Soria Living Lab

Collaboration @ Rural chooses Adema for a test

The local action group from Almazán, ADEMA, is one of the Spanish Rural Living Labs with Cudillero, another town from Asturias. These 2 LL have started in Spain under a new project related to the new technologies called Collaboration @ Rural (C@R).

Yesterday, José María Muñoz, Adema's manager, said that "The Project was introduced by an European consortium composed by 30 partners of 15 different countries, and it obtained a subvention of 8,6 million euros from the European Commission”.

The Collaboration@Rural project, which will be three years long and will count on a budget of 15 million euros, is going to be carried out with the motto “Collaborative platform development in order to facilitate the work and the life in the rural areas”. The project will provide an internet platform that will make easy the collaboration in the rural communities. At the same time a common methodology will be developed in order to introduce and run the “Rural Living Labs”.

Insisting on this aspect, Muñoz mentioned that “the idea of these laboratories is to start up some test cases about new Technologies, so they could be applied to another places. In fact, the promoters define these laboratories as user oriented real life research context, where people, business and public agents are involved in order to create together, services that will motivate rural development.

In our case, in Spain, two places have been chosen: the south of the Soria province that corresponds with the Adema performance environment; and the Cudillero municipality, in Asturias”, he clarified, emphasizing “the main objective of this initiative is to develop methods and technologies that allow inhabitants in rural areas to participate completely in knowledge-based society like citizens and professionals”.

In this sense, the Adema's manager explained that “the intention of Cudillero municipality is to work inside this Project in issues related to sea fishing, applying new technologies to ships and fish commercialization markets. However, in Adema, we will work about these new technologies applied to issues as tourism and, specially, mycology, creating several technical supports to serve in forest keeping at a first moment. We will also prepare the technical tools to start up the mycological marketplaces in the future.”

Muñoz emphasized that the final goal of this Project is ”to cause an impact on the rural political development, something expected to happen when we start to count on the first tangible results, such as the creation of new businesses or public collaborative services offered to the rural areas citizens”, and also he added that “the idea is to involve political estates from a first moment”.