By Françoise Wautiez, manager of the socioeco.org website
As you may know, the website socioeco.org is a database of documentary resources on the SSE. It has the particularity to be in 5 main languages: French, English, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, thus giving a wide range of contents. The pages are not translations of each other, each is autonomous and contains its own content. In addition to these 5 main languages, you will also find documents in Catalan, Greek, German, Dutch, Polish, Slovak, Czech, Russian, Romanian and Basque.
Collaborations with other sites
Created 10 years ago, the site has over 35,000 references on the SSE. To do this, over the years, collaborations with other databases related to the social and solidarity economy have been set up. Currently, socioeco.org provides access, in addition to the references collected through its documentary watch, to those of 18 other sites. For example, the RECMA site, Jean-Louis Laville’s site, the CDTM‘s documentary resources on fair trade or the films on the SSE identified by Autour du 1er mai. Or international sites such as CIRIEC International or the United Nations SSE Knowledge Hub for the SDGs.
To do this, simply use the search engine and the results will unfold with the logo of the original site and by clicking on the link, the Internet user will be taken to the latter.
What types of resources?
The resources are varied: publications (books), analyses, descriptions of initiatives, descriptions of public policies, pedagogical tools, SSE training courses, student theses, legislation, videos, etc., classified by major themes and files. Key words and a search engine make it easy to navigate from one document to another.
Site traffic
It is not very easy to account for the public that uses socioeco.org. The number of visits has been increasing every year since its creation, reaching 310,000 in 2019, with a drop during the pandemic. In addition to the 30,000 downloads recorded for the same year. That is 1.5 million visits since 2011. France, the United States and Colombia are the main countries of origin, with a clear upturn recently in Spain, most probably thanks to the fact that REAS regularly relays the site’s progress.
A lot of dissemination work remains to be done. However, the collaborations I will mention below show a certain degree of recognition of the work done and the richness of the site.
A collaboration with the United Nations
On the “Legislation” page of socioeco.org, legislations found during the documentary watch or with the help of Yvon Poirier has been compiled for many countries on the five continents. Framework laws (and/or their draft laws), more specific laws (on SCICs for example), application decrees.
The United Nations Task Force on SSE (UNTFSSE) has been interested in this compilation work in the framework of drafting a background paper on public policies in favour of SSE. Socioeco.org has proposed an independent “Legislation” page, which can be accessed directly from the top bar of the homepage. I proposed to organise this new page also according to the scope of the law (national or regional). As well as resolutions and declarations concerning SSE from international bodies, such as the UN itself, FAO and ILO. For Europe and Latin America, the continental scope allows to include standards, guidelines and regulations concerning SSE. It was decided that UNTFSSE members will add to the page to enrich it. The TF logo is on the top right to illustrate this collaboration.
In addition, the search engine can also be used to enter “association“, for example, thus giving access to all the legislation on the site relating to associations throughout the world.
An invitation as a documentation centre
I was invited to present socioeco.org at the Day of Documentation Centres in Social Economy and the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the CIDEC Documentation Centre of the Universitat de València and CIRIEC (19 November 2020 – videoconference). As a result, CIDEC‘s virtual library was added to the databases referenced on socioeco.org in early January 2021.
Launch of the La Fabrique des Transitions website (early October 2020)
The Fabrique des Transitions (Transitions Factory) is an alliance of actors and networks: local authorities, civil society organisations, enterprises, resource centres, research and training centres, government agencies and structures; united by the conviction that territories are major players in the transition to sustainable societies; willing to share their experiences and thoughts and to put them at the service of territories that want to engage in a global transition process; sharing the ambition to bring about a change of scale in the transformations underway.
Socioeco.org is one of the main resource sites of the site. The work of extracting resources from other databases, carried out by Vincent Calame of Exemole, is based on work carried out by Vincent on the socioeco.org site
Internally: relaying RIPESS Europe projects
The completion of three main projects marked 2020 and 2021:
– the VET2 project: Following a first Erasmus+ project in 2016-2018, SSEVET2 – Strengthening SSE Trainers’ Capacities in Vocational Education – aims to contribute to innovation in vocational training programmes and to design a course and the constitution of a community of trainers in 6 European countries.
– BUSSE (Building Up Social Solidarity Economy) project: aims to disseminate SSE know-how and practices in Central and Eastern Europe, through the development of training and thematic publications.
– the AJITER project: led by Ufisc, France, the project aims to facilitate the reception of young adults and their initiatives in rural areas, guaranteeing a capacity to reinvent a shared living together and territorial and social equity, to renew solidarity, to organise the common, and this, among other things, through culture.
All the educational material from these projects can be found on socioeco.org, in English or in the original languages of the countries that participated.
Mapping of members
An important tool for a network is to be able to visualise its members and the work themes of each one. It is thus possible to find on socioeco.org the cartography of RIPESS Europe members, with its 43 members in total, their files in French, English and Spanish, as well as the members of some of the networks, the MES, for example.
In the long run, this should enable organisations or networks to contact other members to collaborate on projects: for example, Cnam, a member of RIUESS, is looking for a collaborator in Croatia, a member of RIPESS Europe.
This same work is underway for RIPESS International.
Let’s go back to the international level
In 2020, I was part of the jury for the “competition” of the Atlas of Utopias, a very beautiful international initiative that has been collecting initiatives on 4 major themes since 2018: water, housing, food and energy. This results in a feature article for the “winners” that presents the initiatives, which you can also find on socioeco.org.
For Latin America, a collaboration has been established on feeding the map of pedagogical tools with the usual literature watch, plus those collected on a Campaign SSE Curriculum Global form. A new map is in the pipeline to visualise transformative educational initiatives for the next World Social Forum.
For Asia, close collaboration with RIPESS Intercontinental member Denison Jayasooria (Malaysia) of ASEC has resulted in several training courses and symposia being posted online, organised as part of the SSE Academy which brings together different countries.
Several African RIPESS INT member countries are protagonists of the ACCD project. The results, descriptions of SSE advocacy tools in different parts of the world, will be relayed on the website and probably on the public policy mapping.
What’s next ?
The avenues for future work are many and varied. For example, the development, based on the European projects mentioned above, of online training courses, which would use the Moodle platform. I will report on these developments in a future article.
See you on socioeco.org!
