Health, cybersecurity and green are the priorities of DigitalMeet 2022

Health, cybersecurity and green were the priorities of DigitalMeet 2022, the largest Italian festival on digital literacy for citizens and businesses, organized by Fondazione Comunica and I-Center Tag which closed its doors with a “more than positive” balance sheet. This year’s edition in fact saw 110 events, 210 speakers, 70,000 participants, including people in attendance and online, and the festival recorded about 15% more in succession than in 2021, a symptom, according to the organizers, that the pandemic has given a strong acceleration to digitization and also to the paradigm shift for the public who have rediscovered the pleasure and advantages of the ‘agile life’ by preferring remote participation in public events. DigitalMeet, ahead of its time, has in fact organized almost all the events with a double possibility of use, through streaming coverage on the festival’s social platforms. Gianni Potti, founder of DigitalMeet, in announcing with satisfaction the numbers of this tenth edition, commented that the event “marked a clear break between the before and after the pandemic. If in 2020 and 2021 to make the events was a necessity, this year even though there is not the same contingency, the online presence has continued to grow, although not at the expense of the physical one. This is proof that the digitization of events is an increasingly marked phenomenon also in Italy ” .Three lines along which this ten-year edition has developed: “health and digital”, “digital and energy” and “digital and everyday life”. Virtual medicine, Metaverse – and its potential in the fields of fashion, culture, sport, education – were the topics most followed by the public. The combination of “telemedicine and health”, as new frontiers of well-being, followed by the theme on energy communities and sustainability applied to digital, and by the focus on the world of small and medium-sized enterprises and digitization, as well as that of smart cities, the driving events that have received great feedback and following from the public. Just as much curiosity and interest attracted the innovative focus on the relationship between telemedicine and cybersecurity. Many insights are proposed for the 2022 edition of DigitalMeet. In particular, great attention was paid to the two researches with which the festival opened and closed the works, which concerned the business world on the one hand and the sustainability of digital infrastructures on the other. The first research, presented in the Senate in Rome on the occasion of the press conference to launch the festival, entitled “2012-2021: ten years of digital businesses in Italy” was conducted by Professor Paolo Gubitta of the University of Padua in collaboration with InfoCamere analysts. The study investigated the evolution of digital businesses, their territorial distribution, the explosion of some professions (+ 204% employees in the e-commerce sector). Summary of a decade to analyze how digital is mending the country where the South in the period 2012 – 2022 recovers part of the delay and sees the sector grown in particular in Campania. The second research entitled “The sustainability of digital: the role of data center “was conducted by the Department of Economics and Business Sciences” Marco Fanno “of the University of Padua – responsible for Professor Marco Bettiol, Professor Eleonora Di Maria, Professor Valentina De Marchi, Linda Cerana. The research focused on the environmental impacts related to the use of digital technologies, with a focus on data centers, to provide guidance to the public administration towards a more sustainable management of their digital infrastructures.