DOPE's manifesto
What you know is needed.
We wrote it for those between 16 and 35 who feel they can do more.
After school
Once school is over, something strange happens.
The chances to test yourself become few.
You study alone, you work alone, and ideas stay in a notebook.
Artificial intelligence
Then artificial intelligence arrives: it writes, draws, codes.
It is normal to wonder what place will be left for you. They ask you for experience to give you a job, and a job to give you experience.
Those who have worked on a real project know how to do things a machine alone cannot: understand what is needed, decide with others, fix things when something goes wrong.
Not feeling up to it
The most common fear is not being up to it. We all had it, on the first day.
Here nobody asks you to already be good at it.
You start with a small task, next to someone who has been here a year.
Big things
Werner Heisenberg was 23 when he wrote the foundations of quantum mechanics. He talked about it with Pauli and with Born.
Mary Shelley was 18 when she started Frankenstein, for a challenge among friends at a villa on Lake Geneva.
Ideas grow together.
Out of passion
Here nobody works for a grade or for money.
You work because a question will not leave you alone: how high a rocket we build can go, how water rises in a tube with no weight, how an organoid grows.
We choose difficult projects. That is where you learn the most.
Everyone is needed
Engineers and scientists are needed, economists and artists, people who write and people who take photos.
And philosophers are needed, to ask whether what we build is right.
Whatever you study or do, there is a place for you here.
Making mistakes
You learn by doing, and by doing you make mistakes.
At the UAS Challenge 2026 a gust of wind brought our drone down. The team repaired it in one night and went back into the competition: in the end they came fourth.
Here, making mistakes is part of the work.
What DOPE is
DOPE is an association of young people, in Genoa. Nobody makes money out of it and nobody gives you a grade.
Everything you use every day was made by someone. You too can make part of it.
Bring what you know
If you have an idea that feels too big, bring it.
Someone here will want to try it with you.