About me

About me

Hi! I am Martina :-) I was born in Marsala, the city in Italy which is the closest to Africa. My biggest passion since I was little is sailing and I was part of the national team in my teenage years.

I left Sicily when I was 18 to study in Rome and when I was 20 I left Italy for my first experience abroad (in Sweden), where I learnt English! That changed my life. Since then I lived in Spain, Thailand, Belgium, Brazil, Germany and the United States, diving into different cultures and learning different perspectives around life. Last year, I decided to come back to my home country and my dream is to be able to contribute to policy-making in my country and, in particular, support the creation of policies related to the digital revolution.

I am passionate about many things but two of them especially: public policy and technological innovation. I am certain that, with the right policy framework, the digital transformation can bring positive change in all corners of the world and I’d to contribute to the creation of such a framework.

I have worked as policy advisor on digital trade for most of my professional career (here you can find my work in policy), but a few years ago something has changed in my approach to public policy. I decided I wanted to have a better understanding of the digital revolution by engaging in activities on the ground. I think that I can only give good policy advices if I have experienced myself the wonders of the digital revolution. But I have to admit that it got a bit out of hand :)

Today I am both an entrepeneur and a policy advisor, while I also founded and currenlty manage FabLab Western Sicily.

On one hand, the startup I co-founder is Oral3D and it offers 3D printing solutions to dentists. We have developed a solution which makes it very easy for dentists to transform CT scans into .stl files and send them to print.

On the other hand, FabLab Western Sicily is a social project that is bringing innovation and creativity in Sicilian schools through digital fabrication. In the past 4 years, FabLab Western Sicily has trained over 1000 kids in schools on creative digital education. We have organized lots of seminars and events from students, and in parallel studied creative digital pedagogy to be able to teach digital fabrication in a way which can make a positive and long-term impact on the students.

From the experience gained in the past years, it has been possible to develop an ad-hoc curriculum called Teens4Kids in which teenagers are trained to teach digital fabrication to kids in school. A curriculum which we are proposing to schools all over Sicily and which I hope can be of inspiration for policy-makers in the future. You can see all about the Teens4Kids project in this page.

My policy work can be found in my (other) website: www.martinaferracane.com.

FabLab Western Sicily fb page.

TEDx about Teens4Kids project: A recipe for a generation of creators (in Italian, but English subtitles are available).