In the face of the many ecological, economic and societal uncertainties, our societies need a "landscape of desire" - in the words of Ernst Bloch - and new opportunities to project themselves into the future and take new paths. An ecological and social transformation of our society is already largely at work in all European territories, through thousands of initiatives. A new platform gives the opportunity for all organisations and actors of the transition to promote their actions more easily, through a new web portal.
After the map of France of alternatives by category of Bastamag, Launched in 2014, based on the reports made by their online newspaper, this is a new platform for identifying the many actors in the transition and the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) who promote alternatives, projects and solutions to create a fair and sustainable society.
Some are already identifying and mapping many of these actions and ecosystems. In the majority of cases this information is scattered over the sites of these organizations and does not show all that exists in terms of solutions.
After two years of work, a dozen associations (1) launch today Transiscope.org, a new web portal that makes visible all the alternatives, projects or places that participate in the development of an ecological and social transition. Food, health, climate, citizenship... Transiscope aims to highlight all these alternatives by displaying them on a single map, collecting already existing data. It is a citizen project which thus offers an unprecedented directory of contacts and allows connection to local alternatives. This platform, led by an inter-associative steering committee, takes the form of a website associated with a tool to connect the various existing databases.
Thanks to the platform everyone can find the actors and actions for the transition on his territory in a simple way to engage and participate:
- develop and tool our common: the software developed for the project is free, therefore reusable and improvable for other projects,
- Accelerating networking and synergies between initiatives in order to make alternatives visible to each other is a key factor for cooperation,
- visualize territories or issues that require the development of concrete alternatives which, by aggregating data, a more global analysis is made possible.
The platform aggregates citizen alternatives that constitute concrete responses to a systemic crisis. These alternatives seek to achieve one or more commonalities. They must prove by their governance, economic model, work organisation or investment choices that they are oriented towards the development of a common good and not towards the realisation of a particular interest.
The platform therefore promotes alternatives open to the public to share their knowledge, while affirming its refusal to integrate any violent, discriminatory, anti-democratic, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic or racist behaviour.
The platform responds to a growing need for clarity and accessibility in the world of alternatives without requiring more work from the organisations, projects or actors who develop these initiatives thanks to innovative technology. Its ambition is to soon propose an agenda of events that act in favour of the transition of our society.
The project is carried and largely financed by a collective of ten citizen associations that pool their databases and work hand in hand to develop this innovative and open source tool.
(1) Atlernatiba, MES, Hummingbirds, Utopia, Virtual Assembly, Cape or Not Cape, RIPESS, CAC, WARN, CRID
