Here you find the link to the electronic complete version of the article while the English version follows below: please enjoy and keep supporting Dot 2.0!

Innovation

Research, hope is in the web

Dot 2.0, scientists leap forward: it is born the virtual department

Paolo Napolitano* Alessandro Cozzutto*

"Share and grow" because social sciences count, this is the motto that sums up the philosophy of Dot 2.0, Virtual Department of Political and Social Studies, a blueprint devised, financed and engendered by some young graduates enrolled for PhD at Turin State University, with the purpose to share brainstorming,  schemes and assets circulating within the academic world and beyond...

Officially started off on last February, 11, the Virtual Department of Political and Social Studies is the no-setting where to spread scientific multimedial, freely available contents, released under Creative Commons license, the tool thought up in 2001 within the informatic arena to allow authors of creative works (software, video, music, literature etc.)to branch out the anacronistic stretches of copyright safeguarding, granting to users/consumers the freedom to copy, distribute and modify their creations.

Dot 2.0 (dotduepuntozero.org) is envisioned therefore with the purpose to cluster multimedial contents triggered by scientific research in the field of social sciences and committed to spreading and promotion of the results of that research:  videos, documentaries, interviews, scientific and media articles, meeting and lesson podcasts, in addition to a string of enterprises more specifically relating to the Torinese environment. Some instances: the series of meetings "The Senses of Politics" ( that is politics scanned through the five senses construed as tools of true and real political creation), Civic Education seminars for Turin elementary schools about the democracy issue, the video of the meeting held by the Wu Ming writers collective, the partnerships set in with the Polytechnic research center"Nexa", with the "Libera" university aid, and with the "Scuola Holden" in Turin.

Dot 2.0 is spawned by a communicative and relational want in the attempt to overcome that being in a cast that often hinders university research in Italy, presently sorted out through a logic typical of watertight compartments: scanty communication, little availability and mostly the irksome gap between the academic world and the social setting that is targeted for survey.

The logic underlying Dot 2.0 is rather that of communicating vessels: a panel in ongoing progress talking over, cooperating, suggesting undertakings in the academic and civic compass but most of all sharing what it brings about. A look on issues and problems of wide-ranging span but unfailingly implemented on the urban fabric: a purposeful and progressing attempt of its promotors to monitor daily the complexity of social, political and economical claims that social sciences are committed to fulfill.    

From political communication and electronic involvement, from public policies to parties and criminal coterie, the scientific research traditional issues are thought up according to a focus and observation point wittingly different, to provide public serviceableness to this kind of studies attempting to argue about them in an unusual and possibly innovative way.

As its members care to emphasize, the newborn Virtual Department is actually conceived not as a goal, rather like a tool available to scientific-social research: with the purpose of keeping in "real" touch people leaning toward research and eager to implement, more, and more cleverly, the new information and communication technologies; targeting spotlights at the daily life of social research Department; approaching professors, scientists and students on the basis of immediately available contributions; involving associations and research centers, insitutions and movements, artists and professionals, from whom Italian university all too often keeps afar.

The resolve to broaden its range of action to outside realities too and join like experiences already in progress elsewhere in Italy, grants that Dot 2.0 can be regarded as an "open source" scheme of social and political research, devoid of prefigured goals because it is the progressing reality to point out its path: an open blueprint and in relentless shape-action that can hold different remarks and contributions setting up its consistency on sharing.

Sharing, in fact, does not merely mean posting a contribution, but actively partaking in the creation and development of a concept, pledging time and effort in it, bringing to (virtual) availability all works spawned by the (real) daily cooperation.

The Virtual Department of Political and Social Studies is online. Share and grow: because social sciences matter.

* PhD fellows in Political Sciences and International Relations, University of Turin.         

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