PIE News. A public design project toward commonfare

The new poor are a group of people composed by precarious workers,
working poor, NEETs, and people left behind by the safety nets, accounting
for approximately 25% of the European population. Commonfare is a new
collaborative form of welfare provision based on equitable governance and
grassroots democracy, entailing the involvement of diverse stakeholders to
facilitate the bottom-up emergence of collective practices tackling the needs
of the new poor. The paper mainly describes the concepts and building
blocks of the PIE News project, a public design project which started in July
2016 with the aim to foster the emergence of commonfare as an alternative
model to satisfy the needs of the new poor. PIE news leverages on 3 pilots
(Italy, Croatia, Netherlands) with grassroots organizations in order to create
a commonfare model through the development of a Collective Awareness
Platform and a Digital Currency tool. The network supporting the project is
constituted by organizations that account for approximately one-hundred
thousand social media contacts. These organizations include ethical
banking, networks of associations, activists for basic income, and many
others. Finally, the paper briefly presents some results of the project at one
year from its start.