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Phyrtual

An important lesson of the development of Phyrtual is the need for persistence in pursuit of an ambitious objective. Of course, this must be qualified because time, resources and university practices have played a clear role in Phyrtual.

Time is in fact a resource and for several years the organization had plenty of it to pursue the vision of Phyrtual with very limited financial, human and technical resources. This happened because the vision of Phyrtual comes from the field of innovation. Today in the age of social networking the time resource is extremely small and persistence may quickly lose sense if others with much greater resources arrive first. On the other hand, social networking allows for much better functionality and dissemination. 

Knowledge resources, particularly codified knowledge, have a crucial role in Phyrtual and this is something that comes from the de facto alliance between the Fondazione Mondo Digitale and the University of Edinburgh through the presence of a Professor of Technology Strategy as Scientific Director of the Foundation. The vision of Phyrtual as a knowledge-based, community-building environment for social innovation comes from theoretical and practical work started at the university. The Foundation has a policy of knowledge codification for its projects and this has provided the base to develop the knowledge dimension of Phyrtual. It is not common for a small non-profit organization to have a practice of knowledge-codification. At the Foundation this is possible because of its relationship with a University.