Understanding and Mapping
Digital Social Innovation
Peter Baeck, Principal Researcher, Nesta [email protected] @PeterBaeck
Three overarching objectives
Defining and understanding the potential in Digital Social Innovation
Crowdmapping and engaging organisations working on, supporting and delivering DSI and how they are connected
Developing recommendations for how policy, funding and regulatory measures can be changed to better support DSI
‘a type of social and collaborative innovation in which innovators, users and communities co-create knowledge and solutions for a wide range of social needs and at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of ICT and the Internet’
What is Digital
Social Innovation
?
Why is it so
interesting ?
• Empowers Citizens
• New opportunities for
partnerships and coproduction
between citizens and services
• Creates new opportunities to
collaborate on creating solutions
that have a social impact
• Increases the potential to rapidly
scale social innovations
• Better public value services
• Opportunities to develop and
scale decentralized
digital ecosystems
for the social good
Learning from practice
Long shortlist of 100+ examples of organisations
working on DSI.
Case studied 39 of these
Four technological trends in DSI
Open Hardware New ways of making and using open hard-ware solutions and moving towards and Open Source Internet of Things
Open Knowledge Co-production of new knowledge and crowd mobilisation based on open content, open source and open access
Open Networks Innovative combinations of network solutions and infrastructures, e.g. sensor net -works, free interoperable network services, open Wifi, bottom up-broadband, distributed social networks, p2p infrastructure
Open Data Innovative ways to capture, use, analyse, and interpret open data coming from people and from the environment
Norm Wright, CC
Open Hardware
Open Hardware
Arduino Arduino is a simple
low cost circuit
board that anyone
can turn into an
electrical device
Over 1 million
Arduino boards
have been
produced
Open Networks
Safecast Uses open hardware,
sensor networks to
capture large open
radiation level data sets.
Used by citizens to map
radiation levels in Japan
after the Fukushima
nuclear disaster.
More than 16 Million
Data Points have been
captured to date.
CCAC North Library C.C
Open Knowledge
Open Knowledge
Zooniverse
Zooniverse involves large
crowds of citizens in
capturing and analysing big
data sets.
Zooniverse hosts online
citizen science projects
which involve the public in
crowdsourcing academic
research. Large online
communities devote their
free time to projects such
as studying more than 2m
images of cancer cells in the
Cellslider project
Gamification – Genes in Space
Open Knowledge
Patients Like Me
Enables people living with a long-
term health condition to contribute
their personal experience and
knowledge on diseases, condition
details and treatments to a
social network of peers living with
similar conditions.
The network engage more than
220,000 users and cover more than
2,000 conditions
Open
Networks
Open Networks
Guifi.net Founded in 2000 as a
response to the lack of
internet in rural
Catalonia.
Operates a "mesh
network" where each
person in the network
helps transmit internet to
other nodes in the Guifi
net.
More than 23,000
network nodes.
Open data
Open Data
Open
Corporates scraping, opening up
big data sets Through open data and web
scraping Open Corporates
make information about
companies and the corporate
world more transparent and
accessible. The data is turned
in to searchable maps and
visualisations of complex
corporate structures.
Example – Goldman Sachs
has 1,475 subsidiaries
registered in the U.S. and 739
in the Caymans alone.
Understanding the DSI community and
mapping networks -
Digitalsocial.eu
Type of support or
activity
Networking Events, Fairs,
and Festivals
Running Incubators and
accelerators
Hosting and managing
maker spaces and hacker
spaces
Through research projects
or research networks
Delivering digital social
services
Providing funding and
social investment
Advocacy and advisory or
expert bodies
Organisations working on and supporting DSI across Europe in multiple ways….
Fablab Amsterdam
Nominet Trust
Bethnal Green Ventures
W3C
Tyze
Chaos Communication Camp
www.digitalsocial.eu Crowdmapping the European
DSI community
Lessons Learned.
Lessons learned…. Most DSI projects are driven by new types of SI organisations.
Most activity is small scale , but rapidly evolving field, with lots of interest & potential & challenges
Significant skills gap to do ‘digital’ in the social innovation community
Most open data activity least on open hardware and networks
Leading practice happening in UK, Netherlands and Spain
Less activity in Eastern EU
Make it easier to create new DSI through regulatory and funding measures specifically targeted at supporting DSI. Make it easier to grow and spread DSI through public procurement, support for evidence generation, common standards and integration with public services. Increase the potential value of DSI (e.g. making available open data, ubiquitous broadband, open standards and supporting innovation spaces). Enable some of the radical and disruptive innovations emerging from digital SI – such as new approaches to money, consumption, education and health. Expand the European digital social innovation network and invest in the development of skills and capacity to do Digital Social Innovation
Crowdfunding as opportunity to
mobilise funding and volunteeering
Materials on Digital Social Innovation 11 Digital Social Innovation Trends
Keep in touch: www.digitalsocial.eu [email protected] @peterbaeck
Film – what is digital social innovation