Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation
Projects participating to the roundtable, parallel sessions or presenting workshops or posters
- Mayo Fuster Morell: P2Pvalue www.p2pvalue.eu
TECHNO-SOCIAL PLATFORM FOR SUSTAINABLE MODELS AND VALUE GENERATION IN COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION IN THE FUTURE INTERNET
- Michael Föls: DecarboNet www.decarbonet.eu
DecarboNet is a multidisciplinary effort to identify determinants of
collective awareness, translating awareness into behavioural change, and
providing novel methods to analyse and visualise the underlying processes.
This requires significant technological advances, including (i) generic
tools to co-create knowledge with on-the-fly recommendations of related
content from multiple sources; (ii) a cross-platform social media
application to provide eco-feedback and engage citizens in games with a
purpose; and (iii) methods to measure and predict behavioural change, and to
capture collective awareness by means of a quantitative framework.
www.ecoresearch.net/climate - Media Watch on Climate Change
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Serena Cangiano: DSI4EU Digital social innovation for Europe www.digitalsocial.eu
The DSI4EU project will support, grow and scale the current Digital Social Innovation network of projects and organisations, bringing together social entrepreneurs, hackers, communities and academics working on key DSI fields such as the makers movement, the collaborative economy, open democracy and digital rights. DSI4EU will foster digital innovations for the social good, helping communities share data, collaborate to solve societal problems and scale their initiatives focusing on open and distributed technologies and new sustainable business models. DSI4EU will develop and upgrade the digitalsocial.eu platform, to promote large-scale collaboration and support experiments among the DSI community and activate collective awareness with a large number of citizens across Europe. DSI4EU will also provide an engaging programme of training, mentoring, events, policy workshops and experimentation. DSI4EU will represent the building blocks for a new participatory innovation model for Europe, a more decentralised web and an inclusive and sustainable society, including a radical approach to scaling, extending and connecting the DSI network in Europe.
DSI4EU webiste: www.digitalsocial.eu
DSI4EU consortium: NESTA UK, WAAG Society, SUPSI Lugano
DSI4EU Representatives at INSCI2016: Serena Cangiano (SUPSI Lugano), Zoe Romano (WeMake Milano)
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PROFIT project: http://www.project-profit.eu/
PROFIT aims at promoting the financial awareness and improve the financial capability of citizens and market participants by developing a platform, built on Open Source components, with the following functionalities: (a) specialized financial education toolkits available to the wider public (b) advanced crowd-sourcing tools to process financial data, extract and present collective knowledge, (c) advanced forecasting models exploiting the market sentiment to identify market trends and threats, (d) novel personalized recommendation systems to support financial decisions according to the user’s profile (financial literacy level, interests, demographic characteristics etc.) (e) reputation-based incentive mechanisms to encourage the active participation and contributions of citizens through many different channels like posting and rating of financial articles, questions and answers forums, voting in relevant polls, etc).
- CAPSELLA Collective Awareness PlatformS for Environmentally-sound Land management based on data technoLogies and Agrobiodiversity www.capsella.eu
CAPSELLA kicked off on 1 January 2016.
Just like the tiny yet sturdy little plant it takes the name from, the CAPSELLA project will deepen the roots of sustainability in agri-food systems by harnessing scientific and local knowledge, people’s energy, motivation and innovation skills around the theme of agro-biodiversity by making use of novel, improved and demand-driven ICT solutions.
CAPSELLA will focus on two complementary domains: agro-biodiversity and the food supply chain. It will use participatory bottom up data collection and top down data integration to develop solutions for these domains. The project will build from scratch open data repositories concerning regional agro-biodiversity, and build upon and enhance existing data sets on the agro-biodiversity and food domains. Based on these, the project will develop a number of community-driven data powered ICT solutions, which will be tested by the communities engaged in the project and will result in a number of pilots. At the centre of the CAPSELLA work will be three multidisciplinary, community-driven use cases
• “field scenario” addressing use of functional agro-biodiversity in cropping systems;
• “seeds scenario” addressing on-farm genetic diversity conservation and informal seed systems;
• “food scenario” addressing the transparency of the food chain in the processes related to the production, distribution and consumption of food
The project will have a strong societal and business sustainability focus by including incubation activities for selected pilots.
CAPSELLA will build a sustainable technical prototyping platform, a meeting environment for innovation that democratizes access to big data, cloud computing, open data, open software and pilots. To do so, it will build up on on-line and off line tools including the organisation of key events to raise awareness about the project and collect information by a button up approach.
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SciCafe2.0 Project http://www.scicafe2-0.eu
Observatory on crowdsourcing, Supporting agency for Science Cafés and participatory actions. Development of a platforms for supporting distant discussions and participations.
- Make-it http://make-it.io/
Over the past ten years, the Internet has revolutionised and democratised communications to a certain point. These powerful tools provided by ICT software and hardware are completely changing the way we make tangible and intangible goods. Nowadays, virtually everybody with Internet access can create digital content composed of virtual bits and make it available to everyone else instantly, no matter who they are or where they live. Now, the same thing is happening to manufacturing as the access to tools like 3D printers and laser cutters is increasing. As a result, these intangible goods or virtual bits which can be shared globally, can be turned to physical objects or atoms which manifest themselves locally. This is making the interface between the virtual world and the physical world blur if not disappear. As a shorthand term, this transformation from bits to atoms is being called the Maker movement.
The overall objective of the MAKE-IT project is to understand the role of Collective Awareness Platforms (CAPs) in enabling the growth and governance of the Maker movement, particularly in relation to using and creating social innovations and achieving sustainability. The results of this research will help to understand the uses and impacts of CAPs in different contexts, as well as of the Maker movement itself.
To understand how the role and impact of CAPs approaches the Maker movement, MAKE-IT will undertake multidisciplinary research in different fields including: behavioural studies, social psychology, sociology, management information systems, economics, environmental science, technological impact and governance issues. MAKE-IT will focus the research specifically on the role of CAPs in:
* how maker communities are organised and governed;
* what maker participants do and how they behave;
* the various ways this impacts on and adds value to society.
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Leonardo Maccari, WP coordinator of netCommons, www.netcommons.eu
Information and communication technologies are key components of a modern society, and their control is the key to societal development. The advent of the Internet has been often invoked as a remedy for their democratization and the diffusion of fundamental human rights. The light of truth shows today a different picture: the digital divide is widening the gap between those who can access and take advantage of the new systems, and those who remain “disconnected” (with respect to physical access to technology, economic advantages, cultural uses and skills, and democratic impacts). A problem is emerging about the Internet’s sustainability, both socio-economic (large Internet corporations eluding taxes and aggressively commercializing most services) and political-democratic (the global Internet surveillance and the lack of transparency). This, coupled with the complexity of the Internet’s organisation and the diffused lack of awareness about its actual implementation makes the users easy targets of manipulation, and unaware of the possibility to have a bottom-up, democratic, communal organisation of “the Internet”.
netCommons aspires to study, support and further promote an emerging trend, community-based networking and communication services that can offer a complement, or even a sustainable alternative, to the global Internet’s current dominant model. Community networks not only provide citizens with access to a neutral, bottom-up network infrastructure, which naturally increases the transparency of data flow, but they also represent an archetype of networked collective cooperation and action, mixing common or communal ownership and management of an infrastructure with a balanced set of services supported by the local stakeholders. Community networks, however, are complex systems that require multiple skills to thrive: technical, legal, socio-economic, and political. They face many challenges and they also need abstractions, models and practical tools to grow and produce a higher beneficial impact on our society.
netCommons follows a dual approach to achieve the maximum possible impact. On the one hand, the project works at the local level, mingling with the communities that implement and manage community networks to gather relevant information, elaborate it, and then return to communities advanced conceptual and technical tools helping them to grow and thrive. On the other hand, starting from such hands-on experience and work, netCommons contributes to Internet Science by abstracting concepts and opening the perspective to the world of global communications. It studies solutions and interpretations of how to build global awareness about the importance of sustainability, participation, co-operation, freedom, democracy, peer production, the public and common good, and the role of community networks to help this process. Consequently, netCommons will foster the implementation of the proper actions (local to communities and global to the regulatory level) that can guarantee that information creation and diffusion remains free, neutral, fair, and respectful of individual rights.
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Wikirate (Crowdsource Better Companies): The project has the vision of helping consumers express themselves as ethical economic citizens. The objective of Wikirate is to be the ‘go-to’ place for information on companies’ social and environmental practices, allowing consumers and stakeholders such as policymakers or the media to be better informed. Ultimately, the project will provide companies with additional incentive to act sustainably.
WikiRate has two complementary parts which referred to as the Wiki and Rate sides of the site. The Wiki side deals with textual information. People make individual Notes about a company's behaviour which can describe anything that they've done. The platform also includes Overviews which summarise knowledge about a company's behaviour in relation to a Topic. The Rate side deals with 'quantitative' or standardised information. Metrics are standardised ways of measuring some aspect of a company's performance, they are a fair way of comparing companies' behaviour because they ask the same questions of each company. Metric values show how a company performed on the metric in a particular year. One of the best ways for the WikiRate community to contribute is by adding new metric values - every new value expands our knowledge about a company and makes comparison with other companies more informative.
WikiRate Platform Website: http://www.wikirate.org
Speaker: Vaso Gkatziaki
hackAIR (Collective awareness platform for outdoor air pollution): The overall objective of hackAIR is to develop and pilot test an open platform that will enable communities of citizens to easily set up air quality monitoring networks and engage their members in measuring and publishing outdoor air pollution levels, leveraging the power of online social networks, mobile and open hardware technologies, and engagement strategies. The hackAIR platform will enable the collection of data from:
• measurements from existing air quality stations and open data
• user-generated sky-depicting images (either publicly available geo-tagged and time-stamped images posted through social media platforms, or images captured by users
• low-cost open hardware devices easily assembled by citizens using commercial off-the-shelf parts A data fusion algorithm and reasoning services will be developed for synthesising heterogeneous air quality data into air quality-aware personalised services to citizens.
The hackAIR platform will be co-created with the users, and offered through:
• a web application that communities of citizens will be able to install and customize
• a mobile app that citizens can use to get convenient access to easy-to-understand air quality information, contribute to measurements by an open sensor, or by taking and uploading sky-depicting photos, and receive personalised air qualityaware information on their everyday activities
The hackAIR platform will be tested in two pilot locations, with the direct participation of a grassroots NGO with >400.000 members and a health association with >19.000 members. Appropriate strategies and tools will be developed and deployed for increasing user engagement and encouraging behavioural change. The usability and effectiveness of the hackAIR platform, and its social and environmental impact will be assessed. A sustainability and exploitation strategy will pave the way for the future availability of the hackAIR toolkit, community and website, and explore opportunities for commercial exploitation.
Speaker: Panagiota Syropoulou
Scicafe2.0 http://www.scicafe2-0.euSciCafe2.0 – A European Support Agency for Deeper Informed Engagement and Participative Leadership - convergence of motivations for traditional Science Cafes, and, Crowd Sourcing
- participative knowledge exchange/co-generation of knowledge - multi-lateral flows
- virtual Platform, inviting and supporting citizen input to democratic decision making
- methodologies for participative engagement/crowd-sourcing experiments
- mobilising collective intelligence: insights into best participative engagement models
- off/on-line methodologies connecting the virtual framework to local communities
- providing shared knowledge base with invitational/customisable interfaces
- promoting the involvement of real communities facing real problems
- deepening and widening shared sense making; harvesting collective knowledge
OpenCare prototypes a community-driven model of addressing social and health care, and explore its implications at scale. It draws on three elements: 1. advances in collective intelligence research, to lend coherence and summarize large-scale online debates; 2. advances in digital fabrication and cheap-and-open hardware technology; 3. the rise of a global hacker community, willing and able to look for solutions to care problems.
We explore the potential of this approach to deliver innovative, human-centric care solutions that combine the low bureaucratization and low overhead of communities with the scientific knowledge and technical skills associated to state- and market-provided professional care.
OpenCare orchestrates an open-to-all, community-driven process for addressing care issues, recruiting its participants from existing communities innovating at the edge of society (among others, hackers, artists, activists, designers). This entails the complete design cycle of sensemaking => selection of a problem-solution pair => prototype => testing => evaluation at scale; each step of the cycle will be radically open, with the debate happening online and the fabrication happening in hackerspaces and fully documented. We release open data and deploy onto them state-of-the-art analytical tools for collective intelligence: online ethnography and social network analysis.
OpenCare is delivered by a diverse consortium drawn from Europe’s best universities and the grassroots hacker community.
Ksenia Ershomina
In the wake of the Snowden revelations, public trust in the Internet has eroded. The primary motivation of NEXTLEAP is to create, validate, and deploy communication and computation protocols that can serve as pillars for a secure, trust-worthy, annotable and privacy-respecting Internet that ensures citizens fundamental rights. For this purpose NEXTLEAP will develop an interdisciplinary internet science of decentralisation that provides the basis on which these protocols will be built. Ksenia Ershomina (CNRS) been working on a study of over 50 privacy-enhaced and decentralized applications to provide an empirical and user-centric foundation for protocols for a secure addressbook with key discovery and secure messaging.
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