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.
