On 5 October 2017, participants of the 10th ALL DIGITAL Summit gathered for the ALL DIGITAL Awards Ceremony and 10 years celebration. The reception was held in the Paraguai Creativa Space in the centre of the Poblenou district, the tech neighbourhood of Barcelona – an unusual funky and quirky place, with various nooks, sculptures and constructions allowed for lots of group conversations and getting to know people.

The ceremony was hosted by Ekaterina Clifford and Peter Palvolgyi of ALL DIGITAL. The first part, the ALL DIGITAL Awards, celebrated the best individuals and projects working to improve digital skills in 4 categories:

• Best Digital Resource;
• Best Cooperation Project;
• Best e-facilitator;
• Best digital changemaker.

We would like to thank all those who nominated the projects and individuals for the Awards and shared those exciting initiatives and touching stories.

And now let’s get acquainted with our finalists and winners!

Best Digital Resource

The Awards in the Best Digital Resource category were presented by Krasimir Simonski, the first Chair of the Telecentre-Europe Steering Committee. The 2 finalist projects are:

• CoderToolkit by Digipolis Gent
• Get Smarter by Malta Communications Authority (MCA)

The WINNER in this category is Yep4Europe Methodology created by Yep4Europe Consortium, including Maks vzw from Belgium, El Teb from Spain, and Telecentar from Croatia. The methodology is aimed at facilitators across Europe, to teach young people digital and media literacy skills, to be able to use digital technologies to address the social issues around them. The core is the use of Digital Storytelling in a productive way, increasing citizenship and digital literacy.

Best Cooperation Project

The Best Cooperation Projects were to include at least 2 ALL DIGITAL member organisations. The finalists in this category were awarded by Ricard Faura, Head of Inclusion and Digital Training Service, Government of Catalonia.

The two finalist projects are:

• BRIGHTS: Boosting Global Citizenship Education using digital storytelling
• Innova’t

The WINNER is Generation 0101, which was implemented by 7 partners (5 of them are ALL DIGITAL members), with CTC Rijeka as a leading organization. The main outputs of the project are:

• Guidelines for policy makers in the context of dealing with youth unemployment;
• Development and testing of 7 educational modules in ICT field;
• 7 international hackathons in partner countries, where participants used gained knowledge by creating ICT solutions for social organizations.

The individual categories have always triggered a lot of interest from the public. E-Facilitators are in the frontline of digital inclusion working directly with users and supporting them, and digital changemakers are the leaders of the networks and initiatives to boost digital skills and ensure inclusion and effective support of citizens.

Best e-facilitator

While this year all the applications were assessed by the jury, the finalists in the Best e-facilitator category also joined the online public voting on our facebook page. The results of the jury and public votes for this category were combined.

The Awards for best e-facilitators were presented by Emili Giralt, projects director at Telapolis. The finalists in this category are:

• Katja Plesko – Programme Manager at Simbioza Genesis,  Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Tom Van Hoey – Trainer at Konekt, Ghent, Belgium

And the BEST e-FACILITATOR is Dolores Carmona, facilitator at Digital Literacy Programme of Extremadura – AUPEX,  Torremejía/Badajoz, Spain. In her 15 years of service, Dolores has conducted over 1000 workshops for about 10,000 people, being a trainer, coach, adviser, community manager, journalist.. She promotes the digital culture trying to build a cooperation environment and a deep sense of community where people feel comfortable and confident.

Best Digital Changemaker

The final category was Best Digital Changemaker, presented by Therese Jamaa, General manager of GSMA, Mobile World Capital.

The two finalists are:

• Olivera Stanić – Secretary and Director of Professional Service at Centre of Technical Culture (CTC) Rijeka, Croatia
• Ana Pleško – Director of Simbioza Genesis social enterprise, Ljubljana, Slovenia

The Best Digital Changemaker 2017 is Veronique De Leener – Director at Maks vzw, Brussels, Belgium. Veronique founded Maks in the poorest neighbourhood in Brussels to help people through social economy projects and digital skills. Every year Maks reaches 2.500 disadvantaged people; 500 of them are guided to employment. Veronique brought digital storytelling method to the core of the training as a way to give people voice about important social issues.

In her acceptance speech Veronique stressed that all the participants of the summit are digital changemakers, indeed.

Our warmest congratulations to all finalists and winners! We wish the projects further development and scalability and our e-facilitators and digital changemakers every success and best of luck in their endeavours!

To be continued…