Edgeryders.eu, WorldBrain.io and its partners want to apply for the upcoming ICT-54-2020 call as a consortium to run an incubator and co-development community for P2P/Open-Source knowledge and collective intelligence tools. The budget is €8 million over 24-36 months. >70% (~6m€) to be given to applicants.
To complement the expertise required for running this incubator, we are looking to find partners that would commit themselves to be part of this program.
We are still looking for an operational partner that is capable of handling on the administrative work to manage large amounts of public money.
If you are interested to join as a collaborator or applicant for the proposed program, please add yourself to this survey. For any questions or comments, add a reply to the thread.
Introduction into H2020 Call Context
Europe wants to become the leader in the field of collective intelligence and is uniquely positioned to do so. Its values of interoperability, privacy and decentralised power are foundational for an open web and the emergence of collective intelligence.
The upcoming ICT-54-2020 call allows a consortium of organisations to apply for an €8m funding pot of which they have to distribute €6m to outstanding academic research groups, hi-tech start-ups, SMEs and others, contributing to the research and innovation area via cascade funding model. The Commission considers proposals with an overall duration of 24 to 36 months. Third parties will be funded through projects, typically in the EUR 50,000 to EUR 200,000 range per project, with an indicative duration of 12 months.
The deadline is January 16. 2020. (very tight)
One of the subtopics of the call is:
“Bringing forward the emergence of collective intelligence on the internet”
- developing approaches for scientific understanding and technology-based stimulation of collective intelligence on social media and the internet to foster trustworthy knowledge and information sharing, and to enhance social inclusion. Focus is on two main use cases:
- develop new community-based service models on social networks that exploit collective intelligence to provide enhanced community services, and increase the availability of trustworthy content;
- in the context of collective intelligence develop and implement new concepts for connecting people and smart objects/agents/AI on social media.
- Approaches for both use cases must be rooted in scientific analysis of collective behaviour and network mechanisms, harness decentralised technologies such as P2P or blockchain for governance and support a dependable collective memory.
Proposal Summary:
WISDOM - Human & community centric incubator for P2P knowledge and collective intelligence software.
Vision
The space of knowledge management and social media applications is dominated by players who’s economic reward models force them to create lock-ins, therefore severely limiting the free flow of information, data and social interoperability and collective intelligence. Their centralised power allows them to be manipulated to spread low quality information, influence elections and abuse user’s privacy and freedom of choice.
The web is already decentralised and interoperable. Therefore only funding organisations with new decentralised technologies, like Blockchain, won’t solve these issues.
To get another leap forward in the web’s potential to foster collective intelligence we need to also change the economic models and recreate an environment of human centric & ethical service design, freedom-of-provider-choice (open markets) and democratic peer2peer communication.
We believe that 4 components are key for achieving this:
- Economic and business models that
- align with the principles of interoperability by implementing investor reward models that cap returns and make organisations non-tradeable (like Steward Ownership, Cooperatives, NPOs, Open Science Research, Open Source Output)
- Those models need to prevent a growth-at-all-cost mindset and incentivise organisations to be service/profit oriented instead.
- protect user data from being sold as a commodity and out of hands of (European) citizen
- create incentives for organisations to collaborate more on shared infrastructure so they can grow together, not alone, and overcome the tragedy of the commons.
- align with the principles of interoperability by implementing investor reward models that cap returns and make organisations non-tradeable (like Steward Ownership, Cooperatives, NPOs, Open Science Research, Open Source Output)
- Interoperability to create USPs of freedom and perfectly user adapted tools that monopolistic organisations have a hard time competing with. Interoperability should be implemented with special focus on:
- Data Portability
- Social interconnectivity (allowing users to switch providers and still communicate with their ‘old’ peers & social connections, like email)
- User centric adaptability: Users can easily experiement & upgrade to state-of-the-art technologies and protocols outside of a single company’s control.
- Algorithmic freedom to democratise people’s ability to control their information diet and bubble
- Modularity to enable user choice in service providers (e.g. using different default search engines in a browser)
- Open Source software to create shared infrastructure and lower development costs
- On/offline facilitation to foster emergent, scalable & co-creative communities, and individual/leaders that are aligned with their self and purpose.
Incubator Program
The proposed incubator program for P2P knowledge and collective intelligence tools aims to grow a community of economically sustainable organisations that co-develop the technological, economical and social infrastructure for increasing the capacity for collective intelligence online.
It’s key components are:
- Communicating and co-evolving a larger vision of collective intelligence that is made possible by interoperable and hyper-adaptable human centric knowledge/social software and non-exploitative economic models.
- Preferring applicants that
- use investor reward models that do not create incentives for growth-at-all-cost but for being service focused, like Steward Ownership or Cooperative models. VC or ICO funded companies will only be accepted in special cases, where such a focus can be successfully argumented.
- use business models that protect privacy/data ownership and user data from being sold as a commodity
- develop modular software & apply interoperable standards/protocols
- Facilitating a individualised learning/acceleration journey for teams and individuals in:
- human centred product & service design
- ethical principles of next generation social and knowledge software
- how to build businesses that can sustain themselves before funding period ends
- personal development to increase leadership skills and ethics, and ability to collaborate with peers
- the ecology and interconnectivity of the proposed solutions
- organisational development to determine value systems, purpose and directions
- Faciltiating on/offline community with battle-tested practices for emergent community design to stimulate knowledge transfer and shared (software) development
- previous approaches have resulted in little co-creation and shared direction between projects, and therefore lower efficiency of deployed money.
Consortium Partners & Roles:
Technology Partner: WorldBrain.io
WorldBrain.io is a steward owned company developing open-source, offline-first & P2P knowledge and collective intelligence applications.
Their role in the consortium is:
- providing the initial technological, ethical, conceptual and economic vision for a human/community centric & interoperable network of knowledge and collective intelligence tools that is further developed together with the community in an open process.
- providing modular, reusable, open source boilerplates for offline-first & p2p knowledge & collective intelligence applications to speed up development of new tools.
- Memex: A online research tool to full-text search web history, annotate, co-curate and discuss web content, and collaborate with peers.
- Storex: A user controlled, interoperable and adaptable storage layer for knowledge management data. This modular library powers the search and storage of Memex and allows developers to
- flexibly adapt an application backend to any platform (web, mobile, browser extension), database/search technology (MongoDB, SQlite) and transport protocol (Http, IPFS, Ethereum).
- build translators for any data model to enable emergent interoperable user-centric communication standards
- pulling in a network of activists, policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors that are aligned with the provided vision to engage as mentors, funders and partners.
Community Partner: Edgeryders.eu
Edgeryders is an online & offline community of over 5000 hackers, activists, entrepreneurs, developers and scientists, radical thinkers and doers, and just normal people that want to make a difference. Their role in the consortium is to:
- provide a high-quality online platform and methodology for online collaboration
- facilitating an online and public application and project selection process
- hosting a rich online-conversation about next generation internet topics, technological challenges & philosophies
- analysing conversations through a semantic social network analysis (SSNA) to surface high quality connections between people/content to increase collaboration potential and discover promising new initiatives from within the community.
- running our battle-tested distributed offline events and festivals to get people to collaborate
TBA: Operational Partner
The main role of the operational partner is to handle the processing of the H2020 money. It is required that this organisation has experience with handling the bureaucratic work associated with large sums of (public) money.
Potential Partners
- Purpose Ventures & Foundation
- SEND e.V.
- Ashoka
- ProjectTogether
- BetterPlace.org
TBA: Facilitation Partner
The role of this organisation is to
- provide world-class on/offline facilitation to foster emergent, scalable & co-creative communities, and individual/leaders/teams/communities that are aligned with their self and purpose.
- organise the preparation and execution of the team retreats
- Facilitate mentorships & meetings of the co-learning pods that form within teams and organisations
Potential Partners
- CocoonPro
- DGov Foundation
- Enspiral
- Art of Hosting Community
Here is the plan for our weekly calls:
Topic: Collective Intelligence Incubator
Time: Jan 21, 2020 05:00 PM Brussels
Every week on Tue, until Feb 18, 2020, 5 occurrence(s)
Jan 21, 2020 05:00 PM
Jan 28, 2020 05:00 PM
Feb 4, 2020 05:00 PM
Feb 11, 2020 05:00 PM
Feb 18, 2020 05:00 PM
Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.
Weekly: Error - Zoom
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 733 932 800
