'Common Good First' project meeting in Glasgow

Last week representatives from universities in Europe and South Africa met at Glasgow Caledonian University to discuss Social Innovation and Digital Storytelling in the framework of the Erasmus+ project Common Good First, coordinated by GCU and in which the University of Alicante is a partner as leader of the Quality Monitoring work package. The UA was represented by OGPI senior project manager Cristina Beans. The consortium was also joined by the EU appointed Project Officer from Brussels and a representative from the Scottish Government’s Department of Social Enterprise, Social Innovation and Social Investment, who are also contributing funding to the initiative.

Common Good First is a digital project which will link community projects in South Africa to each other and to higher education institutions around the world using a web-based knowledge bank and innovative digital storytelling solutions. Common Good First will identify community projects and work with them to promote their objectives online and to investigate how the academic network could input innovative approaches to social change in response to the challenges the projects are facing. 

The aim of the three-day session was for the team to make progress on planning the digital storytelling modules, which are to be piloted at South Africa’s Rhodes University and University of South East Norway; to develop the approach for project selection across South Africa; and to consider the logistics of the platform build, which will take place in Cape Town early next year.