At this open workshop at OK Con Geneva 16 September 2012, the emerging findings from a major new study on digital social innovation (DSI) in Europe will be presented. The research is commissioned by the European Commission, DG Connect and run by Nesta, in partnership with the Waag, 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.
Join the workshop if you are an academic, practitioner, policy maker or a social innovator interested in learning about DSI.
14:00 – 15:00 The potential in digital social innovation
- Chair: Marleen Stikker (President, Co-founder, Waag)
- Geert Lovink – Founder, Institute of Network Cultures (panel member)
- Juha Huuskonen – Board member of Open Knowledge Finland/ Founder, Pixelache Festival (panel member)
- Charlie Leadbeater – Nominet Trust board member and 'Top 100' project lead (panel member)
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, IRI, Esade, Future Everything) and the European Commission, DG Connect.
