Hospitalet 6.0 is the alliance between the City Council of the second largest city in Catalonia and the Mobile World Capital Barcelona Foundation to fight for digital inclusion in the densely populated city bordering Barcelona. Although it had been devised for a long time, the agreement to fight against digital divides was officially signed a year ago now. After a start that was somewhat more theoretical than practical, in which an extensive x-ray of the situation in the city of 256,444 inhabitants was carried out, this year its promoters intend to take more action and begin to see the effects.
During this year and next, a specially equipped shipping container in collaboration with the local association Contorno Urbano will travel to various parts of the city on an itinerant basis. It will be a point of learning about new technologies. Its objective will be, first of all, to resolve doubts in situ on aspects related to the digital field. It also wants to channel the population towards the catalog of training possibilities that are available in the city.
The container will visit streets, parks, squares or markets to attract unorganized groups, those who are outside of associative movements and who are always more difficult to reach. Precisely, Contorno Urbano, which began by painting graffiti to give color to gray spaces in the metropolitan area, has already restored a container in l'Hospitalet. It was a pioneering idea that managed to turn into a flourishing social meeting point what until then was a completely degraded space and a focus of neighborhood problems on the limits of the Florida neighborhood. The transformation of the old landfill won one of the La Caixa Foundation awards for Social Innovation.
This is not the only initiative about to start. Another of them is a training program for people over 55 years of age in which the teachers will be people from the group itself in an attempt to create local references closer to the population than foreign visitors. The MWC has been the moment chosen to give the guidelines to the trainers. The topics to be discussed will be defined by the community itself based on its needs. During the MWC, a pilot project carried out in collaboration with the Bellvitge hospital will also be presented, which aims to improve the lives of some patients with technology.
Until the end of the year, on the other hand, there will be specific training for teachers in information management and disinformation, one of the main needs detected both by those responsible for the l'Hospitalet project and by the Digital Future Society (DFS ).
The actions are being defined after carrying out a study presented at the end of last year, which through 2,000 surveys revealed that 45.5% of people over 75 residing in l'Hospitalet do not have internet access at home. Normally, most of these studies put everyone over 65 in the same bag and do not disaggregate from that age.
"It was essential to make this x-ray to understand the magnitude and type of digital divide in the city, although in the end no relevant differences are appreciated with other cities and the same recipes can be transferred", consider the promoters of the set of actions grouped under the heading name of L'Hospitalet 6.0. From this field work it is concluded that there are older people who do not want to connect and this must be understood. For the rest, they want to advance in the digitization of the city in the fairest way, without leaving anyone behind.
