With Garzón

Available article in Spanish and Català

Olga Fernández Quiroga

Pharmaceutical journalists, “reporters quoted and active citizenship

Available article in Spanish and Catalan .

Cibernàrium: 10 years on.

Monday, July 13th; the day to celebrate the 10th anniversary  of Cibernarium , the first Barcelona multispace devoted to technological promotion with the specific mission to promote information an communication technology among citizens, professionals and companies. There are different events all day round although I can only attend the last minutes of a round table on “Young entrepreneurs: 2.0 projects in the internet” chaired by  José Manuel Pérez Tornero, Professor of Journalism and Communication Sciences at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Genís Roca, Director at Roca Salvatella. I can also attend two lectures; one by Sixto Arias, General Director of Mobext (Group Havas), “The best prophet is the past: 10 years of internet in Spain in 10 words” and the other by Enrique Dans, Professor of Information Systems at the IE Business School, “Future Scenarios in the web: genesis or apocalypses”. 

          

Health and participation in health issues are not discussed. Reference is made to the web, its function, its history, what its future could be, how people are protagonist there, about creativity and about participation. These last discussions were of interest to the e-Criterium team. Eventually, our philosophy is  based in believing in people, in ourselves, as effective and potential change agents and in the web as a tool. A “powerful tool” -was said- where “we will recognise the best and the worse of human beings”. We are aware as citizens we must be held responsible for our actions and their consequences both positives as well as negatives. Just because of that we are on the side of those who want to preserve the web as a space for freedom, creativity and discussion.

We value this responsibility and we think when people criticize is because something is not working properly or simply does not work or because information is not available to understand why it is working in some way and not in another. However, people also praise, congratulate and highlights what is working properly and specially people are generous providing their own ideas. Generosity of time and effort for the common good has always been there; now the web offers the opportunity of multiplying its effects, its visibility, and the possibility of sharing with millions. And sharing all experiences do more than adding them, it creates new knowledge; it is collective knowledge for the health of the community.

We would like the web to be a space to generate ideas to be used in the improvement of the health system and to benefit them all.

And that will be our value. The value of people who believes that belonging to a health system is something more than owning a health card or holding a contract. People who believe that health institutions were are and will be the result of citizenship to serve citizens. Citizenship is what we have in common and as citizens we build our institutions as we believe they should be.

I was happy to verify we share with those who know well the last trends in the web the idea of a free and generous social net where our citizen’s rights can be used to promote participation to guarantee democracy. 

Olga Fernández Quiroga