Introduction
SOILTRIBES Bootcamp #1 – Porto, Portugal
The first SOILTRIBES Bootcamp marks the launch of a European journey to reimagine how we understand, care for, and govern soil. Titled “Reimagining Soil Literacy & Soil Culture,” this event invites participants to weave together scientific, civic, and artistic perspectives on soil.
More than a training, the bootcamp is an immersive co-creation space designed to generate new ways of knowing and acting on soil justice. It focuses on the early stages of the SOILTRIBES co-creation process: setting the context, making sense, and ideating.
A participatory, arts-based learning loop
The bootcamp is structured around a cycle of sensing, deliberation, and digital activation:
1. Sensing & Storying Soil
Storytelling, mapping, and creative exercises to surface diverse knowledge, struggles, and cultural relationships with soil.
Arts-based tools—drawing, theater, soundwalks—help bring forward invisible or marginalised perspectives, including those of non-human actors.
2. Deliberation & Co-Design
Participants split into small circles to deliberate on key soil justice issues: access, contamination, ownership, biodiversity, and more.
Using deliberative formats, groups co-design proposals, policy actions, and practices of collective care for the land.
3. Prototyping & Digital Activation
Narratives, governance ideas, and policy proposals generated during the bootcamp are uploaded to the SOILTRIBES Decidim platform.
This digital layer ensures continuity: outputs can be refined, commented on, prioritized, and followed up by a wider community beyond Porto.
Details
How the challenges were selected
Ahead of the event, SOILTRIBES launched an open call for soil challenges. Members of the Community of Practice proposed pressing dilemmas around soil literacy, soil culture, and governance. From this open pool, a set of challenges were selected to frame the Porto bootcamp.
👉 Explore the selected challenges here
Why join?
Cross-pollination: Work alongside farmers, community actors, artists, researchers, and digital democrats.
Translocal impact: Engage in challenges that connect local struggles with European and global soil debates.
Blending methods: Experience how artistic, scientific, and policy-based tools can unlock new visions of soil governance.
Lasting impact: Shape ideas that live on through the SOILTRIBES platform and feed into broader policy dialogues.
Objectives
The objective of this first SOILTRIBES Bootcamp is to create a shared foundation for reimagining soil literacy and soil culture through dialogue, creativity, and collaboration. Specifically, the event aims to:
Build a common language across disciplines and practices, connecting farmers, researchers, artists, policymakers, and civic actors.
Surface and exchange diverse ways of knowing soil—from scientific insights to cultural memories and community practices.
Identify and work on pressing soil challenges that will shape the wider SOILTRIBES process.
Experiment with deliberative and arts-based methods that can open new pathways for soil governance and ecological democracy.
Ensure that the ideas generated are captured and shared digitally, so they can inspire and connect with other regions and future bootcamps.
Select four challenge teams from the Community of Practice, each of which will receive a €5,000 grant. These teams will begin developing their ideas during Bootcamp 1 and continue advancing them in Bootcamp 2, moving from ideation to concrete prototypes.
Gathering Venues
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Porto
Porto
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09:00 AM
-09:15 AM UTC
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