PIE News. A public design project toward commonfare

Abstract

The new poor are a group of people composed by precarious workers, working poor, NEETs, and people left behind by the safety nets, accounting for approximately 25% of the European population. Commonfare is a new collaborative form of welfare provision based on equitable governance and grassroots democracy, entailing the involvement of diverse stakeholders to facilitate the bottom-up emergence of collective practices tackling the needs of the new poor. The paper mainly describes the concepts and building blocks of the PIE News project, a public design project which started in July 2016 with the aim to foster the emergence of commonfare as an alternative model to satisfy the needs of the new poor. PIE news leverages on 3 pilots (Italy, Croatia, Netherlands) with grassroots organizations in order to create a commonfare model through the development of a Collective Awareness Platform and a Digital Currency tool. The network supporting the project is constituted by organizations that account for approximately one-hundred thousand social media contacts. These organizations include ethical banking, networks of associations, activists for basic income, and many others. Finally, the paper briefly presents some results of the project at one year from its start.