The political side of DiDIY

In the last days I attended two political events, where I had been invited to give talks on the innovation related to and triggered by digital manufacturing. In both cases my presentation emphasized that a significant novelty of what is happening is that the (possibly) forthcoming industrial revolution has (also) bottom-up drivers (the example of Raspberry Pi Zero, a computer priced 5 euros, impressed the audiences), and that the Digital Do It Yourself phenomenon is an excellent case of this.
Then, both events have been an opportunity to present our DiDIY Project, its background and its aims.

The positive reactions I have got from my talks are more and more convincing me that what we are doing, and are expected to do, for exploring, understanding, and providing guidelines for the “human-centric digital age” through the lens of DiDIY could be really significant.
In this perspective, interacting with politics is more than just one more possible target: it can become an effective enabler.

Hence, this is not only a short report, but also the invitation to propose creative ideas about how to further follow this path!

(For the sake of completeness: the two events I mentioned have been a meeting of the Italian representatives of the democratic party in the European parliament and the congress of the representatives of research and innovation institutions of the Lombardia region, currently governed by a center-right coalition: a bipartisan situation…)