Mid-February, Francesca Bria from Nesta presented the final study report on Digital Social Innovation (#DigitalSI) As NESTA puts it:
This report coordinated by Nesta and commissioned by the European Commission, DG CONNECT is the first systematic network analysis of the emerging digital social innovation (DSI) ecosystem in Europe
The study began 18 months ago with the research of the principal digital social projects. They used crowdmapping to map all the identified actors, who are entrepreneurs that use digital tools to tackle a particular social issue. There are initiatives in domains like health, creating websites to share information on particular diseases and to improve patients’ well-being by creating a sense of inclusiveness in a community, or like e-government to let citizens express their opinion or to suggest policies, to name a few.
The study has also focused on identifying the links between the organisations what allowed them to do a link analysis of the situation and come up with recommendations to improve the existing situation. The aim being to maximize the positive impact of digital social initiatives and at the same time, create awareness of the risks of misuses that could happen.
The study explores how emerging technologies in the digital economy can transform society by the mobilisation of collective action, enable a more collaborative economy, new ways of making, citizen participation, sustainability and social innovation. – See more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/event/shaping-future-digital-social-innovation-europe#sthash.eJTDji6O.dpuf
The research shows that the identified initiatives are emerging from these 4 technological trends:
- Open Hardware: initiatives here create new tools for example for environmental measurements on a critical variable
- Open Networks: like connecting devices to collectively share a resource as Internet connection
- Open Knowledge: websites to collectively create and analyze information. There are great examples in health and in participatory democracy
- Open Data: facilitates awareness, participation and collaboration, creates opportunities for innovation
The identified organisations are involved in these 6 areas:
- Open democracy with publications of governmental spending for example
- Open access, here are the open standards, open licensing and others essential to guarantee an all-inclusive Internet
- Collaborative economy with crowdfunding and new socio-economic models like AirB&B
- Awareness networks, to help on crisis situations and to improve behaviours or services through sharing data
- New ways of making, with FABLabs and 3D printers but also designing personal configurations
- Funding acceleration and incubation
All the reported initiatives are for the social good, it makes good to read about them 🙂
The main big risk reported is that Internet becomes BIG BROTHER, centrally controlled, with a few companies dominating the offer of services. On this scenario, if those main players have their power extended, they could discriminate traffic, acquire a wealth of personal data with no alternative, as people will have to accept their terms of use or be left-out, just to mention some of the consequences. So let’s sustain all DSI open access initiatives!
