Families_Share: digital and social innovation for work–life balance

Purpose The European H2020 Families_Share project aims at offering a grass-root approach and co-designed platform supporting families for sharing time tasks related to childcare, parenting, after-school leisure activities other household tasks. To achieve this objective, the has been built on current practices which are already leveraging mutual help support among families, such as Time Banks, Social Streets self-organizing networks of parents active neighbourhood level seek harness potential ICT mobile technologies increase effectiveness participatory innovation. aim paper is present discuss methodology platform, well results obtained by several partecipating communities in different countries. Design/methodology/approach This discusses how Families Share (CAPS project, Horizon 2020) bringing economy childcare. developed co-caring digital welfare with activities. conducted two iterative pilot experiments socio-economic evaluations six cities. More than 3,000 citizens were engaged co-design process through their local community organizations more 1,700 children actively experimented organizing collaborative childcare authors challenges solutions co-designing socio-technical aimed facilitating socially innovative models, approach, based technology-supported co-production may provide new sustainable model municipalities companies respect life––work balance. Findings technological tool work–life Originality/value As main difference state-of-the-art proposals, organization self-managed activities, way being orthogonal either social-network functionalities or supply demand services. Furthermore, participative both overall structure.