Civil society groups are created in all programs very much in line with EU policies, they also contribute to the bottom-up establishment of new policies and to the update of strategic programmes. Among them, Local Action Groups (LAG) focussed on Rural Development, Living Labs focussed both on R&D and regional cooperation, and an endless number of municipalities and public entities interested on wealth creation improving the citizen's quality of life. However, all these groups do not sufficiently exchange information and do not network adequately, lacking thus a common strategy to exploit synergies for achieving sustainability and larger impact. This is indeed needed if active communities or "Social Spaces for Research and Innovation" SSRI are to be created.

Despite the remarkable efforts and achieved results of both the European and the National technological platforms, there is still a lot of work to be done for full implementation into the society, in general, and, particularly, into excluded civil groups such as elderly or handicapped people in rural and urban communities.

The rural and urban communities working on health and independent living is one of the best and more ambitious environments to implement this strategy. For this reason, the Spanish National Platform eVIA http://www.evia.org.es/), with the support of several projects involving SSRI and Living-labs like CISVI and Collaboration@Rural (http://www.c-rural.eu/), along with the collaboration of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade http://www.mityc.es) , The Ministry of Environment and Development Rural and Marine (http://www.mapa.es), and the association AETIC (http://www.aetic.es/), organizes these days under the hospitality of the EXPO Zaragoza and "Fundación Zaragoza Ciudad del Conocimiento" ( http://www.fundacionzcc.org/). We hope this initiative merits your interest and we invite you to participate registering through the following URL http://www.researchspaces.eu up to next 4th of September.