Hello, my name is Alberto Cottica.

I work at the Council of Europe

on a project called EdgeRyders,

it is about the transition of young people

to an independent, active life.

If you look at the data,

young europeans seem pretty much like a lost generation.

Unemployment is very high,

and what’s worse, about one person in five

is not in employment, education or training.

This does not happen only in your early twenties.

It actually gets worse as you go towards your mid-thirties.

What we’re looking at here is a general loss of autonomy

of the adult population.

The young just happen to be in the line of fire.

But that’s not the whole story.

Europe, and indeed the world,

are full of extremely entrepreneurial, brilliant, generous,

talented, young people.

They find new paths to activism,

for example leveraging the diversity of backgrounds

of second and third generation europeans

to make society more open.

They start companies to build large-scale urban games

that are used to reappropriate public spaces

and use them in new ways.

They move to North Sea islands

to explore the way small communities

can switch to renewable energy sources,

finding a new sense of purpose as they do so.

And they make learning easier to access

by launching free, peer-to-peer, online schools.

These people don’t work together.

In fact, they’ve never even met.

But their activities seem to be connected

in a coherent picture.

And this picture is that of

the world we’ll all be living in tomorrow.

And by the way, though you certainly can view them as successful

they are by a measure of success

that is not the same as that normally accepted

by the society at large.

Many struggle to make a living

or have done so as they started their journeys.

Just like you and me.

How to make a living with integrity,

how to live the kind of life that we want,

how to have a say in our communities.

So many people in Europe and elsewhere,

young and not so young,

are thinking very hard about these problems,

and that makes them - us - the experts.

And when you pull together a lot of experts

what you have is a think tank.

EdgeRyders wants to be

the largest think tank in the world

on the youth’s transition

to an independent active life.

How does this work?

Well, it starts by exploring the transition space.

And that means sharing what we are doing

as we build our lives,

learning from each other,

and figuring out together what to do next.

There is a gaming element.

Society’s typically not generous with rewards

for young people’s efforts,

but we think it’s important to honour them.

So we do it with points and stuff like that.

The second step is to aggregate

the individual journeys into common solutions,

generate a policy vision,

and bring it to the attention

of the European and national authorities.

The space where we do all this

is an interactive online platform

called EdgeRyders,

developed here at the Council of Europe,

based on free software.

EdgeRyders is designed to be scalable.

So whether you’re a regional government,

a local authority,

a private or third-sector organisation,

if you care about this problem,

please come see us

and we’ll discuss possible partnerships.

Meanwhile, good luck with your journey.