The socioeco.org website is celebrating its third anniversary, and to mark the event, here is a brief overview of the project. Socioeco has continued to grow, with over 3,500 analysis documents, including 500 case studies, more than 1,000 identified publications and almost 180 SSE training courses. The site has five working languages, with two others currently being prepared. It is also progressing in terms of the number of visitors, which has tripled in three years, some of them surprised that so much is being written about the SSE. This was the very challenge we set ourselves: raising the profile of the wealth of initiatives, approaches, themes, authors, public policies and legislation that are out there. But what exactly does this SSE resource site offer?

  • information on SSE-related events throughout the world with a national or international scope;
  • a wide variety of documents: from learning tools in written or audio-visual form to academic research, including theses, in-depth articles, book reviews, speeches at events, proposals and charters;
  • summaries, titles, authors, etc. of the publications linked to SSE themes;
  • SSE training courses throughout the world;
  • the ESSglobal map, showing you the location of the initiatives near to where you live, already developed for three regions, France, Brazil and Quebec, and soon to be available for many other countries.

As everyone already using the site knows, all these resources are available in five languages: French, Spanish, English, Portuguese and Italian. Catalan and German will be added in 2015.

How is the information organized?

The idea is to provide as many as possible entry points for accessing the site’s content:

  • theme-based access: 10 themes, 45 sections and 189 keywords for a clear and detailed organization of information: solidarity finance, integration enterprises, short circuits, SSE legislation, etc.;
  • geographical access;
  • access via author: close to 3,500 authors are already present on the site;
  • access via conferences: this new section aims to provide a space for all the speeches made at SSE-related events;
  • two maps: one showing SSE initiatives and their contact details, the other displaying SSE training courses, case studies, descriptions of initiatives so they can be publicized, and theses describing specific cases of SSE experiments;
  • an SSE encyclopedia, Solecopedia, which includes definitions of a number of the site’s keywords: what is Community-Supported Agriculture? What is fair trade?

Partnerships with other information monitoring sites

There are plenty of other website that monitor SSE-related information or specific aspects of the SSE. One example is the RELIESS site, dedicated to public policies targeting the social and solidarity economy. Rather than duplicate the work this site does, socioeco.org has incorporated the RELIESS documents, which can be identified by their logo; visitors who click on these documents are immediately redirected to the RELIESS site. Socioeco.org also includes links to the Autour du 1ermai website, so that visitors can discover films specific to the SSE, as well as to Recma, the international social economy review. A link to a research site on complementary currencies will also be added this year.

Partnerships with the world of research

The Réseau Inter Universitaire de l’Economie sociale et solidaire, RIUESS, has chosen to add the contributions presented at its annual conferences to socioeco.org. This means that the documents are accessible from two different sources: the RIUESS website and socioeco.org, where documents can be accessed not via a conference, but also via theme-based or geographical keywords or via authors, so that anyone looking for a document does not have to remember the date of the event where it was presented.

Students are not forgotten on socioeco, which lists theses dedicated to the SSE so that visitors can benefit from this wealth of content. An online file also makes it easy for students to show what sort of thesis they are working on, and thus possibly collaborate with other students. This tool could prove to be very useful if developed further.

Projects for 2015 

First and foremost: add videos!!!! Because there is a whole series of interviews, documentaries and animated films to be listed. Another goal for this year will be to continue to enhance the site, including with the introduction of German to prepare for the Ripess Europe Congress, scheduled for September 2015 in Berlin.

Your involvement is vital to the development of the socioeco.org website. Don’t hesitate to share any documents you feel are important or that you have written, write a presentation for the author section to raise the profile of your work, and describe your initiatives.

The site is designed as a collaborative work tool: the more content is has, the more useful it will be.

Feel free to write to Françoise Wautiez: f.wautiez@socioeco.org.
Follow us on the socioeco Facebook page, dedicated twitter feed, socioecofr, and on scoop.it: http://www.scoop.it/t/economie-sociale-et-solidaire-a-l-international