Below is a kind of “checklist” of key things to include in our proposal aggregated from various sources. I present them in an order which describes the logic/thinking of the EC.
Key concepts
Internet Ethics
Network Effect: Mobilizing the Collective Intelligence for the Public Good
Connected communities:
Why network science approach
Collective Awareness Platforms: What social networks + cooperative production of knowledge + IoT can achieve
Grassroots ecosystems
Technology needs
Open Coordination Mechanisms
Regulation and policy: Self- and Co-Regulation, Governance
Key visualisations
These are visualisations found in various documents including the program officer’s published paper (attached), as well as fact sheets and presentations of previously funded CAPS projects below. The reasoning: these models/articulation worked for evaluators.
1. Core design principles and functional requirements for a future internet. Source: Oxford Internet Institute, “Towards a future Internet: Interrelations between technological, social and economic trends,” 2010;
The paper presents four scenarios for a future internet, and ranks them in order of probability and desirability. The main contribution this paper offers is insights on principles for future needs based internet and functional specifications derived from them. However the needs as defined by perspectives of experts and may or may not reflect what is needed as percieved by citizens, grassroots actors, communities and social innovators and other stakeholders. Further, while Power to the People is gauged as the least likely, but most desirable scenario, what is missing is insight on the hidden obstacles that would need to be removed, as well as suggested workarounds/changes, in order to render such a scenario more likely.
2. How can ethical and social dimensions be given much stronger influence on the evolution of the internet (and tech development in general)? This is the “big” question underpinning the design of the CAPS program.
The Program officer seems to think Collective Awareness platforms can contribute towards this. CAPs are defined as : “ICT systems leveraging the network effect (or “collective intelligence”) for gathering and making use of open data, by combining social media, distributed (cooperative) knowledge creation, and IoT.”
" CAPS are expected to support environmentally aware, grassroots processes and practices to share knowledge; to achieve changes in lifestyle [17], production and consumption patterns; and to set up more participatory democratic processes. The ultimate goal is to foster a more sustainable future based on a low-carbon, beyond GDP economy, and a resilient, cooperative democratic community."
3. Mechanisms by which CAPS are able to address societal problems. The program officer wants/believes CAPS to be able to address societal problems by exploiting the network effect in several ways:
- Exploit the peer pressure from social networks as a tool to drive more sustainable behaviors, consumer patterns, and lifestyles say for energy, environment, or health. This impact can become even larger if customized advice and individual habits are shared and compared over social networks. This may also be the basis for creating “virtual communities for social change” [19], [20].
- Support more efficient and worldwide-scale collaborative consumption, which is a key element for a low-carbon economy, making lending, exchange (also of knowledge or energy), swapping, and bartering operable at scale, across geographic boundaries [21]–[23].
- Enable better decision making (at personal or institutional levels) and increase resilience by getting facts or evidence from citizens and sensors for instance in transport [24], [25].
- Achieve an “objective,” near real-time and global awareness of environmental conditions, leveraging on personal mobile devices used as discovery tools [26]–[29]. These applications are in line with the emerging concept of “citizen science,” where ICT-empowered citizens actively contribute to scientific objectives, even without any in-depth scientific knowledge.
- Drive better policies or to create new models for economy, society, and democracy [30]–[34]. Eventually, this extended awareness can also be a tool to support experimentation and implementation of new social and economic models [35] (e.g., social currencies based on social reputation, distributed P2P finance, microfinancing, etc.).
- Increase citizen’s confidence and trust in statistics, forecasts, simulations, and scenarios by reconciling data from official and unofficial sources [36].
- Enable more accurate predictions of social, economic or environmental trends based on feeding data, contributed by distributed human and environmental sources, into complex integrated ecological, social, and economic models including feedback loops, thus bringing them to the level of sophistication of weather and climate modeling. [37]
- Support development of alternative collaborative approaches to problem solving [38] [39][40] to unleash talents in society [41]–[44].
- Here is a meta visualisation combining how they (EC) think these processes work (Collective Intelligence Spectrum) and how we (consortium) interpret them. The visualisation is possibly a bit out of date, if you let me know what needs to be added I can make a new version:
- A key feature of our approach is that it facilitates new connections emerging between actors, issues, problems, concepts, contexts, practices and solutions across silos an networks/domains of expertise. Because happens online on an open platform, as well as offline, connects hyperlocal to European. As well as surfacing contradictory policy priorities, processes and or interventions. Because the network is global, the project will provide european perspective within a global view (number of internet users from developing countries is set to grow very rapidly and CAPS need to take those perspectives inteo account).
- Process for instigating and changing behavior
- Solution acceptance
An evaluation scheme taking into account the dynamic relationship that can develop between the stakeholders and the solution as illustrated. From Collective Awareness Platforms for Social Sustainability: An introduction (2014)
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