(Qui in Italiano)

With the onset of digitization, the landscape of memory has undergone changes that touch upon its most intricate and hidden meanings. With the widespread use of digital intelligence, the truthfulness and meaning of descriptions of the world and thought are put to ever-greater test.

In this context, what value do collections of documents, archives, materials, or websites that aim to serve as places for in-depth exploration and the exchange of reflective material acquire?

We ask ourselves this question, not only because as the Bassetti Foundation we are dealing with the enormous amount of material contained in Piero Bassetti’s archives, but also because this very website was created with the idea of preserving each article, video and image and curating their organization, re-presentation, and reuse.

The result is twenty years of web that not only provides information about the Foundation but also about the internet itself: from the early HTML pages to wikis and blogs, with underground experiments that often served as precursors, such as the linkography or the timeline. It is an archive that continues to grow with articles, interviews and documents about the topics we propose and address. We like to call it a Live-archive, due to its constant mobility.

In recent years, we have grown to consider the Foundation’s website as a kind of home base for a complex network of accounts scattered across the internet that include social media and platforms for audio, video, and photographic materials.

We have always believed that the internet could be a place for content-based discussion rather than just fast-paced dialogue. Resisting the trend to forcibly shorten texts and relegating quick communication to social media, we consider the website as a dinner table set for nourishment and dialogue, and the other accounts as invitations to join the feast.

The Live-archive has always been active. In the current version of the website its structure is simplified into three main sections, represented on the homepage by the first three photographs. These are three gateways: materials dedicated to presenting the Foundation, the Live-archive and a News section that informs readers about events or occurrences which lose their primary value once they become part of the past.

The section dedicated to presenting the Foundation explains how our activities aim to influence civil society. This landscape is described through six windows: The Foundation of Piero Bassetti, governing innovations in the civil economy, responsible innovators of the future, citizen engagement, seminars and presentations, and dialogue with institutions.

While our daily life is described in the first gateway, the heart and soul of the website is the Live-archive. This is a collection of in-depth articles, analyses, and studies that gather textual, audio-video and photographic materials from the extensive exchanges of ideas that have taken place within our Foundation over the last twenty years, centered around the theme of Responsibility in Innovation. All of these materials are accessible through various search options.

When reading an old article, it becomes clear that the topic may be far from fully addressed and that suggestions for future steps can be gleaned from it. Writing has often been steered by an awareness that the text would remain freely and indefinitely available and discoverable in the sea of the internet.

In conclusion, I would like to briefly present a contemporary aspect that we wanted to emphasize in our online presence, a sort of stance in envisioning the meaning of a website today. The aim of embracing Three Driving Forces was to offer a better perception of the website for visitors, to engage with the figures with whom we most often dialogue, and to present ourselves as a place for collective thinking: 1. Finding something new vs. feeling like you’ve missed something; 2. Your Desk-space; 3. The Cover Stories, which are the words of others (in other’s words).