Internet as a participative tool for the young people of the Adriatic region

COPEAM was invited by the Municipality of Reggio Emilia (Italy) - international relations and cooperation branch “Reggio nel Mondo” - to participate in the event “Brain runner. Internet, multimedia re-use and participative culture” organized from the 20^th to the 28^th April in Reggio Emilia. This event was focused on innovation and new cross-media languages in the education and information fields, in the organization of citizen services and in the territory governance. In this framework, COPEAM was asked to coordinate the two-day workshop “Mind the differences” (27-28 April), representing the final step of a project carried out by the inviting Municipality and funded by the Emilia Romagna Region within the Agreement of the local authorities of Emilia Romagna for the Balkans. The project was aimed at creating bridges between Emilia Romagna and the Balkans through the organization of activities involving young people from different cities: Parma, Reggio Emilia, Modena and Ravenna (Italy), Novi Sad and Kragujevac (Serbia), Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Tirana (Albania). The final workshop gathered a group of 20 young people coming from those cities with the purpose of identifying the potentialities offered by the web to enhance the active participation of the youngsters in their communities and to improve the international networking. Mr. Marco Nassivera, editor-in-chief of ARTE reportage, was the expert chosen by COPEAM to show to the workshop’s participants some examples about the traditional information changes and the opportunities the cross-media languages offer to create new and participative way of telling the present, like the web-doc. At the end of the seminar, the project of a common “Adriatic” web platform – that will be soon on-line – was drafted by the participants, as a tool to portray their respective communities and countries from the youth’s point of view.