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The paper aims to underline how active participation through digital storytelling is one of the cornerstones of social innovation that allows people to structure society in an alternative way and develops competencies and commitment to foster the growing of better citizens.

Melting Pro. Laboratorio per la cultura, a cultural organization based in Rome (IT), interprets active participation as a fundamental part of its own line of research by declining it in its project activities, according to several themes: training and learning, valorisation and preservations of heritage, enlargement and diversification of the public (audience development).

In this paper the starting point of the discussion are two projects run by the association, where digital storytelling is used as a main tool for civil participation as a mean of lifelong learning.

Diamond – Dialoguing Museums For A New Cultural Democracy is a two-year European funded project aimed at realizing science museum activities addressed to marginalized groups. It intends to do so by exploiting the enormous potential of museums as tools of empowerment and social inclusion and that of Digital Storytelling (DS) within the cultural and social domain.

Intus- Intelligenza ambientale, Narratività, Tagging delle risorse Urbane e Sensoristica diffusa is a national project that offers an innovative and technological solution for the creation of cultural tourism services based on experiential and personalized fruition of the places. The intention is to reveal the hidden level of identity specific to each site to engage visitors into a participatory story-telling adventure. Intus it is a replicable system devoted to the valorisation of heritage. It is tested on the towns of Corleone e Palermo using material coming from the CIDMA (international centre Anti-Mafia) related to the  Maxi Trial – Falcone & Borsellino. 

In both projects, participation through digital storytelling implies tight involvement, allowing participants to have a say in the way questions and projects are shaped. The results typically better reflects customer needs, generating useful information and creating a feeling of involvement and ownership that is often felt lacking in traditional approaches to civic engagement. In this context, stories told and recorded become essential tools to stay alive and to give continuity to the past, giving the chance to keep memories and to grow individually and as community at the same time, providing answers to the major challenges of the world on the one hand, and to individual needs on the other.