SILC Exchange

SILC = Social isolation, loneliness and connection

Exchange – place /technical platform to meet and exchange ideas about loneliness, social connection and suitable interventions.

The one first component is an online meeting space – like a village well or village open space- which is open to anyone engaged in supporting endeavours against loneliness. It is there for members of GILC, Lonely EU, the social connection collective, the Allianz Gegen Einsamkeit to come to at opportune moments and meet other like minded people.

It is like a permanent running Zoom meeting with breakout spaces, so like a pub with lots of tables and side booths or snugs – tables set apart for specific conversations.

It is based on the German Platform Alfaview – so fully compliant with all the usual EU GDPR restrictions. And there is a downloadable app to stabilize the connection to the space.

The link to the platform is sent out bilaterally to participants of the Brunnenstunde, GILC members or other people specifically attending one of the get togethers.

The calendar on mobilizon

The second item is a publicly accessible calendar for events. Currently a lot of events are distributed via newsletters, groups, whatsapp channels and linkedin groups etc., but it is a bit of a hit and miss of who gets what. As the wordpress plugin for mobilizon is a bit … expansive in showing, the next calendar items are shown further down below on the website. But browsing the next events is anyway better on the website itself.

https://calendar.silc-exchange.com

The forum on discourse

There will be at some point also a SILC Forum based on Discourse, however there currently are still technical difficulties in setting it up. It is expected to be running reasonably smoothly within May 2026, but will start only slowly.

forum.silc-exchange.com

The plan forward

There is no grand plan forward, no separate community building etc.
The goal is simply to temporarily plug a gap and fill a need that is currently there. The expectation is that over the next two years either or even both GILC and Lonely-EU will have built enough capabilities for a full professional platform offering, and the goal is then to migrate the offering of SILC exchange unto that, or slowly grow this as the platform on which (some of) their operations run. There will not be a SILC exchange community.

The next events on SILC-Exchange