality of life.

Barcelona aspires to lead the transition towards a technological sovereignty that will enable both the government and city residents to decide and coordinate their priorities in the use of technological innovations for the benefit of all.

The technological-sovereignty agenda, helped by the adoption of open-code software, open architecture, open standards, and data ethics, should be at the service of the common good. We hope all this will create new productive economic models that are fair, and that facilitate the exchange of knowledge between cities.

We have evolved from a top-down process to a bottom-up one by promoting collective intelligence and getting all the key players in the city’s innovation ecosystem involved.

Scope

Our mission is to resolve the challenges facing the city and its citizens through a more democratic use of technology, and by promoting technological and digital innovation for a more open government, and as a tool for developing a plural economy that fosters social and environmental transformation and encourages citizen empowerment.

There are several initiatives and projects underway in each of the following areas: