Hello Future Carers, today Edgeryders CEO Nadia El-Imam is at the Shaping the Future of Digital Social Innovation in Europe conference in Brussels. In the afternoon CAPSSI programme director Fabrizio Sestini is giving a presentation about the CAPSSI call, followed by a Q&A session. So, if you have a question let Nadia know and she will ask it for you.
My own question is this. Item a in the scope of the call is called “Collective awareness pilots for bottom-up participatory innovation paradigms”. The word “pilots” makes me think of projects that emphasize field testing of tools, by applying them to social innovation and sustainability problems. This is quite different from developing new tools; development might result from finding out, during the pilot, that tools need improvements, or need to be discarded altogether. It follows that the key deliverable of CAPSSI is not technology per se, but a proof-of-concept of collective awareness tech making headway in a social innovation and sustainability problem. Is this interpretation correct? Would a project that is 90% issue-centered piloting and 10% technical innovation – demonstrably needed to tackle the problem at hand – be acceptable?
Although I am not sure this is the most politically correct formulation of my curiosity, focusing on challenge a I would like to ask about the clause “Given their piloting nature, proposals are expected to be rather compact and small, even though projects including technology development and/or integration may require larger investments.”
Most eligible challenges for this call are complex by nature, and a pilot would need to capture the sociotechnical aspect at full. Why would the valorisation of new patents (this is what I read for “development and/or integration”) be more justifiable than the work needed to understand how use, and misuses contribute to empowering the target population, or hinder the process?
Much of the knowledge expected as a output from a pilot would serve the purpose of identifying pitfalls, making sense of governance needs, projecting the potentials and pitfalls of scaling up. This is heavy on the FTEs accounting… heavier than R&D.
a) Your interpretation is correct. Solutions must be based on sensible integration of sensible, existing technologies like social networks etc…nothing new conceptually or technically. But integration of these tools might need integration. starting point must be real
b) yes. its up to us to propose solutions, and composition that fits.
2. Reply to Marko’s question:
The specification that proposals requiring more tech development might require more money is just based on what has been observed in the past, it is not an indication of justification of tech over other aspects.
Thanks to Nadia’s intel work, we now have the answer to my one remaining doubt. Everyone wants “interdisciplinary” and “embedded in a real community” in theory, but is CAPSSI prepared to fund a project that de-prioritizes software development in favor of prototyping (not of software, but of practical solutions) and of new methods of enquiry on collective awareness that reuse existing software? And the answer is unambiguously YES.
So. We do our care thing. We focus on building exciting prototype solutions and summoning a vibrant community around them. We run ethno analysis. We use the ethno coding to do a semantic social network analysis, which Ben, Guy and I have a hunch is the way to go for online conversation harvesting. This will definitely require sticking together some simple-to-use tool (think Edgesense, but with semantics), but this will reuse existing libraries and not aim to build commercial grade, sleek, deeply integrated software.
