Dati Storti (literally ‘Crooked Data’) is a participatory change process that activates emotional and collective intelligence to act on the urgent challenges of the southern regions in Italy. It is an unconventional experience of connection and training that brings energy and interest from associations, students and professionals to Southern Italy.

Dati Storti is a travelling project that crosses virtually 6 regions of Southern Italy (Calabria, Basilicata, Campania, Apulia, Sicily, Sardinia) with a training and co-design event based on project-based learning. For this reason, the proposed challenges start from the worst statistical data for each region: data needing to be overturned by new solutions.

Dati Storti is structured in three sessions. In each session, an open co-design process is activated about one challenge for two southern regions. Each session is an online and hybrid event concentrated in a weekend that includes a Hackathon and a Policython to open up the challenges and to bring exchange of skills, through the involvement of an extended community of associations, active citizens and young emigrants from the South, who join together to develop or consolidate concrete project proposals.

Hackathons are open to any adult above 18 years old who wish to join a team in order to respond to proposed challenges.

Hackathons are immersive experiences guided and facilitated by mentors and experts following the design thinking processes.

The Policython is the section dedicated to secondary school students aged between 16 and 19 and aims to formulate and propose public policies.

Dati Storti is a project born out of the desire to tackle the data that show the South of Italy with the highest percentage of youth unemployment, environmental offences, early school leaving, cultural deprivation and lack of social services.

According to this goal, the aim is to facilitate the creation of social projects or social enterprises that tackle the main challenges.

The hackathon has different learning goals. It has been structured through a project-based learning process, using tools from design thinking following a framework based on the exploration of the problem, an ideation phase and a prototyping phase.

Conveying this process and its tools as an approach to tackle other social challenges is one of the main goals of Dati Storti.

Each Hackathon involved between 30-40 participants above18 years old: members of local associations dealing with the challenge, professionals or academics, young people who have emigrated from southern regions wishing to return to their own homeland, people from other places interested in the region or in the social challenge, active citizens of the area. Someone registered as individual, some did as a group.

The project has been launched in June 2021 and the first online event has been held from October 1^st to the 3^rd 2021 as an Online Hackathon. The second event has been held between December 3^rd and the 5^th as a hybrid hackathon with some teams online and some in a space in Naples.

The third event has been held online from March 10^th to 13^th just a as a Policython for schools.

The acceleration process is ongoing from November 2021 to June 2022.

Before each session there has been the public presentation of data about the challenge accessible through the website and social media.

In the days before the events, the challenge has been presented through Instagram streaming interviews with experts from local associations or national associations.

Participants who registered voluntarily to each event received a Starter Kit meaning a Google Drive folder containing information about the event and the process, report and data about the challenge and some interesting case studies.

All participants have been invited to join Slack, a messaging platform that has been used as main digital tool to manage the remote event

Slack has been structured in different channels such as Agorà (for general communication), Market (to facilitate the introduction of participants and the creation of teams), Tools (to suggest design tools) or Inspiration (to suggest some interesting project and case stuy). Apart from collective channels, each team had its own channel on the platform, as the main window of communication among members and with mentors and experts.

Along the whole hackathon, mentors facilitated the teams and met them through videocalls during 3 specific checkpoints dedicated to different phases of the process. A network of experts has been involved in specific moments for 30 minutes for each team.

By the end of the hackathon, each team had to produce a public presentation (Google slide or Canva) performed online in front of an external jury.

The teams proposed projects such as: products, spaces, physical and digital services that can be developed as social enterprises or civic activism projects.

During each hackathon, with the support of a Jury, 1 or 2 teams have been selected in order to follow an acceleration process with Scostumat* APS in the next months.

This follow up phase has involved monthly meetings, both workshops, discussions and checkpoints with expert mentors. This phase includes: interviews to assess the status of the project in order to identify and assign expert mentors who will follow the group; interviews with expert mentors and definition of timeline and progress steps; workshop about discovery and research with the community / human centered design, workshop about value proposition and economic sustainability model, workshop to co-design the product/service/experience, workshop to define a go-to-market strategy, workshop about the project’s storytelling.

Useful Links

datistorti.org

scostumati.org