💌 5x5:🌿5 Instants x 5 Months of my Charlemagne Prize Fellowship

📸 Laurel letter made with Grok AI

🌱During the last 5 months of my Charlemagne Prize Fellowship I was able to see my ideas grow like a laurel plant and it was beautiful, it was a real metamorphosis. From abstract to real. From dream to paper.

🌿I wanted to share that process with others, so I decided to capture 5 instants every month from May to November 2024. This resulted in a serie of 5 posts, published on LinkedIn, called "5x5". In each post, I included a few instants about my pro bono work (regarding young people and women) each month, as that was as important as my fellowship to me.

Such serie is now available in this post, which summarizes the titles of each article, available in full on LinkedIn:

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🇮🇹 #5th,Rhome: Published on the 25th of November, the International Day of the Elimination of Violence against Women. This article includes the final moments of the Fellowship, which happened in Autumn '24. These include: The EU Code Week in Brussels, The Freedom of Research Summit in Aachen (where I presented the results of my research, included also in the Report on the Future of the Union published in May 2025), The Berlin Conference, an interview for the Hertie School and my speech at Women x Impact '24 (In this case in my role as Italian Ambassador of Women in Immersive Tech, as this was the role I had at the conference also in '23). Later the same year, I also presented my research to an online meeting of ESA's ECSECO.

🎄It was wonderful to me to finish the year in Italy, as I was able to travel towards the end of the year to Milan, Rome and Naples: it really made me feel R(h)ome.

💌 Full article available here.

📸 This and the images below were made with Canva & Canva AI

(typos were left on purpose, nobody is perfect quoting Hannah Montana)

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🎲 #4th, God does not play dice: This article Contained 5 key moments in August and its title is a nod to one of Einstein's most famous quotes. I thought it was interesting to put this quote as a name for this article, as the last part of my research which was published in September deals also with game theory. In September the 5 instants you will find described in full below were: The publication of my 3rd working paper "From the United States to Europe: Collaboration is key for the metaverse to succeed", speaking about collaboration at Gatherverse's AI Evolve online Summit, speaking at the Global 5G Evolution event, joining the Europinion Institute for Research (EIR) as a Research Fellow to support young researchers pro bono and, lastly, speaking at Taranto Biotech Days with Womentech where I am a Young Ambassador.

🌌August was a very fun moment in time: it was really like throwing the dice and waiting to see what would happen next, knowing that all you have to do is trusting it will be ok.

💌 Available here.

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🪽#3rd, Angels roll their eyes: This article included 5 moments of July '24 which were particularly important. For instance, deciding to review my website, which I was keeping hidden during my fellowship. Indeed, to me writing on LinkedIn was a very convenient way of blogging, while I was covering the blog. At the same time, with the blog being out of the public eye, I used Instagram to test the theme of the blog, which was glitter in an ode to Nero, who built the Domus Aurea. In July I was also working on my final working paper, "From the United States to Europe" and, to promote it, I decided to do an online tech policy chat with a wonderful person: Joan O' Hara, Senior Vice President of Public Policy at the XRA at the time (now working at the House of Representative Committee on Foreign Affairs). It was an intense moment, but also one of satisfactions: in July '24 I unveiled that I had just finished a course for female entrepreneurs named #SheMeansBusiness. It was great to have inspiring women in business to look up to.

✨ July was really a glittery and golden month, but even cruel in a way: I was working almost daily until 2AM and I was realizing that my life was changing right in front of my eyes, despite my efforts to control it. This is when I started to think that probably we should let only God play dice and not worry too much.

💌 Available here.

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🇺🇸 #2nd, The pursuit of happiness: This article is a picture of five marvelous moments happened in June '24. The first was the support showed by the European Space Agency (ESA), whose senior executive, Luca del Monte, contributed to my second working paper "A digital renaissance in Europe". In June, I also had an event where I gave a preview of my third working paper, on which I worked later in the Summer, titled "From the United States to Europe". This preview event occurred during the Hertie Summit and to me it was extra special to return to Berlin, the city where I had studied. In June, I also started getting involved with Womentech and reflecting more on what it meant for me to grow up in the South of Europe as a young woman during the financial crisis.

🌆 Such reflections helped me to think more in depth about the differences in the American Declaration of Independence and European treaties: I started to see more clearly that in Europe young people often do not feel like they can dream or if they do, they never wake up and make it happen and this is a problem. I believe we should have in Europe the right to pursue our happiness too, but I also think this is something we should fight for and not think it will be given to us by others.

💌 Available here.

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🌼 #1st, Alea iacta est: The first article was published on May 25th and its name is a quote from Julius Caesar. However, it is also another nod to game theory: it means it's time to take action, but at the same time it puts the responsibility of the action on the person throwing the dice, not on something bigger. I find this very fascinating. In May '24 I traveled to Aachen for the Charlemagne Prize ceremony, held yearly in the Rathaus (while the Fellowship ceremony is in November), I spoke at Gatherverse's XREvolve online Summit, had an article written about me by my alma mater, the Graduate Institute in Geneva and came up with an idea: the 5x5 serie.

🌱 The 5x5 serie was probably just a seed, planted in May '24, and I was grateful to share how it grew over the months.

💌 Available here.

I look forward to see how the 5x5 idea will grow further and to share it.

Love,

Elena