Description

SpONSOR is a project within the Ambient Assisted Living programme that brings together partners from Luxemburg, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland. The project aims at developing, testing and implementing an ICT platform that facilitates the posting, browsing and exchange of key information between competence-offering seniors and search-based requests, from competence-demanding organisations from the public, private and voluntary sectors.

Each end-user organisation will be taken into account according to its context, mission and characteristics, and will be able to configure SpONSOR in its own terms by implementing those services best suited to meet their end-users requirements and preferences.

The platform is supposed to be deliberately grounded and located within localities and communities and thus having a predominantly local or regional nature, and easily run on that basis towards a full integration within each partner end-user organisation. Many of these mediating organisations operate within social entrepreneurship models, such as a no profit association or cooperative, and some of them will eventually act as local SpONSOR providers to such end-user organizations.

In summary, SpONSOR is more than just a matching platform as it aims at innovating through the integration of various co-dimensions:

• services to help and advise seniors in their quest for occupation, proximity-wise or at a broader level, through the mediation of senior-oriented organisations;
• the development of a proactive support activity comprising the steering of the platform through social media and special events targeting both seniors offering competences and firms on the demand-side as a means to build as quickly as possible a network of partners;
• the customisation of the platform and its uptake by all sorts of local organisations, either already involved in senior occupation or new to it but motivated, or social entrepreneurs who want to develop such a service in their local context;
• semantic flexibility to make the labelling and classificatory schemes evolving and even learning processes thanks to the inputs of the users;
• the taking into account of diminishing capacities and search for solutions of various kinds to help the senior prolong his/her occupational activity.