The overall ambition of the PIE News project is to foster the emergence of commonfare as an alternative economic model to fight poverty, a condition affecting some 25% of the European population. Commonfare is a new collaborative form of welfare provision based on equitable governance and grassroots democracy. It entails the involvement of diverse stakeholders to facilitate the bottom-up arousal of collective practices tackling the needs of the new poor (precarious workers, working poor, NEETs, people left behind by safety nets). The consortium will achieve this goal through a Collective Awareness Platform (CAPS) which (a) informs people about existing welfare state provisions, (b) provides them with the means to share good practices on how to handle poverty-related issues, and (c) supports their abilities to network and to sustain real-life value. The project pioneers commonfare as a new social innovation goal by raising collective awareness on the threats connected to Poverty, lack of Income, and unEmployment (‘PIE conditions’), thus empowering the new poor and enabling the relevant stakeholders, e.g. polivcy makers, to tackle such threats more effectively. Three pilot actions (in Croatia, Italy, and the Netherlands) will drive the design and implementation of the PIE News project, triggering a public engagement process. PIE NEWS capitalizes on the collective power and skills of the ‘new poor’ promoting commonfare through actions that increase collective awareness on PIE Conditions. Such actions will be supported by an extensive dissemination strategy, including, e. g., open calls for the organization of bottom-up networking events. The PIE News platform will innovate the CAPS domain not only in terms of target population and, public design approach, but also by combining a reputation system as a way to remunerate labour with a digital currency as a mean of acquisition of good and services within and outside the platform.

PLUS aims to address the main features of the platform economy’s impact on work, welfare and social protection through a ground-breaking trans-urban approach. The project focuses on this specific and meaningful segment of the so-called Industry 4.0 revolution because it summarizes all main opportunities and challenges for the future of work, social innovation and a fair growth. The platform economy, indeed, is emerging as a strategic sector in terms of application of digital technologies, business investments and new jobs. The project’s goal is to sketch a picture of such transformations proposing an innovative approach that identifies urban dimension as fundamental stage for measuring and evaluating social and economic impact of these innovations and for building more inclusive policies. In this way, PLUS will contribute to fill a gap both in understanding and tackling challenges posed by digitization of labour. PLUS frames a ground-breaking grid of investigation that intertwines four disruptive platforms (AirBnb, Deliveroo, Helpling and Uber) and seven European cities (Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Lisbon, London, Paris, Tallinn). A multi-disciplinary legal, socio-economic, political, historical approach articulated in desk analysis, field research (both qualitative and quantitative), and action research (based on communities of practice, social laboratories and pilots-cases) will be adopted in order to foster new alternative scenarios that can contribute to promote social protection, economic development and well-being in digital labour. The project valorizes the role that different stakeholders could play in promoting and balancing such transformations. A bottom-up approach and techniques of co-creation will be adopted to produce outputs directly impacting on policy-making, market and welfare: innovative typologies of contracts, a Chart for digital workers' rights, taxation and regulation guidelines, social enterprise pilots and educational patterns for new skills