By Peter Baeck, Nesta. Presented at Crowdsourcing Week Europe 2014. Join us at the next event: http://crowdsourcingweek.com/

1. Digital Social Innovation
Crowdweek
Copenhagen 14.10.2014
Peter Baeck, Principal
Researcher, Nesta
peter.baeck@nesta.org.uk
@PeterBaeck

2. About Nesta
A £340m endowment with a mission to help people
and organisations bring great ideas to life.
Investments
in early stage companies, social enterprises
and social venture intermediaries
Research
On how innovation happens and the
impacts
Skills
Supporting innovation in all sectors, from
design, finance, evidence and scale
Programmes
Backing and supporting innovations
governments, local authorities and
challenge areas such as health

3. 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

4. Sept: First AG
Meeting + Open
Workshop at
Open Knowledge
Conference
December:
Second
Open
Workshop
June:
Second
Interim
Study
Report
DSI
Challenge
Prize design
Sept. Post-workshop
Report
Sept. Final
Study
Report
July: Third
AG Meeting
February: DSI
Policy
Workshop
and second
AG Meeting
December :
First Interim
Study Report
Inception
Report
Digitalsocial
.eu live
Crowdsourcing
DSI policy ideas
on the Your
Priorities
platform
Oui Share
Collaborative
Economy Fest
2014: DSI
Mapping launch
France
March: Guardian
Article 10 DSI
innovators to
watch
We are here
May
2013
August
2014
Jan
2014

5. ‘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 ?

6. 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

7. Learning from practice
Long shortlist of 100+
examples of organisations
working on DSI.
Case studied 39 of these

8. 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 Data
Innovative ways to capture, use,
analyse, and interpret open data
coming from people and from
the environment
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

9. Open Hardware
Norm Wright, CC

10. 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

11. 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 13 Million
Data Points have been
captured to date.

12. Open Knowledge
CCAC North Library C.C

13. 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

14. Gamification – Genes in Space

15. 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

16. Open
Networks

17. 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.

18. Open data

19. 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.

20. Open Data
Fruitfly
In Wienna the city has opened up
more than160 datasets which
has lead to the development of
more than 109 apps for the city.
One of these is the “Fruit Fly” an
app that offers users a visual
map that captures data on all
fruit trees on public ground in
Vienna. Colour coded pins are
used to illustrate different types
of fruit. Crowdsourced data is
also used to index which fruit is
ripe or in season. The result is a
quirky app that citizens or
visitors of Vienna can use to
navigate their way towards a
free but healthy snack

21. Digitalsocial.eu
Engaging the European DSI community and
mapping networks

22. www.digitalsocial.eu
Crowdmapping the European
DSI community

23. Organisations working on and supporting DSI across Europe
in multiple ways….
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
Bethnal Green Ventures
Fablab Amsterdam
Nominet Trust
Chaos
Communication
Camp
W3C
Tyze

24. Lessons Learned.

25. Lessons learned…. 858 organisations and their
projects mapped
Most DSI projects are driven by
new types of SI organisations.
Significant skills gap to do ‘digital’
in the social innovation
community
Most open data activity least on
open hardware and networks
Less activity in Eastern EU
Most activity is small scale , but
rapidly evolving field, with lots of
interest & potential & challenges

26. Supporting
DSI to grow

27. Making it easier to create new digital SI (eg
regulatory, funding &c)
Making it easier to grow and spread digital SI (eg
public procurement, support for evidence
generation, common standards)
Increasing the potential value of digital SI (eg making
available open data, ubiquitous broadband)
Enabling some of the radical, disruptive innovations
emerging from digital SI – new approaches to money,
consumption, education, health
>
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Policy goals

28. Materials on Digital Social Innovation
11 Digital Social
Innovation
Trends Keep in touch:
www.digitalsocial.eu
contact@digitalsocial.eu
@Digi_SI