LabMeeting 2015 Madrid: Reflections from the Lab movement

The LabMeeting 2015 took place in Madrid from September 22^nd to September 24^th 2015.

The LabMeeting 2015 took place in Madrid from September 22^nd to September 24^th 2015. This 3-day workshop organised by Karin Ohlenschläger and hosted by MediaLab Prado aimed to explore of the origins and the development of the Lab movement in Spain and Ibero-America.

Over 70 participants from Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador and Mexico actively joined this workshop that brought together activists, researchers, representatives from Academia, artists, public institutions and lab managers representing media, hack, fab, city, maker and Living Labs, including some networks. From the Living Lab community Barcelona Laboratori and Citilab Cornellá were actively present. ENoLL participated and coordinated one of the parallel workshops related to the value of lab networks and the different cooperation models.

The event looked at the lab movement mainly from the perspective of the art, the artists and the digital culture.

Main commonalities among all the labs were the incorporation of training/educational activities, production, experimentation and communication as working lines; the multi and trans-disciplinary (mainly artists, researchers and engineers) extended to a more multi-stakeholder approach in some cases (in particular opening the processes to citizens, and also covering public-private-citizen collaboration); the embracement of the open and the commons; the empowerment of innovation communities; the focus not only on the production but also and more importantly the collaborative process, and; focus and capability working in areas of uncertainty.

Around 30 different labs presented their cases from their own context, purpose and historical moment.

Barcelona Laboratori, innovating from the institutions, presented its case as a city open Innovation ecosystem with strong citizen and cultural participation: a Lab of Labs. They also emphasized the need to involve public institutions when experimentation happens in public spaces.

Citilab Cornella made a contribution about how to develop citizen laboratories through the protocol to be established in between the lab and the citizens. They also emphasized the territorial impact of the labs, and the need of the citizen laboratories to be considered when defining local strategies for structural funds.

The general debate covered important aspects such as the link between the lab and the physical space and the territory, the sustainability, the governance, the protocol in between labs, the role of public administrations and policies, how to connect the decision making and the implementation, and the impact generated. The debate was also extended the last day to the technological sovereignty around the Internet and the smart cities in particular in Latin American Countries. At a city level, and focused on the citizen laboratories, the debate also covered centralised versus distributed structures of labs and the value of re-using and transform existing cultural and open spaces to act as municipal labs.

Other important contributions to the general discussions were the impact of the labs in territorial development, the strong contributions of the hack movement to the culture of the open and governance around it, the role of labs in the public policies.

All presentations and specific workshop reports can be found (in Spanish) here