Social Contract Draft

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.

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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Hi @winnieponcelet

this is an interesting question, as most of those born from changing the frame when reading something.

The social contract has a “unifying” value in being constructed by the community… this is true always, and in this sense any effort of writing one is useless.

However, the same power of “constructing” is found in “making sense”, in “meaning-negotiation” among the participants… what does it mean for us “to do X”.

Let me look for a moment at another example… if you are looking at how people handle nations, you will easily spot the differences in social contracts if you claim that a “right to work” exists, or that a “right to subsistence” does… the effect of these choices will reverberate on whether a through representative democracy is possible, or the extent of self-determination of the citizens…
Now this is irrelevant, if all you want to achieve is for people to somehow live together (I often heard the argument that a despotism by illuminated elites may be more effective than an elected democracy… it all depends on what you optimise for after all)… However, if you had in mind to achieve a specific range of behaviours and possible evolutions, the choice does matter.

Observing and making explicit items in a social contract for community driven care that have managed to make their continuing design and evolution sustainable is not meant to prescribe anything… people can still get together wanting to invest some time to gain experience, and they need not to worry about sustainability over time… however, it offers a provocation to reflect about which direction is the process of designing one’s own social contract taking, when the desired goal is to build a sustainable care initiative.
The group will still have to negotiate (ultimately build) the meaning of each of those items for its own community… a process that will happen at different speeds for as long as they exist… but they will have a reference point to reflect upon what their choices are looking like.

This is why philosophers of politics have over centuries spent a lot of resources describing the social contracts of their times, trying to understand how they came to be from the past…

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Do I read that you would recommend we go back to our notes and try to include considerations about the impulses at the origins, before the community driven care?
Seeing your emphasis on the “collective intelligence” as related to this deliverable, we can emphasise in the document how the internal governance promotes or tempers the “emergence and diffusion” of knowledge, where collective would mean “including the community it should care for”.

Concerning the comparison to initiatives like Xprizes and company hackathons, except for the sheer size of advertisement, nothing tangible comes out of them when looking for follow-ups, so it’s a blocked road.

Do I read your recommendation in the right way @lucechiodelliub ?

Dear @markomanka – also mentioning @alberto

I believe it is up to you to decide whether you want to upload deliverable D4.5 as we have it, or you want to edit it in some way after Alberto’s remarks and in view of the GA (thanks @lucechiodelliub for pointing at specific sections/paragraphs). Alberto might have an opinion on this as well.

P.S. I take advantage of this post to ask about the status of deliverable D1.6 “Peer-auditing of the project and indication on how to work around failures and pitfalls” (due Aug 31st).

Guy

I hear you Guy. I would like to have a quick chat with @markomanka, but it has to be next week. Marco, is that feasible?

Hi @alberto, how does 25 look for you?

Hi @melancon, I presume it’s just the tension from this item here that has made them slow down the internal review. Let me pepper their tails, and I will be back :wink: