Digital Social Innovation in Europe: crowdmapping actors and networks – Workshop

Digital Social Innovation in Europe: crowdmapping actors and networks – Workshop

Monday 16 September, 14:00 – 17:00 @ Room 5, Floor 3

Co-Organisers: DSI partnership (Nesta, Waag Society, IRI, Esade, Future Everything) and the European Commission, DG Connect.

To sign-up for these workshops, please write to:

• [email protected] for the “The potential in digital social innovation” panel
• [email protected] for the “Who are the digital social innovators?” panel
• [email protected] for the “Supporting and growing digital social innovation in Europe, what needs to change?” panel.

14:00 – 15:00    The potential in digital social innovation

Chair: Marleen Stikker (President, Co-founder, Waag Society)

Panel members:

• Geert Lovink – Founder, Institute of Network Cultures
• Juha Huuskonen – Board member of Open Knowledge Finland/ Founder, Pixelache Festival
• Charlie Leadbeater – Nominet Trust board member and “Top 100” project lead

15:00 – 16:00    Who are the digital social innovators?

Chair: Jon Kingsbury (Nesta, Programme Director, Creative Economy)

Panel members:

• Ezio Manzini – DESIS International Coordinator, Design for Social Innovation for Sustainability Network
• Flore Berlingen – Co-founder, OuiShare
• Zoe Romano – Arduino, Digital Strategy & Wearables

16:00 – 17:00    Supporting and growing digital social innovation in Europe, what needs to change?

Chair: Francesca Bria (Nesta Senior Adviser)

Panel members:

• Rob van Kranenburg – Co-founder of bricolabs / Founder of The Internet of Things Council/ Community Manager of SOCIOTAL
• Daniel Kaplan – Founder and CEO, the Next-Generation Internet Foundation
• Philippe Aigrain – Founder and CEO of Sopinspace, the Society for Public Information Spaces
• Fabrizio Sestini – Senior Scientific Officer at the European Commission DG INFSO

At this open workshop we will present emerging findings from a major new study on digital social innovation (DSI) in Europe. The research is commissioned by the European Commission, DG Connect and run by Nesta, in partnership with the Waag Society, ESADE, IRI and Future Everything. The study looks at grassroots civic innovations that use mass collaboration to tackle societal challenges.

At the same time that we have big global challenges we are also able to harness collective intelligence via ICT to solve global-scale problems so that citizens can develop awareness and map actions in real time.

The DSI research is identifying examples of Digital Social Innovations (DSI) that are exploiting the network effect of the Internet and merging technology trends such as open data crowdmapping, open hardware, and open distributed networking to bring people together to solve social challenges.

A brilliant example of DSI is Safecast, the crowd-led global sensor network for collecting and sharing radiation measurement that was created following the nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011. To date volunteers have mapped radiation levels of more than 3 million data points, providing an accurate real-time data streams that was inconceivable before the Safecast project.

We will share with you what we have learned to date about the actors that enable and support digital social innovations. We want your input and challenges to inform our thinking and to influence our recommendations to the EC on how to foster emerging digital social innovation research and policy across Europe.

Join the workshop if you are an academic, practitioner, policy maker or a social innovator interested in learning about DSI.

To find out more information about the research and the open workshop, please see the project fact sheet or email [email protected]

The workshop space can accommodate up to 45 people. To sign-up, express your interest in the topic and get in touch with the coordinators please write to:

• [email protected] for the “The potential in digital social innovation” panel
• [email protected] for the “Who are the digital social innovators?” panel
• [email protected] for the “Supporting and growing digital social innovation in Europe, what needs to change?” panel.