Maristella Berlato, who represented a group of students from the IIS Pacinotti School in Taranto, won the Italian session of the My e-Participation Story Contest, launched for e-Participation Day 2015, an initiative that was held simultaneously in 11 countries on May 7, 2015. The title of the Italian story is "Our E-participation Story: Taranto Waits for Answers."
The students tweeted with European MPs on the issue of the environmental pollution caused by the ILVA plants in Taranto and developed a video to document the beauty of the city and fight the negative image that the city is acquiring.
Some of the Tweets
@EleonoraEvi what if you were to lose a loved one due to a tumour caused by pollution? (Daily reality in Taranto)
@MassimoPaolucc6 what if you had to breathe red dust and clean your balcony every day? (Daily reality in Taranto)
On the E-Participation Experience
"This first e-participation experience was excellent. We loved the opportunity to expose our problems in Taranto, but also our hopes. We believe that these initiatives are useful and we hope that both local and international institutions will carefully analyse our situation.”
Other initiatives from Rome and Southern Italy also participated in the competition:
- Sergio Colella from Naples: used the Facebook "S.O.S. amici aiutiamoci tra di noi" group with over 34,000 contacts to solve daily problems, small and large alike.
- Ciro De Sio from Pontecagnano: always active on social media to denounce the state of the Pontecagnano Coastline, he launched a petition on the European portal to invest EU Funds to contrast marine erosion. His story is entitled "La scogliera che non c'è".
Ana Lain [Ana_fmd] was in Belgrade for the Annual Telecentre Europe Conference - Teac 2015: Digitally Empowered Europeans (September 24-25, 2015), where she exchanged views with representatives from other European countries suffering from the same problems:
- Low awareness of e-participation tools
- Mistrust in institutions
- Lack of communication
TEAC 2015 hosted a special session dedicated to Project e-Uropa, entitled “e-Participation in Theory and in Practice."
