Social Contract Draft

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I read with great interest the whole thing (I mean the longer deliverable here. I found the commentary to the contract’s articles very helpful for me to engage with the document). I have two comments.

Social contract for open care initiatives or social contract for OpenCare?

This is kind of internal to OpenCare as a project. The social contract is mentioned in our proposal and Grant Agreement as deliverable D4.5. It is described like this:

A draft explicit social contract for community-driven care services design, aimed at removing exploitation from the participatory design picture. This is done by styling the community as a collective author and researcher, rather than a “rightless volunteer”, like in most crowdsourcing exercises.

So, I was expecting a sort of TOS for contributing to OpenCare. Over 300 people contributed their experiences, ideas and wisdom to OpenCare. How do we credit them? How are we accountable to them? What promises can we reasonably make? Which rights do they have?

Instead, this seems to be a kind of constitution for someone wishing to provide community care services. Don’t get me wrong, it’s super-interesting, but it does leave me a bit confused. Was there some shift in focus I missed? Am I looking at something other than D4.5?

Is community care necessarily best-effort?

The second comment takes the social contract for what it is. It is this: it seems there is an untenable tension between the document’s ethical reach and the reality of community-provided care as we see it in OpenCare. For example, article 5 and its commentary state that access to care can not be restricted, as it is a human right. Article 6 and commentary invoke independent oversight. Article 3 commits to funding transparency, and it does so in a language that strikes me:

[…] we commit to procuring and managing resources adhering to the ethical standards we apply in all our activities, and in measure to sustain the continuity of our action, designing adequate fallback strategies should causes of force majeure cut us short of planned funding.

All of this sounds distinctly unlike the open care initiatives I have in mind from participating in the OpenCare conversation. What sort of transparency can the Cytostatic network, which is essentially underground, commit to? What happens when the Helliniko Community Clinic doctors and volunteers are exhausted and burned out, and still people in need of care come? What standards can they secure? And if Buoy or Woodbine fail to deploy risk mitigation strategies (for example taking on insurance), does this mean they are failing?

I am not convinced of all this. As far as I can see, community care initiatives are, technically, “best effort” services. “We will do our best, but cannot commit to a minimum standard. Moreover, it is not fair that you expect one from us, we are doing our best here.”

These initiatives seem to emerge to meet immediate and urgent needs, and everybody seems clear that best effort is better than what’s available right now. They remind me of Amartya Sen’s discourse on justice: there is a large difference, he claims, between advancing the cause of justice (for example, by stopping people from deporting innocent children of illegal immigrants) and designing a system of perfect justice. Community care initiatives are Sen-ian that way: they improve the care panorama, but cannot possibly take on the delivery of a flawless system of care – and they don’t seem to think that is their job anyway. See, for example, the insistence of the Helliniko crowd that “they do not want to replace a national health service, they want to push it to be more inclusive, humane and efficient”. A good, complete care system is desirable, but it’s someone else’s job to deliver it.

Coda on this: transparency, accountability and risk mitigation are all great things, but they are also overhead. In Europe’s welfare states, national health services are required to have all this. But then they struggle to maintain financial viability, universality of coverage, or both. And this resonates also in the jurisprudence around human rights: social rights are “left hanging”. We have a right to care as humans, but nobody has an obligation to provide care to humans as such, bar exceptions. If a person has cancer and no health insurance and no assets in the wrong country, that person will die. Nobody will necessarily go to jail for dereliction of duty.

So, maybe, community care can only be best effort. It is what makes it efficient and fast. Asking these initiatives to behave as if they were regular hospitals means, effectively, saying they should not exist. Am I wrong?

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Hi @alberto

thank you for breaking the ice :slight_smile:

Since your comment is divided in two portions I will offer you two separated replies, to keep the two threads apart as possible… this one is about the “identity” of deliverable 4.5

In facts, when we set sail writing the proposal (which should be available to the general public at this URL https://edgeryders.eu/en/opencare/project but isn’t, maybe @matthias can help?) our ideas of open care were the conjectures of researchers starting an investigation… a certain naivety is unsurprising: one could argue whether we have achieved the collective intelligence repeatedly mentioned in the proposal, but I presume we can agree we have produced some reassuringly sound insights by the conversations on the platform and the analyses available with OpenEthnographer, as long as we maintain realistic expectations.

Deliverable 4.5 had been formulated thinking of the cases of open care that were closer to our experiences at the time of writing the proposal, those that have achieved a structure and some public visibility. However, as the reflection about how to define “open care” that sprouted within the community in the first semester demonstrated, once we reached out to the deepest layers of community driven care, we discovered a fairly different world. Often short lived initiatives, with little to no organised value channelling, and hence little governable exploitation, almost an absence of explicit design, substituted by a mechanism of reactions, and trials-and-errors. As in a iceberg, what had been visible to us at the beginning, including the cases like Helliniko Community Clinic that you mention later in your comment, were just the tip, and the smallest portion of the entire ecosystem.

In conversation with successful and failed initiatives from the field, we realised the social contract that would be needed is much more radical than just a way to agree about the traceability of contribution, and redistribution of value. What value would you even redistribute, if most initiatives have never figured out what’s their value chain, and systematically disperse the value generated, sometimes wasting opportunities, because of a lack of time for reflection (it’s easy to talk from my office, but if I had been in Nepal in 2015 I would have started helping where possible, trying to coordinate at a very superficial level my actions), sometimes for cultural barriers (the known unknowns of someone, may not be so well known to someone else), always for the lack of an infrastructure of support, knowledge transfer, mentoring, across domains and initiatives…

So… what you look at in article #8, is what the original path materialised into, and if you do not recognise it’s clarity of explanation about how to deal with value as a step in the direction of each initiative discussing with its community
how to deal with traceable and non-traceable contributions, we may amend it, or write a #9 together (this is way we invite a conversation)…
However, a “social contract” only devoted to this aspect, in the face of the complexity community driven care initiatives are facing out there, would really just be a TOS for our project (which we never wanted to do, hence the title of the deliverable), and not a social contract… What is the social contract that binds together all the values shared and exposed in a community driven care initiative? People who have experienced loss due to failing initiatives, or contributors who have suffered burn-out, or who were haunted by doubts about the meaning of their commitment,even people seeing their projects “successful” but not acknowledged, supported, or replicated, …they sought a different reflection than we expected at the beginning, what we set sails to do being just a fraction of it.

Now, to the pragmatic part, would you propose changes to article 8, or would you rather a 9, or 10 added somewhere?

The Deliverable is frozen in time for bureaucratic reasons, but the editors wrote its text hoping that this could be used, and misused (in the sense of used beyond our initial purposes) by the communities… a living and evolving document.

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Now to the juicy part of your comment. It strikes me that no one from the people we are in touch with running care initiatives felt our language “binding” as apparently you read it. I wonder if it was the effect of having a conversation around it.

I will start from the sentence you put in quotation marks “We will do our best, but cannot commit to a minimum standard. Moreover, it is not fair that you expect one from us, we are doing our best here.”
I have heard it.
Several months later, I have met people operating in this project in burn-out and doubting what they had been doing.

“We are doing our best here” is the operational regime of emergency… even within institutional care (that’s why triage exists, and all sorts of rules about whom to care first, and whom to save when you have to make a choice…). However, community driven care initiatives are not all emergency initiatives, and most of them really are not. Once you strive to become the reference point of a community for something (a service, most of the times in open care), your modality of work changes, your relationship with those people becomes deeper, richer, and more complex. Mistakes, losses, abandon, exact a toll on them, and on you. As well as accusations of collusion with groups of power (I still remember the loss of trust when Italy tried to force doctors to report illegal migrants), systematic imposition of arbitrary treatments, or racial/faith discrimination. You are there to help, at the beginning, but failing these dimensions transforms the meaning of your commitment, and erodes you and the initiative.

Of course, we could have written a simpler social contract for completely unregulated care initiatives: skin in the game. Everyday doctors and nurses are threatened when they refuse something, or when they are thought guilty of mistakes, of malevolence… many of the issues in the social contract we propose are regulated by “natural selection” of the care givers, or the beneficiaries, according to circumstances…

However, every initiative can strive to do better, and we have never met one that said “we don’t want a safety net” or “we don’t want to be transparent”… this are not overheads. Overheads is implementing these dimensions into box-ticking mechanisms, and other bureaucratic implementations. Organizing in groups, recognising the need for lean documentation, guaranteeing room for conversation and expertise transfer, … this is also “care” for the community, because if the care-givers need to love the feeling of heroism to provide care, its meaning will soon change.

Community care is best effort, but best effort doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no space to reflect on the care offered, and to improve it. If we really think of open care as a sustainable alternative for failing national/official systems, than we have to leave behind the idea that it is heroic, and we have to commit to elevating it to its full potential.

I invite you to name an initiative that would not want to do it, that is not striving to do it… it’s a process, and this proposed social contract is a roadmap to reflecting on how to become sustainable.

Of course, none of the points in the contract is prescriptive, and never a specific solution/implementation is identified… because each community can design what works best at its scale… other communities with more experience can (and our project is helping them doing it more) mentor, by sharing what they learnt with their mistakes, or serendipitous findings.
But if we want to settle for a care that does not strive for at least this much, we are betraying our promise to exploring a sustainable alternative model of care for Europe.

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(On the identity of the deliverable) First, a question. I’m a bit confused here. Where can I read article 8? The deliverables I read stop at article 6.

Second, a respectful disagreement. It’s not that I do not appreciate the attempt you are making here, it’s clearly relevant and ambitious. But, meanwhile, we have not solved the problem of collective authorship. We risk ending up with the community as a “rightless volunteer” (your own words, before we all adopted them), again. Maybe anthropology has something to suggest here, @amelia?

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(On the juicy part) You make a fair point. I need to reflect on why I got this reaction: was it the quasi-legalese (“force majeure”)? Was it the organizational “we”? (Notice how open carers communicate: there’s no “we” in this post, there’s “you should do X” and “I am doing it this way”). Was is the implication that taking care implies a liability for the care-giver, which is a powerful incentive to retreat into the impersonal world of professional care, insurance policies and liability waivers?

I am re-reading David Graeber’s Debt, and cannot help framing this debate in terms of his theoretical architecture. I tend to see this open care stuff as what Graeber calls baseline communism. Worth copying him word for word:

If you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.

According to Graeber, this is an arrangement which has nothing to do with contracts. It is asymmetric by definition. Asymmetry is what makes it efficient: “from each according to her possibilities”. Contracts, however, arise in exchange, which is a completely different principle from baseline communism. In exchange, people perceive themselves as more or less equal. One can accept something from the other (like in baseline communism and in hierarchy, the third organising principle considered by Graber), but now the person accepting something is in debt. Upon repaying the debt, equality is restored.

So maybe I am unconvinced by the language of contracts, because they contradict my impression that open care is based on baseline communism rather than exchange and reciprocity. Not sure. At least one of the commitments of the contract (ok, aspirations, if commitments is too strong), insurance/financial measures of risk mitigation are explicitly rejected by the Amish in the name of something economists would call moral hazard. They use, instead, skin in the game.

A second problem (not with the contract but with your comment, is that you seem to assume that people burn out because they cannot provide standards, monitor etc. I do not see evidence for causality. I invoke Ockam’s Razor: you see people burnout and initiatives fail because most initiatives fail, and in so doing burn initiators out. It is just as probable that people burn out because they overextend, in the attempt not to curtail others’ right to care. I have no evidence for that either, but maybe we can ask – once again – @amelia if she has any wise things to say on “what things look like from out here”.

Final point. Oversight, standards etc. are, I think, definitely overhead when you are operating on this kind of edge. Do you believe otherwise? Can you explain? Here’s my argument, by example: the DIY pancreas exists because the inventors said “screw FDA approval, it will never happen, not in time. We can’t sell it, but we can give schematics away under legal protection for free speech.” If they had followed due process, the solution would not exist. It is not a coincidence that their slogan is the same as NightScout’s: #wearenotwaiting. If this is not a call to cut corners of due process, I don’t know what it is.

On the other hand, these people are going to great lengths to make sure their fellow diabetes patients are OK. They are monitoring, they are trying to extend the area of coverage, they are trying to get ever better etc. But (1) they are doing it because they are decent people; no need to add a written commitment, because they are already committed; and (2) people are treated as adults, very smart adults in fact (“Remember, everyone learns differently – and everyone’s diabetes is different. Figure out what works well for you, and rock it!”) . Even with the schematics and the tutorials, it is far from trivial to build yourself am artificial pancreas. In other words, these efforts to improve are themselves best effort. But that’s OK – having a potentially fatal condition works great for giving you focus.

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I found that the proposal is still available in the OpenCare Resources wiki at “Project Materials → The original proposal”.

But as you found, the page dedicated to it was not imported for some reason. It is still available in the legacy Drupal version. I’ll care to find out why the import did not happen, and fix that incl. the missing link forwarders. Thank you for pointing this out.

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I am not sure… have you, or have you not copy-pasted the articles as your first post in this thread?
Had you happened to read them also, for the sake of this conversation? I suggest you just look back up to your own post, and discover #8 :wink:

Now to your substantial comment… where you apparently see problems, even after one and a half year of working with them, only in their attribution of authorship, the people we have met doing “collective authorship” had worries about governance, about what they should have expected in hindsight, and how to reconcile what they invested themselves in with what happens. The “social contract in community driven care” (still the text of the call, word by word, none the less) turned out not to be about authorships. Actually, I will argue in my reply to your next post, that the conversations on the platform itself do not belong to authorship, but to the thing you despise and label “overhead”…

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And here again, in what we are calling “the juicy part” :slight_smile:

I receive your quote about the “baseline communism”, but I am not particularly impressed. We never set sail to produce baseline communism, we launched our project to find a sustainable alternative to a failing model.
I would also argue that here you are playing with words, mixing contracts (the legal pact binding two or more parties), and social contracts… social contract do not arise in exchange, the exist anywhere people co-live… in whatever form they may take at a certain moment, they explain how people are trading off trust, cooperation, competition, and whatnot…

The Amish, as instance, do not reject risk mitigation… they reject its financial form (insurances), but have put behavioural rules and community oversight that cover the same needs… ultimately the mutual help they offer IS risk mitigation… skin in the game looks a bit different, and they only practice it for those breaking their social contract engaging in risky (immoral?) behaviours.

Your second point, with due respect, ignores the abundant psychological and medical literature on burn-out. You are entitled to your opinions. However, the “failing” scenario and the “people overextending” are exactly the same scenario… the latter is one of the most common forms you encounter of the first. Again, plenty of literature about the cascade effect of breaking limits when offering care, and the transformation of societies when the care-givers become people in need… not something you want to produce by design.

Your final point is what surprises me the most. We have spent so much time discussing how to make something viable avoiding overheads, that your comment brings me 1 year in the past. You are talking a “limousine project” DIY pancreas as if all the initiatives we have seen were the same.
Not everyone monitors, documents, or understand how to scale… because when you are in the grey area you may lack the confidence for asking, or people may not take you seriously (we live in a strongly polarised society), you may simply not have access to some resources…
But again I understand you misunderstand the social contract for a contract… what we wrote is an attempt at making explicit the social contract that already makes community driven care work (or not), as a guide for people setting out with a new project, or struggling with a running one, to have the opportunity of reflecting on their value chain, and find their own solutions

The platform we work on, OpenCare, which puts projects in touch with each other, which uses openethnographer to spot groups talking of similar topics to allow someone to suggest they get in touch, on which questions can be asked about doubts or discomfortable situations, in which uncertain practices are offered to oversight of others… that’s really the kind of need it satisfies… a LOT more than authorship (please, count the number of new care initiatives started here, or the number of innovations… and compare with the conversation about understanding something)… and I am sure you don’t consider what you do an overhead.
Why are you so stuck in thinking it is for them?

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It does not look like we can make further headway. It looks like you are defending something, but I am not attacking (and why I would I?), so we are getting nowhere. Instead, I will ask a few questions and step aside for others to make their own points.

First off: [quote=“markomanka, post:10, topic:6977”]
I suggest you just look back up to your own post, and discover #8
[/quote]

I stand corrected. I was looking at the articles on a Gmail preview window, and I guess it had not fully pre-loaded the PDF attachment. Articles 7 and 8 are actually closer to my own way of seeing things.

You are missing a word, and it’s the one denoting the actual object of the action: it’s “social contract in community driven care design”. Not quite the same thing, I would say. When you include it back, things make perfect sense. We need to offer a social contract because we are asking people to spend time with our project (and you know how hard it has been to get 300 people to do that. In exchange, we commit to offering something.

Questions:

  1. Are the articles describing what you see in community-based care initiatives? Or are they prescribing how they should be, in order to be fair, effective, sustainable etc.?
  2. Whose point of view is encoded in the description or prescription? Your own, as a researcher, or the informants’?
  3. How do you think we should address the issue of collective authorship in OpenCare? Maybe this is a question for the ethical advisors too?
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:slight_smile: Are you not familial with conversations in disagreement? Or where you expecting to vent your opinions, which you are entitled to, without my explanations of why I do not embrace them?

You are the master of the house, if you want me to shut up, say so :wink:

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At page 49 of the final proposal as it was approved for submission, you will read that the deliverable was entitled “D3.5 Community driven care. A draft social contract (delivery date: month 18)” (which then turned to D4.5 because it was impossible to have a WP0)… You will notice that the “design” is not there :wink:

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As stated above, it is not prescribing, but guiding the reflections of that which initiatives trying to mature towards sustainability should pay attention to… we do not prescribe anything, a social contract is something you realise is there, and you reflect upon… it is not something you “enforce”

By definition, this is what we understood (I am not the main editor) from our repeated encounters with what you call “informants”, during the workshops, the clinics, and the other serious games sections…

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Your disagreement is noted. I just don’t think we can make further progress, as I have offered my arguments as best as I could. You are not impressed, I know, but that’s the best I can do, so I will just leave it at that. That does not mean you should not write as much as you think is appropriate! Why would I shut you up? It simply means I am stepping aside from the argument.

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Ok, so it is a description. This is what a “constitution” covering Helliniko, Orange House, Open Insulin, Woodbine, EchOpen etc. would look like if they had written one together. Hopefully they themselves will confirm or dissent.

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We are not looking at the same document! :confused: Mine is called “Grant Agreement”, Annex 1. I am looking at the description of deliverables of WP 4, on page 20 of 33 (Annex 1 itself starts after page 82 of the GA, so the overall page number is 102 of 243 as shown by Preview). I read:

D4.5 : Community-driven care: a draft [18]
A draft explicit social contract for community-driven care services design, aimed at removing exploitation from the participatory design picture. This is done by styling the community as a collective author and researcher, rather than a “rightless volunteer”, like in most crowdsourcing exercises. (emphasis mine)

This is echoed in Table 1.3.5, Critical implementation risks, as R5:

Lacking or exploitative social contract. Many online participation initiatives do not address the question of why people should participate at all. […]

@lucechiodelliub, can we have a clarification of what should actually be in D4.5, as per our obligation towards the European Commission? Is there a “definitive document, and what does it say”!?!

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Even in the design phase, which as argued above in most cases is happening during execution, not in online conversations, the social contract cannot be limited to tracking and acknowledging authorship.

We can include, as this is meant to be a basis for evolution, further articles since #7 and #8 seems to touch your chords but not to satisfy you… however, observing the initiatives, it would look we would then have to become prescriptive, rather than descriptive… Unless you can point our attentions to instances when such an item of the social contract was at play, for us to study it further…

Concerning risk R5, an initiative respecting the presented social contract is, as far as we have been able to observe, capable of maintaining a long-term thriving community of participants, none of whom develop frustrations or feelings of exploitation, so it covers the basis.
We added #8 when some of the failing/struggling initiatives were pointed out, in which exploitation had emerged for generated value that had been spotted by “sharks”, and were not channelled and governed by the community…

If the unmet need you feel is that of a TOS for the platform, why not adapting one of the contracts used by some GNU projects (which are hanging from the same tree of those used by academic publishers)? That is not a social contract though, just to be clear, that would be a legal contract we propose…

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@alberto I would like to stress what I had written in one of my initial posts in this thread, that during OpenCare we learnt a lot, and some prejudices/conjectures (select which you like the most of the two) we had have been challenged… a social contract is something which exists, or something which you hypothesise if you are working with a thought scenario.
In the spirit of the project, it is about reality we talk in the deliverable, and we cannot inject what we would like to see. An exercise in imagining the social contract for an online design process that does not happen in real world (e.g.: Fellowship Blog: Strategy & Labwork in August - #14 by winnieponcelet and the entire thread) doesn’t appeal as a sound deliverable of the project. Reality, however surprising or uncharming, seems more interesting for us, and for future projects.

However, as I also highlighted above, we discovered an ecosystem like OpenCare does satisfy several points of the real world social contract in this living design, concerning the sharing of experiences and best practices, reviewing each others, and such… it hits on transparency, on evidences, on quality… with very low bureaucratic overheads (it’s documented while doing)…
We were quite excited when we realised this, that is why I am still struggling to grasp why you seem so let down.

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Let down is too strong. I do stand with an unsolved problem (collective authorship). That’s my main problem, because, as I see it, we have not solved it, and have used the deliverable meant to address it for something else instead, for the reasons you explained.

As for what the deliverable does address, I do not feel let down, but I have trouble reconciling my mental picture of the OC community with it. I have tried my best to explain why… Look: I will re-read it. I may be wrong. But in the end it does not matter what I think. With a descriptive document, what matters is that the people being described see themselves in it.

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I have difficulty wrapping my head around the discussion. Others may do as well?

The contract makes sense. Not sure what its role would be in a project though, where it contributes. Agreeing on a common set of values and drafting your own ‘contract’ helps build the team. The process itself is valuable. Providing people with a readily available contract might not have much practical use then, unless for inspiration, but then the formulation is quite dense for that.

Or if this agreement becomes something like the Fab Charter. Would it work as a unifying thing, for such a diverse group of people/initiatives?

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To understand what is expected for the project in relation to Deliverable 4.5, it is indeed necessary to have a look at opencare’s Grant Agreement, namely its two annexes: Annex 1 (for project implementation) and the Description of Action (for the recollection of the project’s ambition and engagements). These two documents list everything we had agreed to strive to do, and this is also what is going to be reviewed by the EC next year.

Here are excerpts in relation to the work to provide for deliverable 4.5 / social contract for community-driven care design:

Description of Action - excerpts :

1.4.4 Design for participation and collective intelligence: own contribution p22/66

As design tools are democratized, design professionals must take on the role of trigger and support for meaningful social changes, focusing on emerging forms of collaboration (Manzini 2015). OpenCare does just that, and hopes to contribute to advancing the field in two ways.
The first, consistently with objective 1, is to focus on execution and so provide a detailed case study of designing for collaboration. We instantiate a large-scale collaboration experiment and document our trials, errors and successes.
The second, consistent with objectives 1 and 2, is an attempt to take out exploitation out of the participatory design picture. This is done by underwriting an explicit social contract with the OpenCare community, styled as a collective author and researcher. to this end, we run a social lab to reflect on the nature of accountability, governance, and ownership in distributed participatory design in care provision. By role-playing, simulations, and storytelling, we explore the dynamics of the distributed innovation systems under a spectrum of desirable, and less so, schemes of governance, and value propositions from the community members.

The ethnographic account of the narratives of expectations and fears of the participants resulting from this activity, and a systematic study of the technical tools available to empower a fully scalable citizen participation, are documented and published for peer evaluation and reproduction.

1.4.6 Own contribution of the project to care policy making - p23/66
**The objective of the project is to build a foundation for development of future community-based collective intelligence projects.**The ambition is to find ways to collect and disseminate new ideas and knowledge in areas where markets, or market incentives, do not exist. This can be done either by the creation of markets (or pseudo-markets) or incentives (such as Xprizes or prediction markets) or by creating other structures and incentive schemes that are not market based. Part of the research project is to identify workable (and proven) methods to do so, and to find out when different methods are suitable and effective.
Since the area is not well developed, a major contribution is the research on, and mapping of, existing projects. Here, the OpenCare network will be used to help find these projects.
The tangible output (to be published in academic journals) will be:
● Identified best practice from previous research and existing projects.
● Mapping of existing collective intelligence projects.
● Policy design based on this identified best practice.

Grant Agreement, Annex 1, excerpts - p18/33:

Objectives:

The research questions are both empirical, (I) to what extent have collective intelligence projects (including prediction markets) been used in the care sector in Europe, (II) what are the features of these programs, and policy oriented (III) what will make a collective intelligence project successful (e.g. which policies will facilitate the emergence of successful projects), (IIII) to what extent existing project are scalable. The field studied will be the European health care sector, where bottom up, collaborative projects might provide new solutions, providing real value for society.

Description of work on WP4:

Using the empirical findings, and theory derived from other sectors, we identify a “best practice” for community based
collective intelligence projects and use this best practice to evaluate existing projects and provide policy guidelines for future development of such solutions in areas where markets are limited or non-existing. The whole process maintains an ongoing relationship with WP1 by feeding its results onto the main OpenCare conversation.

Description of tasks and deliverables for WP4 (following page):

Task 4.4: Reinvent mass collaboration as a non-exploitative activity (Task leader: SCImPULSE; months 13-23)
We use ethnographic techniques to explore if, and how, the accountability and ownership policies in citizen
cyberscience carry through to community-driven innovation in the welfare sector. We document the expectations and fears of participants to participatory design in care, map pitfalls against sustainability and scalability, and identify the means to deploy fair, non-extractive citizen participation. This latches onto the policy-oriented WP4 because mass participation in public service provision is inhibited by the fear of activism serving as the fig leaf for the political expediency of budget cuts (Lowndes & Pratchett 2012).

D4.5 : Community-driven care: a draft [18]
A draft explicit social contract for community-driven care services design, aimed at removing exploitation from the participatory design picture. This is done by styling the community as a collective author and researcher, rather than a “rightless volunteer”, like in most crowdsourcing exercises.

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