Greece today is a nation-wide lab ripe for social innovation. In no other time, since Europe's Second Civil War, has Greece been tainted by such volume of unmet social needs. The call for solutions has been consistently falling on the state's deaf ears.
Despite all this and since the beginning of the crisis in 2008, Greeks have increasingly become agents of an almost spontaneous generation of ideas manifested across a variety of activist and entrepreneurial phenotypes of social innovation.
A platform on which the instigators of this infant spring of social innovation in Greece could find a niche to express, discuss and reflect on the particular nature of their issues at hand, could work miracles in galvanizing positive change within Greek society as a whole.
In a climate where austerity rules and risk taking is discouraged on all fronts, society is being starved of the most quintessential factor in any organic social interaction; the inherent and intentional risk as pre-condition of societal trust, the primary ingredient in any social contract.
If social innovation is evangelizing to reinstate the social at the heart of socioeconomic well being, then SIE forms a promise in forging that change. And this promise cannot be distant from a promise to instill renewed Trust in the hearts and minds of the people of Europe, not least for the ones who have little left to hope for, not least for your fellow Greeks.
Beyond all merit-worthy prototyping, matchmaking and modeling, skilling and scaling up of social innovation in Greece, the simple act of placing Greeks on a map, enabling them to see and perceive themselves on a shared space of shared values is bound to propel their social innovation to the next level. They have a deep sense of value in a welfare society but they are missing guidance out of the trauma induced by a failed welfare state, towards trusting the interactions between themselves and between their fellow Europeans.
Give Greeks a platform and they will come.
Essentially, for Greeks, the SIE website can become the territory.
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