Understanding and Mapping

Digital Social Innovation

Peter Baeck, Principal Researcher, Nesta peter.baeck@nesta.org.uk @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 Peter.baeck@nesta.org.uk @peterbaeck

Film – what is digital social innovation