Synopsis: Ict:

6research Objectives 7overview of the Research project 8chapter 1 Project overview and theoretical framework 11background 11what is the value of Digital Social Innovation in the context of Future Internet

and solutions for a wide range of social needs and at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of the Internet'.

'This research aims to explore the potential of the network effect of the Internet (activity

the network effect of the Internet may still be in its early technical phases and early implementation to maximize social good.

The development of open data infrastructures, knowledge co-creation platforms, wireless sensor networks, decentralized social networking,

and open hardware, can potentially serve collective action and awareness. However, today it stills fail to deliver anticipated solutions to tackle large-scale problems,

and reach of commercial Internet models and the relative weakness of alternatives, mainly filling marginal niches

Digital social innovation plays a central role in the development of the Future Internet. One of the motivations underpinning this research is need the to investigate the key role that civil society organisations

and grassroots communities play to enable bottom-up social innovation that leverage the power of the Internet.

In the DSI Network Data-Set, there are a total of 285 organisations with a total of 178 activities as of 13 december 2013.

and open hardware projects like Arduino that is recoluzionising open design and manufacturing;(ii) Participatory mechanisms and open democracy featuring new projects pioneering direct democracy

participatory web platforms such as Wikigender and Wikiprogress developed by the OECD that facilitate the linking of National statistics to actual individual living conditions;

the biggest open source data platform in Europe that is underpinning a new bottom up ecosystem for digital public services;(

and analysing real-time environmental data, and Safecast a project that enables citizens to capture and share measurement on radiation levels;(

and Santander pioneering new practices in Open Data and open sensor networks; and mesh networks projects such as Guifi. net, projects such as Confine, Commotion,

and Tor that are using bottom up privacy-preserving decentralised infrastructure for the open Internet constituted by open standards, open data, free and open software,

and open hardware. Other projects are exploring the potential of federated social networking, such as D-CENT and Diaspora,

and the promotion and diffusion of knowledge systems in the Public domain, such as Communia. Most, if not all of the above examples of civil society digital social innovation take place via the Internet

or are enabled highly by new technology trends such as open networks, open hardware and open data infrastructures.

The selected organizations have been classified into four types: Different typology of organisations (e g. Government and public sector organisations, businesses, academia and research organisations, social enterprises, charities and foundations;

The main technological trends the organisations and their activities fit under (open data, open networks, open knowledge, open hardware;

and policy recommendations for DSI with the context of the DAE and Horizons 2020. iv 5 Introduction The Internet is approximately 40 years old,

the last 20 years or so have seen the commercialisation of the Internet take precedence. Online innovation developed specifically to effect major positive social change remains

and solutions for a wide range of social needs and at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of the Internet'.

including the types of technologies underpinning DSI services that combine novel technology trends such as distributed networks, knowledge co-production platforms, open data, open hardware, open content,

and open source software. Crowd-Mapping DSI organisations and their activities: The types of organisations working on DSI in Europe,

and the specific impact and added value of the innovation enabled by the Future Internet,

This research is identifying examples of Digital Social Innovations that are exploiting the network effect of the Internet

and merging novel technology trends such as open data, crowd-mapping, open hardware, open distributed networking,

and open knowledge creation to bring people together to solve social challenges, large and small.

In particular grassroots communities of civic innovators, web entrepreneurs, hackers, geeks, SMES, open source and DIY makers,

and promoting the generative web-enabled survey). Key activities were conducted also as part of WP4, such as the launch of the project during the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCON) in Geneva 16th-18th september, presentations during the Smart City Fair in Barcelona on November 20th,

and engagement work across social media and community channels to spread the survey and the crowd-mapping exercise.

Rob van Kranenburg Cofounder of Bricolabs/Founder of the Internet of things Council/Community Manager of SOCIOTAL Charles Leadbeater Nominet Trustroger Torrenti CEO, Sigma Orionismayo Fuster

Consultant Logicadaniel Kaplan Founder and CEO, The next-Generation Internet Foundationsimona Levi Founder, Forum for the Access to Culture and Knowledgemarkkula Markku Committee of the Regions, Rapporteur Europe

aims to explore the potential of the network effect of the Internet (i e. that the benefit of a network and its critical mass of users grows larger than its cost),

emphasising the characteristics of Internet-enabled digital tools that can effectively empower citizens and civic innovators.

A primary example of Digital Social Innovation is the Web itself. As it was based on open digital technologies that could be harnessed by any actor

the Web was able to reach a critical mass of connectivity and exploit the network effect described by the Metcalfe's Law,

The Internet and the Web are the technical underpinnings that represent a densely intertwined techno-social fabric of our societies,

the network effect of the Internet may still be in its early technical phases and early implementation to maximise social good.

The development of open data infrastructures, knowledge co-creation platforms, wireless sensor networks, and open hardware, can potentially serve collective action and awareness.

However, today it still fails to deliver anticipated solutions to tackle large-scale problems. The early years of expansion of Internet-based services has generated a great economic wealth.

However this growth has resulted in an imbalance between the dramatic scale and reach of commercial Internet models and the relative weakness of alternatives,

mainly filling marginal niches and unable to gather a critical mass of users and exploit the network effect.

linking them with the Internet of things and Smart Cities activities. Most, if not all of the above examples of civil society digital social innovation take place via the Internet

or are enabled highly by the Internet. The intention of this research is to carry out an honest analysis of the field,

integrating diverse and multidisciplinary approaches and practices, together with grounded theoretical frameworks that will help us to achieve a broader understanding of the DSI ecosystem

How to accelerate innovations that better align the capacities of the Internet to social needs The non-technological elements and the so-called soft innovation

to connect industrialized big data with collective awareness, while taking into account privacy concerns. The objective would be to harness technology for making the fabric of society as a whole wiser, a genuine product of a more inclusive collective intelligence.

What is the value of Digital Social Innovation in the context of Future Internet in Europe?

The attempt to define a successful DSI model for Europe is contextualised in the broader debate around European Innovation models and the Future of the Internet,

ICT and the Internet are critical to help Europe sustain long-term economic growth and create new jobs.

and redistribution of power amongst the players in the innovation Ecosystemwhile the original advent of the Internet and ubiquitous digital technologies led to a speculative bubble that ended in 2001 now the Internet seems to have more deep inroads into all parts of manufacturing

However, the Internet by itself seems to unable to drive innovation out of the crisis of 2008

More than 5 billion additional people will connect to the Internet globally in the next 10 years.

To fully exploit the potential provided by Internet services a high-speed Internet access is required for all the citizens.

If we observe the evolution of the Internet principles, such as network neutrality, equitable service, and peer-to-peer architecture were crucial to build a universal,

because the Web was built on a set of royalty-free open standards decided through an inclusive and transparent process that,

Open standards have fostered the innovation by allowing the Web to be implemented by anyone over different underlying systems

The emerging cloud model,(proprietary social networks, big data providers, the Internet of things implementation), are currently following a different model that allows us convenience but at the expense of security, privacy and openness:

as apps need access to social data held on third-party sites. The lack of standards forces developers to create multiple versions of the same social application for different closed platforms,

Analysing all the possible Future Internet scenarios (Oxford Internet Institute 2010 we see two opposing innovation models that could emerge (see Figure 5:

A major risk for the Future Internet is the realisation of the Big brother scenario, showing that big industrial players (mainly US based) will reinforce their dominant position by implementing platform lock in strategies,

and patents, appropriating users data, and discriminating network traffic. By centralising computing, data storage and service provision (via the Cloud),

and by striking strategic alliances between the largest Over-The-Top (OTT) and largest network operators, there is a risk that the innovation ecosystem will become more closed,

since we are seeing a consolidation of existing powers and incumbents at every layer of the Internet ecosystem.

The alternative is to accelerate innovations that align the capacities of the Internet better to social needs,

Indeed, the network effect of the Internet may still be in its early phases as well.

The development of open data infrastructures and citizens-controlled wireless sensor networks, and the long-awaited deployment of the semantic web, can potentially serve collective action and awareness.

The Web is today increasingly more enmeshed with our daily lives, forming a universally distributed intelligence constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time,

and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills and tools for collective intelligence. Distributed and citizen-centric innovation plays a central role in the development of the Future Internet.

Honest competition based on open standards, protocols and formats are essential to deploy interoperability between data, devices, services and networks.

Avoiding anti-competitive dynamics and lock in engages all actors in the value chain and allow for replicable,

Digital social innovation plays a central role in the development of the Future Internet. One of the motivations underpinning this research is need the to investigate the key role that civil society organisations

and grassroots communities play to enable bottom-up social innovation that leverage the power of the Internet.

Adapted from Towards a Future Internet, the Oxford Internet Study 2010 in Sestini, F. presentation Collective Awareness Platforms for sustainability and social innovationa Theoretical framework of Collective Intelligence to Unleash the Innovation capabilities of European DSI organisationsthe rapid evolution of digital technologies

The tools of collective intelligence include new technologies for sharing data and knowledge, such as crowdsourcing platforms,

They include analytical tools that allow vast amounts of complex data often from different sources, to be mined and understood.

Innovations, such as those which draw on the expertise of data scientists around the world to develop algorithms to solve large-scale problems,

and digital data accessed via the Internet. Digital Social Innovation can deploy collective intelligence by connecting multiple individuals and groups via technology,

In this way, the Internet offers unprecedented opportunities for collective intelligence via its increasing ubiquity and its massive amounts of data available for collective transformation into knowledge.

whose basis is both in collectively tackling problems via platforms based on crowdsourcing and new phenomenologies based on data visualisation.

This type of innovation was unimaginable before the rise of Internet-enabled platforms. In this way, simply labeling images with the ESP game of Von Ahn is digital innovation,

but simply makes it easier for Google to index and search through images (von Ahn and Dabbish 2005).

However, if we can imagine a new process of crowdsourcing to tackle of crisis of climate change,

a process where people collectively identified their own high-carbon intensive behavior via data-collection and visualisation,

and in this era must be enabled Internet digital social innovation are needed to create new arrangements between the social

and Settingsframing the Research Questionsour research starting point proposes that democratized ICT and open digital infrastructures, data,

knowledge and hardware not only provide tools for people to collaborate in virtual space but also facilitate the formation and diffusion of novel collaborative solutions offline in the real world.

In this process social networks of the engaged communities are reinforced. This research will investigate in what conditions the network effect of Internet collective platforms strengthen the social networks of offline communities

and amplify their collective intelligence. It will also address how to develop bottom-up research frameworks

and systems of collective intelligence that help citizens to share knowledge, transform social practices and shape future alternatives.

and use of their data and contents. This research will look into the type of regulations that can strengthen enabling frameworks for free

contents, software, and data, such as enhancing public domain and making digital contents and information more accessible and reusable by all citizens.

At a socioeconomic level the study will assess new business models and socioeconomic mechanisms‘beyond GDP',based on the valorisation of social data and common information resources for collective use and public benefit beyond monetisation

(e g. towards building knowledge commons for Europe through DSI. At governance and policy level: This research will explore the strategies, research actions,

together with quantitative analysis underpinned by open data gathered though a generative European-wide survey. This mixed methodology was selected because of the exploratory nature of the study.

whose goal is to understand current and complex social phenomena in real life settings, gathering tick data and asking the‘‘how''and‘‘why''questions (Yin 1994.

and solutions for a wide range of social needs and at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of the Internet.'

or experiment with innovative combinations of the selected technology trends (open data, open source and open hardware developments), leveraging social networks (or distributed social networking, sensor networks and the Internet of things,

and knowledge co-creation networks). Aims at empowering citizens, for individual and collective awareness, relying on collaboration and or aggregation between users and/or their data.

Demonstrates of a clear network effect i e. it becomes more powerful when more people use it.

the main technological trends the organisations and their activities fit under (open data, open networks, open knowledge, open hardware;

All data captured about organisations and organisational relationships is made available as an open data set on the website for users to download

and investigate, just as any custom code developed in the course of developing the Website, Database and Dynamic Visualisations will be shared back with the relevant open source communities.

Open data about the mapping of organisations include: Geographic map featuring filters that can be manipulated to reveal information trends

or patterns Dynamic network/relationship map of key organisations that can be manipulated to reveal patterns in relationships A series of interactive,

embeddable data visualisations to demonstrate key features of DSI in Europe 19 Data collection To enable the mapping of organisations

and their activities we considered three different methods with which we could capture the relevant organisational data.

Generative Survey Inclusion of already existing datasets Scraping In the context of this study, network analysis was applied to better understand networks of DSI innovators.

Through an early assessment of the three options it became clear that capturing data through a survey would be preferred the option,

as the other two options would not result in good data. Existing datasets such as the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) membership database, had issues with typologies,

structure and coverage and were incorporated, therefore, not into the map. Similar challenges arose around the possibility of scraping data

in addition to a number of technical, validation and provenance issues surrounding scraped data. Since this field of practice is unexplored relatively,

there is a lack of relevant existing data to help in the mapping process. The dynamic mapping tool will,

however, have the functionality to integrate existing or scraped data should this become relevant for future iterations of the mapping.

Mapping networks through a Generative Survey (ENDNODE) The data captured and its structure determines the mapping capabilities of the website.

Therefore the survey has been designed so that it captures the relevant data needed to understand the different types of DSI organisations and their activities.

It also includes a generative function which is needed in order to capture relational (network) data. The survey has been broken down in to three sections:

Capturing organisational data Capturing data about projects and activities Capturing data about networks and relations between organisations.

First phase: The first section‘Put Yourself on the Map'asks organisations a short series of questions to self-identify as a DSI organisation,

and provide information on geographical location, size and type of organisation (e g. government and public sector, business, academia and research, social enterprise, charity or foundation,

or grassroots organisation or community network). The data on organisational attributes will generate a dot on the geographical map.

Second phase: With the basic organisational information identified, respondents were invited automatically to the second section of the survey called‘Build Your Graph'.

'In this part of the survey, attributes about DSI activities that organisations are involved in will be collected, together with technology trends and methods they are using

Networks between organisations and relational data will be determined through mapping the DSI activities that the different organisations collaborate on. 20 Third phase:

and the generative survey has the potential to evolve into a dynamic DSI community mapping infrastructure and social networking tool.

These were asked then to enter data regarding their organisation and to enter information regarding partners who have worked with them on projects.

A digest email encourages users to complete any missing data in respect of this. Therefore, any organisation can exist on the map

the website survey provides the foundation for the empirical results that are to be used in the rest of the project work packages.

Care has therefore been taken to make the website as easy to use as possible with the aim for it to go viral across the European Digital Social Innovation community.

Currently, there are over two hundred organisations that have registered with the website. However, to date, the survey is only available in English,

Thus, the next stage for the website will be to consider how to produce a multilingual version.

Data visualisationto understand the DSI landscape in Europe the mapping and visualisation takes three main forms:

and work on the open survey data set. The mapping and visualisations are designed around the data that is acquired through the processes listed above.

The proposed approach to mapping and visualisation exploits the flexibility of linked data. All data points will have their own URIS that will allow mapping to Open Street Map objects.

Effectively, different types of data can be layered on top of these URIS to create a more robust and extensible database.

The diagram above reflects this approach with an Open Street Map base layer with actor location data, network relationships,

communication density and user generated data applied. Currently the website is focused on the geographic mapping of organisations.

Over the next stage of the DSI report, various info-graphics that highlight important aspects of the data will be added. 22 Chapter 3-Defining DSI Interim Findings An emerging typology

of the DSI field: Clustering organisations and activities Digital Social Innovation is a relatively new field of study,

with little existing knowledge on who the digital social innovators are; what types of activities they are involved in

such as the difficulties in detecting the most effective combinations of online and offline organisations and collaboration;

a practice of sharing and collaboration at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of the Internet,

uses the beta data to show how the generative element of the survey has begun to create initial links across the organisations to reveal networks both within Europe

a provisional thematic clustering of DSI organisations is emerging, grouping activities into 5 macro clusters that capture the way DSI activities affect

some on business to business transactions (e g. in Nantes or Venezuela), some on particular sectors such as care (e g.

In East Africa the development of M-PESA (a mobile financial payment system born out of social innovation) has become an avenue for nine million people to gain access to secured financial exchange services.

or linking currencies to data. 25 2. New ways of making A vibrant ecosystem of makers is developing across Europe and globally.

Low-cost home 3d manufacturing tools (3d printers, CNC machines), free CAD/CAM software like Blender, 123d or Sketchup and open source designs are now giving innovators

Recycle are becoming the keywords of the Open Hardware and Makers movement, which implies a combination of different design and technology methods, such as fast prototyping,

The Open Hardware is the backbone of the sharing economy, since it shifts the attention away from consumption and resource exploitation,

The open hardware movement in particular is about how you share knowledge, skills and tools, and how you build communities around your open products.

People working on Open source Hardware are creating new organisations such as the Open source Hardware Association, to open new research avenues and coordinate projects,

open source cars such as Wikispeed, building farming tools, new fabrication machines like the Reprap and open objects.

These products are open source and free; and you can use, copy and improve as much as you want with a worldwide community of peers helping you

and tools to enable collaborative communities to undertake large scale projects that can lead to innovative results in open business, open government or open data.

Projects like Open source Ecology are promoting a bigger shift towards a more sustainable lifestyle and society.

Interesting trends are emerging at the intersection between open hardware DIY culture, open source software and open data.

Projects like Safecast or open source Geiger, the Smart Citizen Kit, and open wearables are showing interesting potential in combining innovative technology trends to generate unexpected outcomes.

Technological driven developments such as sensor networks and open data connected with a sustainable user-centric design can support organisations and individuals in addressing challenges of the future. 3. Participatory mechanisms, feedback,

and open democracy Participatory democracy strives to create opportunities for all members of a population to make meaningful contributions to political decision-making,

and citizen participation through crowdsourcing legislation such as Open Ministry or Liquid Feedback are transforming the traditional models of representative democracy.

participatory web platforms such as Wikigender and Wikiprogress developed by the OECD facilitate the linking of National statistics to actual individual living conditions;

the biggest repository of open data in Europe that is underpinning a new bottom-up ecosystem for digital public services.

businesses and society by pioneering new practices in open data and open sensor networks that are changing the provision and delivery of public services;

and communities are beginning to aggregate the layers of data that increasingly permeate the urban environment

and Digital Commonsmany activities in this area exploit the power of Open Data, Open APIS, and Citizens Science such as Open Data Challenge and Open Cities that provide citizens better public services,

wile Citysdk is defining interoperable interfaces for city-scale applications. Other projects are exploring the potential of federated social networking

such as D-CENT and Diaspora, and the promotion and diffusion of knowledge systems in the Public domain, such as Communia.

and Tor are using bottom-up privacy-preserving decentralised infrastructure for the open Internet constituted by open standards, open data, free and open software,

and open hardware. Finally, Github the collaborative service for open software developers is revolutionising the way code is built

shared and maintained by a variety of projects around the globe. Important development to re-decentralise the Net,

For instance, distributed social networking projects such as Diaspora, Status. net or easy-to run servers like arkos,

which makes it easy to run your own secure cloud, and decentralised media publishing platforms such as mediagoblin are gaining new momentum.

while preserving the openness and accessibility of the Internet infrastructure. Furthermore, there's no denying that the ability to access knowledge

Primo aims to teach the high level abstraction of programming as a sequence of instructions to young children in schools,

These kinds of projects are able to combine open hardware technologies with new learning methods to experiment with new educational practices,

culture & education Smart public services Open Networks Confine Opengarden. net Everyaware Commons 4eu Tor project Make sense Freecoin Smart Santander Open Data Wikiprogress Open Corporates

Hardware Safecast Raspberry Pi Fablab Amsterdam Iot Council Arduino Smart Citizen Kit Fairphone Makerfaire New ways of making Participatory mechanisms Sharing economy Awareness networks Open Access 28 Who are involved the organisations in supporting

and public sector organisationsproviding funding for experiments/R&dproviding nonfinancial resources (i e. opening up public data sets) Delivering

and expanding communitiesdemocratizing access to emerging technologiessmart Citizen Kittorchaos Computer Clubtable 5 29 The spread of organisation types across organisations on the map are represented in Table 6

The work by Your Priorities in Iceland and Open Ministry in Finland on bringing DSI to the core of government by crowdsourcing legislation is another.

Data and access to data is the fuel that drives much digital social innovation. Through opening up and sharing public data sets national and local government have enabled citizens

and organisations to create public good services that were not previously in place. The work by the local government in Vienna on Open Government Data Vienna led to citizens developing a raft of innovations,

such as the Fruitfly, a map of public fruit trees with free fruit across the city. The partnership between the not-for-profit Praxis and the Estonian Government on opening up and visualising government budget data, created more transparency around public spending. 30 SMESFROM small start-ups to larger companies,

innovative companies play a big role in pioneering new practices delivering DSI services that enable users

and the health data they create, and the organisation behind Github, the collaborative service for open software writers.

Academia and research institutions Universities and other research-driven organisations such as think thanks, unsurprisingly play a big role in researching

Arduino, the open hardware circuit board was developed, for example, originally by students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy.

one of the most widely used open-source data portal platforms is an example of a not-for-profit providing a service that enables more DSI to happen by making it easier for large institutions to open up their data.

Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Europe's largest network of Hackers, is the most prominent example of grassroots communities coming together to develop

the club also fights for free access to computers and technological infrastructure for everybody. The latest gathering of the CCC in 2012 in Hamburg, Germany, brought together 6,

and social investment Nominet Trust Nesta Advocacy and advisory or expert bodies IOT Council La Quadrature du net European Digital Rights (EDRI) Table

it is possible to capture data by filtered the DSI map by‘Activity type'.'The full distribution across the 289 activities noted on the map is registered in the Table below:

Activity type Number listed Delivering a web service 73 Research project 49 Education and training 31 Network 29 Event 27 Incubators and Accelerators 26 Advisory or expert body 15 Advocating

If we analyse these data based on all 289 organisations, and looking at in the light of the case study work,

organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC)( GE), an informal association of hackers from across Europe.

The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) hosts the annual Chaos Communication Congress, the largest hacker congress in Europe.

semi-open spaces with clusters of tables and Internet connections for groups and individuals to collaborate and socialise in projects, workshops, hands-on talks, panels.

and distributed group spaces of former years (https://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Chaos communication congress). Maker Fairs are very interesting expressions of this new form of networking events that emerged out of the big diffusion of the Makers Movement.

The Open Data Institute's ODI start-up programme which has supported organisations like Open Corporate and Provenance to grow their Open Data projects,

is another. Although incubators and accelerators have been always around, their presence in aiming to address social challenges has been limited rather to date. 33 Traditional business accelerators offer advice

and 3d printing facilities (often referred to as maker and hacker spaces), for digital fabrication and hacking data that entrepreneurs can access freely.

There are now 96 known active hacker spaces worldwide, with 29 in the United states, according to Hackerspaces. org.

a Maker space with a focus on open source, design, digital fabrication, and micro enterprises. An example of increasing interest is the possibility of setting up Urban Labs within city contexts.

'or the Open Data Institutes (UK) open data training sessions for charities. Real empowerment through access to knowledge and education happens

In the case of Commons4eu partners got together to explore the development of collaborative web projects and bottom-up broadband technologies.

Other interesting examples of multidisciplinary research projects are the Network of Excellence on Internet Science (EINS) that aims to integrate multidisciplinary scientific understandings about Internet networks and their co-evolution with society,

and advocating for Web standards, the P2p foundation that works on promoting peer to peer practices, and the Iot Council promoting an open Internet of things vision are good examples of this.

Expert bodies are essential for providing expertise, and coordinating inclusive processes of decision-making amongst key stakeholders.

'This grouping is based on the classification towards creating a data-driven Ecology suggested by MIT (Bollier and Clippinger 2013:

Examples Open Networks innovative combinations of network solutions and infrastructures, e g. sensor networks, free interoperable network services, open Wifi, bottom-up-broadband, distributed social networks

, p2p infrastructures Tor Confine Guifi. net Smart Santander Open Data innovative ways to capture, use, analyse,

and interpret open data coming from people and from the environment Open Vienna City SDK Open knowledge co-production of new knowledge and crowd mobilisation based on open content,

open source and open access Goteo Communia Open hardware new ways of making and using open hardware solutions

and moving towards and Open source Internet of things Arduino Smart Citizen Kit Safecast Table 9 36 Through case study analysis we have sought to build up an understanding of to what extent these emerging technologies are being harnessed by digital social innovation.

It is likely that we will begin to identify additional types of technology. Below we provide a more detailed description of how these trends can be defined,

Safecast, for example relied on Open Hardware to build the first Geiger counter sensor kit, on crowdfunding (open knowledge) to fund the development of kit

and on Open Data to share and analyse the data captured across all of the Geiger counters.

Figure 10the chart above shows the‘Tech focus'of those on the DSI map to date.

and digital services adopted by DSI activities such as social networking, social media, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, big data, machine learning, 3d printing, online learning,

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed wireless sensors to monitor physical conditions, such as temperature, sound, vibration, pressure, motion or pollutants,

and to pass their data through the network to a single or replicated data-processing location.

An Open Sensor Network (OSN) is a Wireless Sensor Network that manages Open information in an Open environment.

The Open Sensor Network connects the sensor with the data repository where the information is processed and stored as it uses public data from different sensors

and forwards the gathered information to the central point within a wireless environment. Sensor networks are used widely in the fields of mobility, transport, environment, geography, meteorology and tourism.

They are key infrastructures of a smart city by providing basic data on the usage of energy, pollution, geodata, traffic, geography & meteorological, tourism and so on.

which would be fed by Open Data from the OSN. A number of European cities have established sensors that detect traffic density

Most European cities work with sensors that monitor environmental conditions. Pollution temperature, humidity and light sensors are installed that provide information that could be used to develop applications for citizens

in order to provide external parties a single point to consume this data. Community networking (also known as bottom-up networking) is an emerging model for the Future Internet across Europe and beyond,

where communities of citizens can build, operate and own open IP-based networks, a key infrastructure for individual and collective digital participation.

While commercial access networks from either commercial telecom companies or by local governments tend to follow a well-known centralized network architecture and operation model

Internet networks have become a key infrastructure for the development of the digital economy due to the democratisation of the access technologies,

and privacy-aware service that bounce Internet users'and websites'traffic through relays run by thousands of volunteers around the world,

and combine successfully different wireless and wired (optical) link technologies, fixed and ad hoc routing schemes,

and obstacles regarding Internet specifications that are exposed by these edge networks. 38 The Guifi. net initiative is developing a free,

open and neutral, mostly wireless telecommunication community network, that started in Catalonia in 2004, and as of January 2012 has more than 15,300 working nodes,

Guifi. net is connected to the Catalan Internet Exchange (CATNIX) as an Autonomous System (AS) via optical fibre with IPV4 and IPV6.

Open Data The explosion of new types of data analytics and machine learning means that it is no longer only government

and analyse data. By making data open, governments and other large organisations and companies that hold or generate data about society have the opportunity to enable citizens to hold government to account for

what it spends, the contracts it gives and the assets it holds. When the European commission published its Directive on the reuse of public sector information (PSI) in 2003 many member states,

and implement open data policies. The directive provided an EU-wide framework for governments at all levels, to begin opening data.

The European commission estimates the economic value of the PSI market at approximately €40 billion per annum. The 2013 revision of the European commission Directive on the reuse of public sector information will further enable the opening of public sector data in a harmonised and more transparent way,

and create the conditions for generating value, both economic and social, from this data. Local authorities are playing a leading role in implementing open data policies

and driving forward the open data movement. The social benefits of open government vary from citizen engagement to increased transparency and accountability

as well as enhanced interaction between governments, other institutions, and the public. Open data (both static or available in real time) favours the transformation of city authorities into ecosystem orchestrators that are able to shape

and foster the innovation process, whilst engaging all key stakeholders and delivering public goods, maximising returns for all citizens.

For instance, citizens are gaining greater insight into how their tax payments are being spent. Furthermore, citizens can create more knowledge in a distributed way,

Beyond the social aspects, open data also supports public sector innovation by breaking the competitive advantage gained by proprietary access to data

and data lock in. Innovation is most likely to occur when data is available online in open, structured,

computer-friendly formats for anyone to download, use, and analyse, as long as the privacy and data protection of all citizens is preserved

and that communities are entitled to share the value and social benefits of public assets. Thus, open data, together with open

and standardised APIS is crucial for innovation, as developers are able to access and use public data

and mesh it with other sources of data produced by the crowd to build novel applications that have a social utility and produce public good.

For instance, with its Open Data in Vienna programme the city of Vienna has demonstrated the potential in opening up its data.

The city opened its data records to the population businesses and the scientific community. Released data ranges from statistics and geographic data on traffic

and transport to economic figures. It then invited programmers and developers to make apps and web services based on the data,

which to date have resulted in more than 60 applications for citizens. Other pioneering examples include the work by the Estonian Government and the not for profit Praxis on the Meiraha project,

which focuses on opening up and visualising the Estonian budget. The Citizen Science project Globe at Night is yet another example of this,

where citizens through using the camera and geo tagging function on their smartphones help the research project measure global levels of light pollution,

thereby effectively coupling open data and citizen science. The movement for more and better open data has grown significantly over the last few years through projects funded by the European commission, such as City SDK.

This is a European consortium of partners helping cities to standardize their interfaces so that services can be integrated into the City's backend system

and can be reused and adopted across Europe and beyond, whilst giving developers the tools they need to develop applications that scale. 39 Another important trend,

boosting the diffusion of open data is the Mobile Internet and the increasing number of mobile devices.

Smartphones tablets, PDAS and other devices are becoming smaller, faster, smarter, more networked and personal.

An unlocked Android phone with touch screen, Wifi and GPS that sold for $300 four years ago now costs $30,

a price that is continuing to drop. As they proliferate, mobile devices are generating ever-larger streams of personal behavioural data that have many potentially valuable public, personal and commercial uses.

Data-flows are also burgeoning as the Internet of things integrates a vast universe of network aware sensors, actuators, video cameras,

RFID-tagged objects and other devices that see, hear, move, and coordinate and reason with each other.

And on the horizon: the automated, driverless car; the smart house with interconnected sensors and appliances;

and the smart city that coordinates mobile cellular and GPS data to dynamically allocate resources and direct traffic.

Open knowledge The contribution of open knowledge covers the variety of ways in which citizens can use online services and platforms for mass scale social collaboration.

Ordinary people today use blogs, wikis, social network and hundreds of other collaborative platforms to manage their daily lives,

solve social challenges and business problem, and participate in e-campaigns, crowdfunding, crowd-mapping and crowdsourcing.

Furthermore, the ability to access, use, and reuse without financial, legal, contractual, and technical restrictions (aligned with the Budapest open access initiative,

Various public institutions and organisations have acknowledged crowdsourcing as a tool to improve the relationship to their citizens by integrating them into political decision-making.

Crowdsourcing is the ability to gather ideas, contents and solutions from a large group of people, usually from dispersed online communities.

Crowdsourcing is used increasingly by public authorities, as a method to solve the lack of trust in the policy institutions,

Crowdsourcing is used also in cities as a tool to improve on (partially) flawed datasets and can be built into innovation projects.

crowdsourcing processes also present challenges that are often related to managing‘the crowd',quality or limitations of ideas, public commitment from policy makers,

It is crucial for successful crowdsourcing to design the activity properly to prevent excessive demands and frustrations.

In Europe, interesting crowdsourcing projects for Cities are emerging from the Open Cities project and Commons4eu.

The platform crowdsources opinions on city legislation, with the most popular ideas being debated by the city council.

and knowledge to a social network of peers living with similar conditions. 40 Open Hardware Open source hardware consists of hardware

and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware's source, the design from which it is made,

is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it. Ideally, open source hardware uses readily available components and materials, standard processes, open infrastructure

unrestricted content, and open-source design tools to maximize the ability of individuals to make and use hardware.

Open source hardware gives people the freedom to control their technology while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of designs.

The work by organisations like Raspberry Pi and Arduino illustrates the potential in open hardware.

Core to Arduino is a simple, ultra-low-cost circuit board, based on an open-source design, armed with a microprocessor,

which can be programmed with simple, open-source software tools by the user. The idea is that anyone should be able to turn an Arduino into a simple electronic device.

Building on these open hardware platforms new services like the Smart Citizen Kit, an Arduino based sensor kit have the opportunity to provide even more sophisticated sensor network tools to citizens,

and allow for the measurement of levels of air pollution, noise pollution or air humidity in the vicinity of a private home, school or office.

Another big trend related to open hardware is the evolution of the Internet of things (Iot. People, places,

and measure data about real-world activity. These data streams can be location reports from objects, people and cars,

environmental measurements from sensors embedded in buildings or in the streets, and other sorts of feeds.

Activity is embedded then in software and interpreted by algorithms through highly normative processes. This smart infrastructure is also increasingly getting to know people by aggregating personal and social data in massive data centres with little privacy and security.

The hypothesis of this model is that people will change their behaviours based on personal statistics.

We know instead that the process for changing collective behaviours is very complex. In Iot with full traceability and transparency, the very notion of what or who is‘important'changes.

We can summarise the various technology trends that are speeding up the diffusion of Iot as following:

The increasing number of more and more powerful smart personal devices, which will facilitate the anywhere/anytime access to the Internet

and to the services it will provide. The Internet of things, which will guarantee access through the Internet to the physical world, to its devices and, most notably, to its services.

The emerging of an Internet of People, i e.,, a trend that includes Web 2. 0, social networks, social computing,

and that promotes Internet as a fundamental channel for allowing an increasingly active role of users (individuals, groups, communities) as providers of data, content,

and services. Cloud computing as a virtualisation infrastructure that offers unique opportunities to reduce the costs of delivering services over the Internet,

thus extending this possibility to much wider classes of actors. What are we learning about the impact of digital technologies on Social Innovation?

Analysing network data: Exploring DSI Network effectin order to analyse the relationship data from the mapping,

we are adopting social network analysis to detect patterns of relations, arguing that causation is located in the social structure.

Social networks are defined formally as a set of nodes (or network members) that are tied by one or more types of relations (Wasserman and Faust, 1994).

By studying behaviours as embedded in social network structures, we will be able to explain macro and meso level patterns that show the dynamics in which DSI organisations and their initiatives create particular outcomes.

Currently, as we are still collecting data, it would be premature to do a conclusive data-driven analysis. However,

in this section we explain the methodology. 41 The emergent network represents DSI organisations and their social relationships mapped in the form of graph that is a collection of nodes

and edges between them. In the case of the DSI social network that is emerging from the map

the nodes in a graph are communities, and the edges represent joint projects. Social network analysis will examine the structure

and composition of DSI organisation ties in a given network and provide insights into its structural characteristics,

such as the centrality of actors in the network (prestige); the number of individual connections (influence;

the number of incoming connections (prominence; the least connections (outlier; actors that are communicating more often with each other (community;

One of the primary problems facing the mapping of an open-ended field such as DSI is how to direct the multiple diverse streams of data from interviews to social media into a central repository capable of giving a big picture of European

Through our approach of mixing open data analytics with human-centric interviews/case-studies we can better understand complex phenomena and socioeconomic and environmental trends,

Furthermore, this visualisation of the DSI network, embedded in our website, is interactive and aims at engaging the larger DSI community itself,

and thus we can use this ever-expanding visualisation and network database as a tool for crowdsourcing even more information about DSI in Europe,

and if the data-set is currently able to answer those questions. The network of concepts that determines the kinds of questions is the theoretical framework.

Only with such a framework can data and hypotheses be interpreted in a sensible manner without projecting preconceived,

and often wrong, opinions onto the data-set. Phrasing both the null hypothesis and alternative hypotheses in terms of network theory must be done with care.

There must then be enough data to adequately test the hypotheses, using mathematical techniques that can statistically quantify the level of confidence in the proof of the data for any given hypothesis. In particular,

this requires significance testing, as network-based data often assumes a non-Gaussian distribution such as a power-law.

For non-Gaussian distributions such as power-laws, traditional t-tests against Gaussian distributions and even traditional statistics around averages and means are scientifically invalid.

and everyone else being between 5 and 6 feet tall. 42 In the DSI Network Data-Set,

However, a snapshot of the data on the 1st of December indicated we have 243 organisations and 146 activities.

as the website currently supports only English) into French and then launching that call to 120 actors involved in social innovation resulted in a net gain of 43 organisations added with 32 new activities.

For any two parametric models that embody a hypothesis over our empirical data, the model with the larger likelihood fit is the better model,

In this case, the likelihood ratio is given under two distributions fitted by the Kolmogorov-smirnov test algorithm, and it is simply the likelihood of the first ratio over the second ratio

when both likelihoods are given by maximum likelihood fitting of distributions representing hypotheses to the empirical data.

different hypotheses (H')could be tested over different data-sets and compared (N'as opposed to N in the denominator).

How much data is given necessary, (N we are assuming a non-Gaussian distribution, to do the network analysis? Using our current data from the survey,

we can run the above algorithms on it to determine if the data is sufficient. The MATLAB code developed by Aaron Clauset at the Santa fe Institute was used (http://tuvalu. santafe. edu/aaronc/powerlaws/.

/The results were, at this stage, not significant for the fitting of the proposed nonparametric power-law.

The harder question is the proper value of N. This can be estimated by simulating data distributions with a large enough N from two different distributions (in this case,

a power-law versus a log-normal) that would then be matched against the Monte carlo data and likelihood rations.

Although this method is imperfect due to the assumption being made over the kinds of distributions, it should give us a rough estimate of

what amount of data is necessary and what likelihood ratios match with p<.1. For our simulation,

This is because distributions such as the log-normal and exponential distribution are difficult to differentiate from power-laws due to the difficulty in proving the existence of the long tail with small data-samples. 43 2

Community detection algorithms can be used to find dense substructures (often called communities) within a larger sparse network.

If the data-set is of reasonable size (less than 10,000 organisations) we will use the Newman algorithm to identify communities.

While we have let the organisations label themselves around predefined categories like Open Data and Open Knowledge,

New clustering and categories will then emerge from the empirical data. Within each community, there will be certain organisations that have a high centrality, the movers and shakers of social innovation.

However, currently this analysis is difficult to do as we have revealed that there is either a problem with the scarcity of data

or it may just be disconnected a highly network more data is needed to find out, since we are at the very early stage of engaging DSI communities. 4

Figure 13 45 We can also reverse the algorithm and find communities that need a bridge to other communities (see Figure 13).

In general, before beginning rigorous network analysis (1) we must collect more data and that (2) our hypotheses will have to be quite broad

This means for the second phase of the report we need approximately double the data we gathered in the first phase, if not more.

if we are comparing hypotheses involving (possible mutually exclusive) different kinds of subsets of the network data, such as comparing two different kinds of communities (such as Italian vs. non-Italian organisations

or open knowledge vs. open hardware communities). How Digital social innovation happens The role of noninstitutional actors

approaches (e g. supply-side approach to Big data & Big brother). Unlike traditional innovation actions, DSI and Collective Awareness Platforms are motivated by the vision of building an open and grassroots civic innovation Ecosystem in Europe to unleash the potential of collective intelligence.

In general, European funding has invested heavily in core European institutions in terms of digital innovation, in particular the formerly nationalised telecommunications companies as well as national research institutes and traditional universities.

However, even now these institutions are facing crisis due to the ubiquity of the Internet, as the new digital innovations of capitalism in particular, digital innovation as exemplified by Silicon valley threaten their current ability to make profits from their previous innovations.

i e. institutions that have arisen during the rise of the Internet itself. 46 This is precisely why telecommunications companies must reinvent themselves in the presence of new, digitally native companies such as Skype and Google.

or CNRS are threatened by the research divisions of companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft who now increasingly dominate premier academic conferences such as the World wide web Conference.

The institutional infrastructure necessary for cutting-edge research no longer requires state investment, and in fact, private institutions have near-monopolies over social networks and search engine data,

giving them nearly exclusive access to the data and algorithms needed for innovative digital research.

Yet, perhaps surprising, even as these digitally native companies are reaching the state of what appears to be permanent platform oligopolies,

these companies are challenged still by new digital actors such as Facebook and Twitter. It is key to distinguish between invention and socialisation as part of the wider process of innovation in a technical system such as the Internet and the Web.

The Internet and Web have defined intrinsic architectures by their open standards that offer themselves as a series of constraints such that‘the choice of possibilities in which invention consists is made in a particular space and particular time according to the play of these constants,

'although ultimately innovation lies in the ability to give these choices technical flesh so that they can interact with the wider world;‘

‘the rules of innovation are those of socialisation.'('Stiegler, 1998 p. 25-26. So the new idea that solves some problem is the invention,

Many of the inventions that now form the basis of the Web 2. 0 economy

and the emerging Internet of things have their roots in noninstitutional actors. Many of these noninstitutional actors have been studied

However, before the advent of the Internet their social innovation was limited in its reach, but with the advent of the Internet suddenly these new digital social innovations had a rapid network growth.

Take for example the do-it-yourself ethic, where the amateur is able to create content and share it in a peer-to-peer manner rather than via a top-down hierarchy controlled by experts or some other appointed group.

advocacy and campaigning Crowdsourcing nonfinancial and financial resources Empathic networking, care, and support between peers Harness collective intelligence to solve large scale societal problems Bottom-up,

networking, users control personal data Mobilising critical mass to achieve social & institutional change New instruments to mobilise resources for DSI organisations Building strong ties,

the open hardware approach means that products developed by one part of the community are accessible for all other Arduino users,

Furthermore methods such as crowdsourcing, or Challenge Prizes, can mobilise the innovation capacities of communities for solving problems

and sensors Tor provides the best example of how the Internet enables users grow the value of a network with a social purpose through plugging in their devices to a‘network

Another example is the work by Open Garden on facilitating the sharing of Internet between devices.

Large scale mobilisation, advocacy and campaigning around common causes Crowdsourcing platforms for ideation, E-Petitions (i e.

and Crowd mapping, social networking and democratic decision making tools, are technologies that allow for the quick identification (and dismissal) of issues.

Open data such as the Open data Vienna initiative allow for citizens to mine previously closed sources of knowledge for problems and new opportunities.

Crowdsourcing nonfinancial and financial resources towards a specific cause: while the type of collaboration described above relies upon indicating support and backing,

where users are involved in developing or crowdsourcing content. As an example, users of the Your Priorities platform collaboratively work on

Digital means that any data exist in binary form and in standardised formats so that can be aggregated

Digital innovation today focuses mainly on data mash-up process, which synthesize new information by connecting,

in particular information generated by users (e g. through social networks) or captured from sensors (Internet of things). Interoperable, customised,

and modular services and applications can be built in a dynamic and flexible way, plugging into existing and future Internet infrastructures.

An ecosystem means that there is an interdependent and dynamic constellation of living organisms acting within a global socioeconomic environment.

By linking differing communities and innovators via a social network, the innovators can more easily find meta-analogies between their problems

each with a track-record of success in their particular neighbourhoods, would be more effective than so-called independent private contractor in determining how to best unify a website that can provide access to information about public resources in the city.

This commission of experts should not simply solidify their position as experts in creating websites,

so that the public service workers in London can maintain their own website without again gathering all the experts from the various boroughs

although filters are in the process of being implemented they are not yet live on the site. The challenge of balancing quality and quantity within the data set is an aspect that we are constantly monitoring

and making small changes to ensure that we get what is needed to make a reasonable assessment of the landscape without disincentivising participation by putting off too many respondents at an early stage we have tried to mitigate this using the two-part validation process described above.

The next stage of Work package 2 will include the Task 2. 2, the development of the website.

Although the website and survey is stable, there will need still likely to introduce minor adjustments in response to user-feedback from the study.

As the block in getting more input seems to be the fact that the website

Lastly, Task 2. 5 will create infographics based on the data that can help visualize the most salient results of the survey.

The way in which the system maps organisations and the linkages between them, has the potential to become an international social network of practice around DSI and associated activity.

Below we indicate the elements that will be possible within the future stage two implementation. 51 Digital Social Innovation web platform www. digitalsocial. eu Crowdmapping DSI organizations

-What kind of projects (type of DSI activity)- Basic taxonomy by technology trends (open data, open knowledge, open networks,

open hardware)- What impact they have (what domains, what reach)- We just develop a more compelling visualisation of organisational information

and relational data 2. Mapping Resources and Founding for DSI in Europe 3. Promoting & Socialising main activities, events,

public funding) and investors Future development tasks Code and data Full information on the development so far and open source code can be found on the Github page here:

/The website is a Ruby on Rails app, but uses Tripod and Mongodb instead of Activerecord.

All public data is stored in a Fuseki triple store, and accessed via the ORM-like Tripod API.

All private data is stored in Mongodb. The current homepage visualization has been created using Openstreetmaps. Access to the Open Linked Data is provided in multiple formats:

http://data. digitalsocial. eu/data. The following list is a priority list for future development:

Improve the UI Allow organisations entering data to self-tag descriptions of their organisations/activities

and for these to feed into a Tag cloud navigation UI Add another Taxonomy, allowing to brows

and cluster the initiatives present on the map according to the 5 categories we define in the study:

In this manner, the website would become not only a data source but also a kind of learning tool to understand what digital social innovation concretely means.

Create better visualisation with the current relational data that can be exported (see here an example of the current visualisations) Better internal search system Addition of social network functionalities to the DSI mapping,

and projects Adding Twitter login option and other social plugins Improve organisational profiles (they can add pictures,

or easily share events, funding opportunities etc from other sites) Add a section to the site that shows

As the platform matures, data and information can be validated by the community through recommendation and reputation mechanisms.

Exploring the potential of different mechanisms such as open data, crowdsourcing/crowdfunding, Living Labs, etc. and comparing these to more traditional approaches.

161ouishare 165p2p Foundation 169patients Like Me 173peerby 179raspberry Pi 185safecast 191smart Citizen Kit 197tor 201ushahidi 207zooniverse (citizen science web portal of CSA) 213 Case studies

Open Networks, Open Knowledge, Open Hardware DSI activities: A network, Operating a DSI service Key facts:

Over 300,000 official Arduinos has been produced commercially Website: http://arduino. cc/Organisation Name Arduino Short description The core to an Arduino is a simple, ultra-low-cost circuit board, based on an open-source design, armed with a microprocessor

which can be programmed with simple, open-source software tools by the user. The idea is that anyone should be able to turn an Arduino into a simple electronic device such as a light switch and sensor.

Type of organisation Arduino is based a business in Italy. History and mission Released in 2005, Massimo Banzi,

an Italian engineer and designer, started the Arduino project to enable students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) build all kinds of electronic contraptions using an open-source hardware board.

The software consists of a standard programming language compiler and a boot loader that executes on the micro controller.

The project first started with 3, 000 euros for the production of 200 units, but when IDDI bought only 50 units,

Arduino has grown since to become popular selling around 200,000 units in 2011 largely because of its creators'decision to make the board's design open source and its quick adoption by hobbyists, artists, scientists, and‘makers.'

Arduino is a key player in the international maker movement of D. I. Y. hardware hobbyists and tinkerers.

The arrival of Arduino is said to mark the move from open-source software to open-source hardware.

Furthermore, Arduino has lowered significantly the economic barriers to D. I. Y. electronics thanks to the product's low cost and open source business model.

This is an example of how student scientists are using Arduino-based hardware to replicate scientific equipment using more readily available components in developing countries.

Various educational and innovative projects and products have been built on the back of Arduino's hard and software.

The micro controller on the board is programmed using the Arduino programming language (based on Wiring) and the Arduino development environment (based on Processing.

or they can communicate with software running on a computer (e g. Flash, Processing, Maxmsp. 59 The boards can be built by hand

and the software can be downloaded for free. The hardware reference designs (CAD files) are available under an open-source license,

and users are free to adapt them to their needs. While the hardware used to power Arduino is open-source,

Arduino software is also open-source. The source code for the Java environment is released under the GPL

and the C/C++ micro controller libraries are licensed under the LGPL. What technological methods and tools is it using,

and what did these enable that was not previously possible? During a TED Talk on Arduino, Banzi said Arduino has been a significant catalyst in the‘Makers'Movement.'

'Arduino has in many senses heralded a paradigm shift from open-source software alone to open-source hardware.

Correspondingly, Arduino's low economic threshold has removed a lot of potential barriers to users previously excluded from getting involved in D. I. Y. hardware

and robotics the availability of Arduino hardware design blueprints for download has meant users who ordinarily might not have been able to afford

or order the boards have been able to build the boards themselves by hand. Enhancing collaboration and engagement:

Arduino supports@Heart partners through promotion of their brand, products and content on its site and social networks with links to documentation and tutorials.

one of these Arduino@Heart is the Smart Citizen Kit a hardware kit to gather environmental data,

On its website, it posts all of its trade secrets for anyone to take all the schematics, design files,

and software for the Arduino board. Arduino design plans can thus be downloaded and manufactured by anyone;

because the Arduino board is a piece of open source hardware, free for anyone to use,

Many questioned if it would be possible to forge a sustainable business model considering the entire basis for Arduino relies upon open source technologies (in fact,

in spite of giving away all the data required to build Arduinos completely free. Some commentators have gone further to suggest that Arduino has circuited also short most conventional industrial infrastructure by‘placing the ability to create wealth directly in the hands of private individuals.'

Creative Commons Licensing Arduino release all of the original design files (Eagle CAD) for the Arduino hardware.

Open source Software Not only the Arduino hardware is open; the Arduino software is also open-source. The source code for the Java environment is released under the GPL

and the C/C++ micro controller libraries are under the LGPL. 61 Avaaz At a glance:

Type of Organisation: Not for profit Aim: Participation and Democracy Technology Trends: Open Networks, Open Knowledge, Open Hardware DSI activities:

Operating a DSI service Key facts: Approximately 28 Million Users Worldwide. has taken 155,896, 453 actions since January'07, in 194 countries Website:

http://www. avaaz. org Organisation Name: Avaaz Short Description Avaaz is an independent, not-for-profit global e-petitioning

and campaigning network that works to ensure that the‘views and values of the world's people inform global decision-making.'

'History and core mission Avaaz which literally means voice in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission:‘

According to the Avaaz website, their model of Internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be combined rapidly into a powerful collective force.

is served by a small core team of 52 full-time staff worldwide, has thousands of volunteers in all 192 UN member states,

and organising offline protests and events as part of their bid to have the voice of the world's people enter

Researchers also believe that particular groups on the Internet may benefit from the strategic opportunities offered by e-petitions,

While Avaaz has evidently been successful in enlisting the help of large numbers of supporters, critics of this form of crowdsourcing,

like Internet theorist Evgeny Morozov, have claimed Avaaz promotes a form of slacktivism, claiming that they encourage previously tenacious activists to become lazy and complacent.

Similarly, their site encourages the use of both online and offline channels to generate the greatest impact of members'campaigns.

Speaking directly on their influence in the proceedings brought against Rupert Murdoch Avaaz's founder, Ricken Patel has said their activism played a critical role in delaying the BSKYB deal until the recent scandal was able to kill it.

Social Computing applications also empower Civil Society Organisations (NGOS, voluntary groups, associations, etc.),which play a significant role in fighting social exclusion.

According to this same report, another potential area of impact of Social Computing sites such as Avaaz, is the potential for adoption by a large number of organisations belonging to the so-called third-sector

Organisations such as Avaaz have offered an alternative conception about how these organisations might increasingly adopt Social Computing applications to manage,

In fact, Social Computing is seen even to challenge the established mode of operation of the third sector,

Certainly more metrics are needed to measure the impact of e-petitioning and Social Computing. This is critical in the context of informed policy implications.

According to the IPTS, the most urgent need is certainly for new metrics to address the emergence of new social media,

and in general, for systematic measurements and internationally comparable data. These would enable better assessment of the long-term importance of Social Computing trends in terms of their socioeconomic impact,

and the quantitative and qualitative differences between the EU and the rest of the world.

comparative data would enable researchers to identify which regions have had greater successes through e-petitions,

According to the Avaaz website, the organisation employs a technical team to make sure the website is constantly secure.

The site is verified also by Geotrust, a world leader on Internet security verification. The Avaaz donation pages have addresses beginning with https://rather than http

://thus signalling they are secure pages. 64 The site is integrated well with other social media platforms,

According to Matt Holland Avaaz's Online Director, like other high-capacity web services Avaaz's hosting platform is complex

and includes a physical server farm, a content distribution network, and some resources served through Amazon's cloud services.

within as little as 24 hours, is something that could not have been possible without the Internet. It can do this well beyond the bounds of a particular country,

As part of this half a million emails were sent out imploring its members those who have signed previous petitions,

Avaaz Community Petitions is a new web platform that gives people around the world the power to start

It is a crowd-sourced part of Avaaz, the largest-ever global web movement bringing people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere.

Security Upgrades: One challenge Avaaz was forced to overcome was a massive persistent cyber attack, which it believes a government

Hours after the initial attack, the organisation made a public appeal on its website, revealing that a 44-hour distributed denial of service (DDOS) strike hit the organisation's IT infrastructure.

taking the site down for a total of 14 minutes. The FBI has also been informed about the attack.

While Datagram (the site's hosting company Croscon (who perform ongoing security audits of the site's servers)

and Arbor networks (who provided defensive hardware which helped fend off the attack) all supported the organisation throughout the attack,

Avaaz were advised to further upgrade their IT SECURITY in the event of similar future attacks. Avaaz consequently launched a campaign (the first of its kind in over 5 years) asking for donations to allow for this security upgrade.

Avaaz's site shows that almost 42,000 people have donated to this campaign. According to Ricken Patel (Founder of Avaaz), the specifics of how the generated funds will be used are still being planned

but will very likely be used to employ a full-time or part-time security office; upgrade to the service level for defensive tools;

traffic analysers to more effectively track the source of attacks and upgrading capacity of firewalls.

In addition, the fundraiser will also have a wider range of objectives, such as helping to ensure the physical security of the organisation's staff.

In Reykjavik, Iceland, 40%of citizens use the Your Priorities platform Website: https://www. yrpri. org/Organisation Name Citizens Foundation (including the Your Priorities platform) Short description Your Priorities is based a web platform developed by the Icelandic Citizens Foundation.

The platform enables groups of people to develop and prioritize ideas and together discover which of these ideas are deemed the most important to implement.

and the open source platform is available free of charge to any group, city or country around the world interested in using the platform to source ideas from citizens.

where the city uses the platform to source ideas from citizens to be debated in the city council on a monthly basis. Type of Organisation The Your Priorities software is open source

and in many senses the design and functionality of their websites, products and services might be thought of as an attempt to redesign democracy itself.

As Gunnar Grímsson, one of its founders explains‘The key metric of success for our websites is participation.

During the election, 10%of Reykjavik voters voiced ideas on the site, 43%of voters viewed the site,

As a result of its popularity during the campaign, it became integrated permanently into the city's administration, in the form of the Better Reykjavík website,

The Your Priorities website enables citizens to voice, debate and prioritize policy ideas, budget decisions and micro-issues affecting their neighbourhood.

For example on the Better Reykjavik website, each month the top ideas in all categories are gathered by city officials,

They hold that the Internet is the best way to reach out and motivate this younger generation to participate in democracy,

Indeed the main reason the Citizens Foundation was awarded a European e-Democracy Award for their Better Reykjavik website was because of its perceptible impact in 2011, at the time of the award,

the site involved 40%of Reykjavik's citizens and obtained direct implementation of many proposals in political programmes. 69

Through making the Your Priorities platform available as open source to other organisations, the Citizens Foundation is actively facilitating the easy spread and uptake of their new service.

Open source and Open Collaboration: The platform is open source and free for anyone to download and use,

which has led to the spread of the model via the Internet beyond Iceland. Open Active Democracy is the software that powers Your Priorities.

As well as being made available on Github so that like-minded civic hackers can contribute to and improve this coding,

users are encouraged also to translate the site's contents if they are able to do so.

Integration: The fact that Citizens Foundation's website, Better Reykjavik is integrated well into the official political structure means that citizens can observe how their opinion has the capacity to shape real political debate.

This demonstrates how e-democracy has the potential to improve democratic accountability (and therefore legitimacy.

Enhancing collaboration and engagement: DSI network effect As an organisation, Citizens Foundation remains resolute in its commitment to facilitating reuse of its products and platforms.

While users can use the website totally free of charge, the website features an integrated tool to make donations to the Your Priorities project.

As a nonprofit organisation, donated funds ensure continual development and maintenance of the Your Priority software.

Social Enterprise services: Cities, countries and groups can also pay to use some of the Your Priority services.

and websites like Better Reykjavik to operate properly. 70 Marketing and PR: If you build it they will come is a famous quote from the early days of the Internet this was never quite true

and certainly is not today. Marketing and promoting a website is a lot of hard work and costs money.

As‘democracy nerds'the Citizens Foundation team are worried that most of our social lives are being run by one company, Facebook.

But as entrepreneurs they point to a tendency to always try to turn problems into opportunities.

Doing so has enabled them to exploit Facebook, finding that it is one of the best ways to attract people to electronic democracy both via sharing and Facebook advertisements.

User interface: There needs to be as little friction as possible for taking part. Therefore, the team have made,

and participate using their Facebook login. The user interface has been simplified in every generation of the software to enable more people to participate more easily.

Incentivising engagement: To make taking part fun and rewarding, Citizen Foundation websites enable people to earn‘Social Points'for writing up points for

or against ideas that many people think are helpful these can be used to buy promotions for ideas that appear as banners at the top of the page.

Importantly, neither the Your Priorities nor the Better Reykjavik websites were Citizen Foundation team's first attempt at creating an‘electronic democratic'web platform.

Rather, these websites are a‘better iteration'of their pilot project, Shadow Parliament a project which aimed to document and scrutinise the actions of the government.

Besti flokkurinn) early adoption of the Citizen Foundation Web tools which they used as a guide for their policy focus.

as well as the most popular ideas in each of thirteen categories on the website. Citizens involved in supporting a particular 71 proposal are given regular updates from the city council regarding its viability and processing.

using the most popular ideas on the website as a guide for questioning the government,

Firstly, their websites'impact, because they involved 40%of Reykjavik's citizens and obtained direct implementation of many proposals in political programmes.

Open Network, Open Data, Open Hardware, Open Knowledge DSI activities: A Network Key facts: Citysdk consist of 23 partners, 9 countries, 3 open source APIS Website:

http://www. citysdk. eu/Organisation Name City Service Development Kit (Citysdk) Short description City SDK is a European consortium of partners helping cities

to open data, while giving developers the tools they need to develop applications that scale.

For each of those domains, an open software API is developed in one of the participating cities or regions,

The API's help developers make applications that will function in other cities, thereby extending the potential reach for applications manifold.

At the same time it provides cities with an easy, open source, standards based way to publish real-time open Data type of organisation Citysdk is a European Consortium consisting of 23 partners in nine countries,

led by Forum Virium, Finland. The consortium is made up of eight cities and city regions six private companies, three development and expert organisations, one network organisation and five research institutes.

and was set up with the purpose of helping cities to open their data and giving developers the tools they need,

With governments around the world looking at open data as a kick start for their economies,

Citysdk aims to provide better and easier ways for the cities throughout Europe to release their data in a format that is easy for the developers to reuse. 74 Taking the best practices around the world the project will foresee the development of a toolkit Citysdk

along with links to the open data from the various partner cities, and developers will be encouraged to work with this to create new ideas and applications for the partner cities and others.

Creating a European-wide market for tourism applications based on Open Data made available by public or private entities.

as well as writing the actual code for the API's and applications. Another part is stimulating engagement and update:

and products using open data. It fosters and facilitates international knowledge sharing around the best practices,

APIS and tools being developed within the project. Although the Citysdk API's have reached only a stable form in the second half of 2013,

several applications have been developed. One of them is Fixmystreet in Helsinki, making use of Citysdk's Open311 interface to insert service requests by citizens into the city's backend system.

Another is the Open Data Globe showing the dynamics of European cities based on the available open data.

There are several applications related to mobility, such as the Greater manchester Realtime Scheduling application, the Park Shark City Platform and the City Navigator, a fully Open source, mobile HTML5 public transport journey planner and navigation application for on the go-go use.

What it the role of the organisation within the DSI ecosystem? Citysdk develops tools and standards that provide benefits for both city officials and development communities.

the Internet, as a way to collaborate, disseminate knowledge and data. Open source Software, which enables the uptake and extension of the software by the development community forgoing stifling discussions on IP and closed development silos Open Data,

as it builds software to publish Linked Open Data in standardised formats that enables app developers to make royalty-free applications that scale Open API's,

that provide a nonproprietary way for data-owners to publish (real-time) datasets use those in applications Agile Software Development, by way of SCRUM tools and methodologies Next to these,

standards are used like GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) and Open 311, and languages like JSON and RDF API's written in Ruby and Sinatra.

Data stored in Postgresql/Postgis database. Collaboration using digital technologies is done mainly using e-mail, video conferences and Google docs for communication and Github to share code and specifications.

Citysdk itself would not have been possible even five years ago. It is technically and organisationally state of the-art-the art project combining the 76 above mentioned technologies in previously unimaginable ways.

Standards and implementations have become so user friendly that the potential user base is large.

The Open Data policies implemented by the EU and individual countries facilitate the building of Citysdk as well as its rapid spreading and uptake.

Enhancing collaboration and engagement: DSI network effect Through the apps and services it is developing Citysdk aim is to build smart services where user generated data make up the core activity of the service.

How is funded the organisation? Citysdk is a 3. 4 million Euro project, 50%funded by the European commission within the ICT Policy Support Programme of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme.

The other 50%is brought together by local funding and national funding; each partner having a different mix.

or incapable of opening high quality data that is in high demand, e g..real-time traffic data. Governments and civil servants demand results too quickly.

It takes perseverance as well as investment in time, money and relationships before good outcomes happen. Business cases for implementing the resulting API's are currently missing;

this however will probably be overcome since some partners are actively pursuing the start-up of companies,

instilling goodwill and overcoming barriers regarding opening data, implementing API's and working with the local development community.

Visual applications of technology (like http://dev. citysdk. waag. org/buildings/)help to inspire others and lead to follow up questions and applications.

A lot of effort is spent is connecting data owners, technicians and domain experts. This pays off in the end.

Citysdk sets the groundwork for an ecology of applications that can travel across Europe or more specific, across governmental bodies that implement the ensuing API's. It fosters standardisation from the bottom-up based on actual use cases.

It turns out this actually works well for the development community and data owners alike.

Open Data; Open Networks; Open source DSI activities: Operating a DSI service, Network Key facts: As part of the project the consortia developed Europe commons, a catalogue of applications with demonstrable impact Website:

http://commonsforeurope. net/Organisation Name Commons4europe/Commons4eu (consisting of Code4eu, Bub and Europe Commons) Short description‘'A new wave of fostering innovation in cities and creating cutting edge digital services''Commons for Europe (Commons4eu) is a pan-European consortium that mirrors a similar

initiative in the USA called Code for America. Code for America involved‘a new type of public service based on the work of volunteer programmers that has sought to building bridges between the public and new technologies.'

'Inspired by this, Commons4eu aims to enable users‘to provide real time validation for innovative methodologies

sensors integrated in Wi-fi networks and other technologies based on fibre optics to the home (FTTH).''The overarching Commons4eu project focuses on networked collaborative projects for use online and with mobile devices, based on the experience of Code for America,

which aims to be beneficial to all the participating countries. Their application is expected to reduce administrative costs,

History and Mission The Commons 4 EU project was started in 2011 with an initial core team of 7 cities:

They develop collaborative web projects following the methodology of Code for America‘based on principles rather than on sectors and by opening existing code in the participating cities and leveraging the European EPSI (European Public sector Information) platform.'

Projects should be based around web/mobile applications. Applications should enable cities to connect with their constituencies in ways that reduce administrative cost

‘Super Wifi, Sensor integration into wifi networks and fibre deployment as commons (both new techniques such as aerial as well as fibre bandwidth management'.

is evidenced by the host of custom-tailored web applications that have emerged to address specific,‘local'needs.

a website with a broader scope than either the Bub or Code for Europe projects.

It simultaneously taps into current technological trends such as open data, open source, as well as digital volunteerism (crowdsourcing), in a way that has a clear social impact.

The application was created to address a challenge presented to many museums around Europe where countless cultural heritage pictures have already been digitized,

Score. in order to solve the problem by crowdsourcing metadata for the digital image inventory. The Tag. Check.

Because digitization has presented a whole host of challenges for many museums, libraries and archives, the aim was to also develop a reusable IT open source solution.

In the Berlin State Museums alone six million objects await to be recorded. Therefore, the Source code of Tag.

Check. Score. available on Github, while the code is licensed under AGPL. What is the role of the organisation within the DSI ecosystem?

From the‘Super Wifi, Sensor integration into wifi networks and fibre deployment as commons'(which includes new techniques such as aerial as well as fibre bandwidth management),

to the web applications developed by fellows for Code for Europe these smaller projects tend to be reflective of the local needs of the partner city or of the fellow's own technological preferences.

This flexible approach to technology is reflected in the wide range of technologies employed by the different fellows who will work with their own preferred web platform (using open source languages like 83 Python

and Ruby on Rails) to build their open web applications. On a larger scale, this might be indicative of how Commons 4 EU looks beyond more traditional‘big tech solutions'to offer a simpler, much looser set of solutions;

websites like Europe Commons and collaborative tools like Github offer a glimpse to digital technology's potential for collaboration

Commons4eu also works with other social innovators on more specific challenges as part of an informal global network and conversation about how technology might be used to rethink the way we approach city governance.

and sharing of open source code. To this aim, the fellows work together on a joint Github account

In the case of Europe Commons the site's open source coding is hosted on Drupal. org,

where like Code for Europe interested civic developers can contribute to the site's code in a similar way to Github.

and city authorities that recognise that this is an opportunity to do more than simply upgrade technological products and service offerings,

While collaborative coding tools such as Github have challenged somewhat the often asocial aspect of software coding,

Established in 10 EU Member States Website: http://www. communia-project. eu Organisation Name COMMUNIA Short description COMMUNIA The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public domain, is an international association based in Brussels. The overarching aim

Open government data and public sector information: COMMUNIA policy paper on the proposal to amend the European Directive on reuse of Public sector Information;

Open access to scientific publications and open scientific data: COMMUNIA Position on EC Horizon 2020 Open Access policy;

blog posts, participation in consultations, drafting of policy papers, amendments and statements. COMMUNIA believes if they manage to change the law to recognize

The Internet prompted the creation of the association. Without the opportunities presented by the Internet,

the association would not exist. After decades of measures that have reduced drastically the public domain, typically by extending the terms of protection.

as the Internet and digital technologies enable people to access, use and redistribute culture with an ease and a power unforeseeable even just a generation ago.

Website: http://confine-project. eu Organisation Name Confine Short description The Confine Testbed experimental facility supports experimentally-driven research on Community-owned Open Local IP Networks.

Funkfeuer, Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network, The OPLAN Foundation, Comunicació per a la Cooperació Pangea Fraunhofer institute and Interdisciplinary Institute for Broadband Technology.

The background to the project is that recent technological developments have pushed forward the Internet and its possibilities, leading to a seemingly omnipresent Internet.

cost-effective and high quality Internet connection, with coverage for all citizens is still a challenge. Often this stems from economic causes,

as Internet provision in a metropolitan area is usually more economically attractive than providing access in rural areas.

Community networking also known as bottom-up networking, is an emerging model for the Future Internet, where communities of citizens build, operate

and own open IP-based networks. Hundreds of 90 community networks operate across the globe, in rural and urban, rich and poor areas.

and obstacles regarding Internet specifications that are exposed by these edge networks. It supports an integrated and multi-disciplinary effort to address

and sustainability of community networking as a model for the Future Internet. Five research projects:

and collaboration on community networking, starting from the FIRE (Future Internet Research and Experimentation) community nourished by the EC.

Therefore, the project also wants to generate open data sets for research that will allow for outside participation and research collaboration,

Actually, the open data efforts will be focused more on the Future Internet context of CONFINE rather than the test bed itself.

The project brings in additional users (researchers) with a common entry point and additional resources (nodes, servers, links) in sparsely populated areas.

The CONFINE project addresses the need to explore bottom-up future sustainable Internet infrastructures. Since this aim requires contributions from all social groups,

The project makes uses of social networks to organize its activities, to make the knowledge addressing,

Nodes connect using affordable and accessible wireless IEEE 802.11 a b/n technology, using equipment from various manufacturers,

community networks are built often with simple and low cost off-the-shelf hardware. The nodes are usually running an open source distribution

such as Linux (Openwrt) or Freebsd. A Community-Lab node consists of two or three devices:

the community device, the research device and an optional recovery device to force the research device to reboot in case of malfunction.

remote backups and updates, file storage and file sharing. The project has also set up http://opendata. confine-project. eu/using the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) 23 software.

This central catalog points to open data available from the different CONFINE partners With CKAN,

the datasets can be tagged easily and commented on (Braem et al. 2013). What did technology enable that was not previously possible?

community networks are built often with simple low cost off-the-shelf hardware. The characteristics of heterogeneity, required network neutrality, openness and size of these networks are a great challenge to routing protocols and their implementation on low-cost devices.

instant messaging, remote backups and updates, file storage and file sharing. These services face enormous challenges due to the limited capacity of servers and links 93 and the structure of the network.

Operating in this large and constantly changing environment requires the deployment of distributed service infrastructures that exploit locality,

while maintaining the privacy of their data and the data they relay. This leads to different threat models and a new notion of trust between users.

What helps to reach goals and overcome barriers? Community networks are an emerging eld to provide citizens with connectivity in a sustainable and distributed manner in which the owners of the networks are the users themselves.

In Melbourne, Australia, Melbourne Wireless is a quickly growing community network (Braem et al. 2013). 94 95 Desis Network At a glance:

Open Networks, Open Data, Open Knowledge DSI activities: An event, A network, Running/hosting maker spaces

and hackerspaces, Operating a web service Key facts: Members active in Europe, America, Asia, Australia, and Africa Website:

http://www. desis-network. org Organisation Name Desis Network Short description DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability) is a network of design labs,

and website management. 96 History and Mission The DESIS Network originates from three main international activities in the 2006-2008 period:‘

and shared their detailed report on the DESIS UK website. This is just one instance that demonstrates how DESIS has forged useful alliances between academic institutes and government authorities. 99 Everyaware At a glance:

Open networks, Open data, Open knowledge, Open hardware DSI activities: Research project, network, operating web service providing education & training Key facts:

3-year project EU funded with € 2. 1m Website: http://www. everyaware. eu Short description The Everyaware project aims to empower citizens to engage actively in improving their own environment and making it more sustainable.

The project does this by providing capabilities for environmental monitoring, data aggregation, and information presentation to users by means of mobile and web-based devices such as smartphones, computers and sensors.

The work on Everyaware is presently ongoing (the project runs from 2011 2014), therefore this short case study is shot a snap of the project's ambitions

and activities and does not purport to present any final findings from the overall project.

Through the project Everyaware intends to integrate theoretical and practical techniques from the disciplines of environmental sensing, computer science,

The overarching aim of the Everyaware platform is to develop an integrated hard and software platform

which Everyaware refers to as‘subjective data'.'It pairs this with‘objective environmental data'from sources such as static sensors.

The aim of this is to undertake a comparison between sensor data and subjective opinions which will expose the mechanisms by which the individual perception of a known phenomenon is translated into its social perception and eventually into choices and actions.

A central server efficiently collects, analyses and visualises data sent from arbitrary sources. The Everyaware platform will handle both sensor and subjective data acquisition.

It will host a modular system based on two hardware components: a smartphone controlling the data acquisition and a modular sensor box with several pluggable sensors.

This approach guarantees high scalability of the overall system and allows for an optimal distribution of sensors (e g.,

, wearable sensors for air or noise pollution. At the same time, web-interfaces allow users to easily upload their sensor readings,

and equally easily tag these with subjective information. Experimental Tribe is the first prototype of such platforms to be realised.

It is a web platform for gaming and social computation. It helps researchers to devise web games/experiments,

and offers a platform for others to join in, meaning the public can both enjoy

and contribute to the scientific research. 101 The web platform is built to engage social computation, letting the different organisers of projects collaborate

and coordinate on the shared platform. Users can run experiments partake in experiments, share their experiences,

and carry out research. Experiments range from urban dynamics, mapping human behavior patterns, opinion dynamics, to perceptions of political networks.

The data storage system and the gaming platform are the two main components of the Everyaware web-based infrastructure,

storing and analysing relevant environmental data. Case studies: Case studies concerning different numbers of participants will test the scalability of the platform,

Widenoise is an iphone and Android app that helps people to understand the soundscape around

and to help live a healthier life. Widenoise also has an online real-time interactive map,

which shows the collected data and indicates the noise pollution levels all over the world. At the same time Widenoise also visualises the data to explain to users in a more accessible manner how they might gain a deeper understanding of the problem.

Sensorbox, Airprobe, a dedicated Web server and Web application, together form a system that measures concentrations of pollutants in the air and localises them through a GPS.

This enables users to see the measurements in real time by using a Bluetooth and Airprobe app on their smartphone,

and also makes it possible for users to access the aggregate data gathered by the community,

as personalised information concerning personal levels of exposure to pollutants. Based on this system there is also an international competition APIC (Airprobe International Challenge) organised between four cities:

In their research and practical work, Everyaware focus on sensing, mobile and location-based technologies, as well as data visualisation.

Along with sensors, human beings can act as a probe to monitor many phenomena, especially in the environmental area.

Mobile and location-based technologies: Cell phones and PCS incorporate sensors of increasing accuracy: GPS sensors, cameras, microphones, accelerometers and thermometers are already a default equipment in most of the mentioned devices.

Networks have accompanied also this process, by expanding the availability of an Internet connection throughout daily life.

Online communication platforms: It is developed within the Web2. 0 paradigm to provide users with the opportunity of collectively categorising,

social networking tools, which allow effective data and opinion collection, and real-time information spreading processes. In addition, theoretical and modelling tools developed by physicists,

computer scientists and sociologists have reached already the maturity to analyse, interpret and visualize complex data sets.

The integration of participatory sensing with the monitoring of subjective opinions is novel and crucial,

as it exposes the mechanisms by which the local perception of an environmental issue, corroborated by quantitative data,

evolves into socially shared opinions, eventually driving behavioural changes. Enabling this level of transparency critically allows an effective communication of desirable environmental strategies to the general public and to institutional agencies.

Generating data and sharing opinion in a user-friendly manner: The combination of sensor-based data generation and online sharing provides the possibility of gathering opinions in a user-friendly manner.

Sensor-based gathering of temperature and noise-level information, for example, allows collection of data on totally new levels of scale.

Use of mobile phones for this purpose seems a particularly powerful way of getting ordinary people involved,

as it could integrate subjective data (such as moods or opinions) as well as scientific readings. It is possible to make more sense of the collected data

when they are displayed over a base map of the local streets either via GPS readings or by captures through a map interface. 103 Raising awareness and effecting decision and policy making:

This focuses on the question of whether‘socially accepted'data gathered in this way could induce widespread opinion dynamics leading to changes in behaviour.

The idea is that the availability of locally relevant digital data, together with their analysis, processing and visualisation should trigger a bottom-up improvement for social strategies.

The appropriate and personalised representation of the collected data to users has the potential of triggering a bottom-up improvement of citizens'behaviours.

On the other hand, the augmented awareness could also act as a source of pressure on the relevant stakeholders and policy makers.

The comparison between sensor data and subjective opinions aims to expose the mechanisms by which the individual perception of a known phenomenon is translated into its social perception and eventually into more informed choices and actions.

It will be a resource for capturing new types of data across EU. 104 105 Fablab Amsterdam At a glance:

Open Networks, Open Hardware, Open Knowledge DSI activities: A network, hosting makerspace/hackerspace, providing education & training Key facts:

Over 250 individual fabrication projects done in Fablab Amsterdam Website: http://fablab. waag. org/Organisation Name Waag Society Short description Fablab Amsterdam is a Fab Lab (short for fabrication laboratory),

Fablab Amsterdam is also part of a global network of standardised open hardware setups. Type of organisation Fablab Amsterdam is part of the international Fablab community (there are now Fablabs in most parts of the world, from inner-city Boston through to rural India, South africa and the North of Norway.

The only requirement for using Fablab Amsterdam in open days is to document the work and project on the Fablab website and share the designs with the rest of the community under a Creative Commons license.

Fablab Amsterdam uses digital fabrication to create an open hardware environment, and builds an open network based on that, in

The digital fabrication include machines such as, Laser cutter, Milling machine, Vinyl Cutter, Embroidery Machine, 3d printer, Thermal Cycler, Microscope, Centrifuge, Spectrometer, Incubator, Autoclave, Rotary

Teleconferencing system and digital communication: To Fablab Amsterdam, it is very important to build and be part of the global Fablab network.

The network also makes it possible for people to attend the Fab Academy from all over the world. 108 Open Hardware and Open philosophy:

and is based on open source design and open hardware such as Arduino. One example of this is Alignment laser,

Before the Fablab people with a DIY interest wouldn't have been able to access the technology and machines in the lab such as 3d printers and laser cutters.

The free or low cost access to open source hard and software means that Fablab communities both benefit from

and contribute to the value of these, which benefits a global DIY community using the same open tools.

Open Hardware, Open Knowledge DSI activities: product and research Key facts: 25,000 phones sold in less than 6 months. 50,000 followers on Facebook.

Website: http://www. fairphone. com/Organisation Name Fairphone Short description Fairphone is a start-up company producing the world's first ethically sourced smart phone,

initiated at Waag Society in The netherlands. History and mission Fairphone was founded as a social enterprise in 2010.

The organisation can't be described as an ordinary smartphone manufacturer. It started as a joint project between Waag Society,

Action Aid and Schrijf-Schrijf in The netherlands as a campaign against the dire conditions endured by people working in sections of the global and often very complex electronics goods supply chain.

cobalt and tantalum mines (materials used in mobile phones) of the Democratic Republic of congo (DRC), many of which are controlled by armed groups,

creating and producing its own smart phone. Through its own phone production Fairphone sought to take the next step in uncovering the story behind the sourcing, production, distribution and recycling of electronics,

and demonstrate how a more transparent supply chain could be developed. 112 What does it do,

Thereby creating an alternative in the smart phone market and raising the bar for the industry.

The project is not about the phone itself, instead Fairphone aims to open up the supply chain behind making the smart phone,

and create full transparency around how the product is made. The phone is a storytelling icon

and the starting point of a conversation about transparency in production processes and supply chains. By connecting the dots for consumers about the social and environmental impacts of the electronic products they purchase

To achieve its goals Fairphone is created as an open platform using mainly social media; anyone can step in

and help crowdsource relevant information and follow each step in the development of the Fairphone, from individuals, businesses and organisations to funds and bloggers.

Production of a fairer smartphone: Fairphone aims to prove that it is possible to build a reasonably priced,

sourced from the same countries mobile phone companies would normally source material and assembly from, but by supporting independent miners and manufacturers who guarantee basic standards to their employees.

On November 13 2013 Fairphone announced that it had sold the first batch of 25,000 smartphones, using only social media for marketing.

The Fairphone team sees this as a unique achievement, as this means 25,000 people were willing to buy a phone that has not been produced yet from a company that has produced never a phone before,

based on belief in the values and mission behind the company. The organisation aims to deliver the phones by the end of December 2013.

The tin and tantalum in the first edition Fairphone are sourced from conflict-free mines outside of the control of warring parties in countries such as the Democratic Republic of congo,

and partners on the ground to achieve similar assurances about other materials used in the phone

In the DRC for example Fairphone looks to ensure that the raw materials that go into the phone do not fund the warring parties in the country.

Through the online platform (50,000 followers on Facebook) every step in the research and development is communicated. Fairphone has received many research requests

Fairphone see the smart phone as a practical starting point for telling the story of how the economy functions,

It's not our aim to become the biggest phone company in the world it's our aim to influence the biggest phone companies in the world, Tessa Wernick, Fairphone communications director.

However, it is important to note that Fairphone do not see the phone as a solution in and of itself,

instead they see it as a vehicle for change, through the revelation of its story,

understanding how phones are made and producing an alternative. Through mobilizing 25.000 potential consumers, Fairphone feels it has demonstrated how collective action can be made to count

Fairphone grew from a community platform to the first open mobile phone manufacturer. It is a great case of the open design movement creating grounds for new relations between product, manufacturers and consumers.

The appealing story together with the careful community-building by the partners brought a lot of media coverage

basically a large group of followers on Facebook and twitter. Since this started as a very collaborative project Fairphone has depended on the community for feedback and input.

and marketing solely through social media. Every step in the development process every decision the company makes,

This open approach extends to plans for the phone itself and the software, although there is some way to go on this. 114 How is funded the organisation?

and produce its smart phone, it has received funding from Bethnal Green Ventures to participate in a startup Bootcamp

The phone itself is being sold in a pre-sale model and in batches of 25,000 at a time. 5000 people order

and pay for the phone before the company decides to go into production. This way a healthy relationship with the manufacturer can be built,

Operating a web service Key facts: The platform has 4 million users worldwide Website: https://github. com/Organisation Name Github Short description Github, a San francisco-based company, was started in 2008 as a way for open source software writers in various locations to rapidly create new

and better versions of their work collaboratively. It has grown since to be the largest social coding repository in the world.

Github has an apparently flat organisational structure; out of its 227 employees there are virtually no managers,

to build better software together. Source code management was historically a particularly asocial (and sometimes antisocial) practice.

By shifting this once solitary activity to one centred instead around digital collaboration or indeed‘social coding,

and code management for open source and private projects, by tapping into this community of collective coders.

the creator of Linux. Over time, Github's mission evolved from offering a paradigm 116 shift in the way programmers had coded largely in isolation to something more.

Since then the platform has gone through a rapid development and is now largest social coding repository in the world with more than 9. 8 million repositories.

At its simplest Github can be described as open source tool for people to come together online and collaborate around a project,

in the majority of cases the projects people use Github to collaborate around are code for websites and software solutions.

To make it easy for developers to collaborate Git has developed a number of features such as a Web-based graphical interface, wikis and basic task management tools for every project.

because the code is open source). This enables a developer to copy a code that he

Homebrew a platform used by developers to make code run more smoothly with the MAC OS was the most heavily trafficked project on Github in 2012.

and improve the Homebrew source code. While Homebrew is just one sample project hosted on Github,

there are over 5 million other projects on the site involving 3 million coders. However it seems Github wants to stretch digital collaboration and transparency to its limits

A study based on a series of in depth interviews with central and peripheral Github users (carried out by the School of Computer science and the Center for the Future of Work, Heinz College and Carnegie mellon University;

Instances of Github can be licensed to run on private servers inside a company's firewall under the Enterprise plans ($5000/year/20 seats.

'This plan enables clients to download a version of Github to live locally on their servers,

Enterprise clients include Lockheed martin, Microsoft, Livingsocial, VMWARE and Walmart. Another revenue stream is Github Jobs where employers can post job offers for $450/listing.

Overall the‘open source'culture of Github translates into their business model in one particularly obvious way:

programmers or companies can use the collaborative platform for free as a place to build open-source software,

but requires them to give up use of Github's‘distributed global network of talent.''In July 2012 Github received its first ever external funding,

a platform set up with the aim of helping governments become more open source, open data, and open government.

This portal is aimed specifically at helping governments all over the world to open source datasets, legislation and information so that citizen programmers can help solve local problems.

What technological methods and tools is it using, and what did these enable that was not previously possible?

Github uses Git, a multi-platform version control application created for use by developers of the Linux kernel,

and downloads (pushes and pulls) to Github. Though developed for software code, any types of files can be part of a Github repository,

and any text-based files (including plain text, Markdown, HTML, Latex, and Lilypond music notation software files) can take advantage of Git's version tracking and merging features.

Github is also a kind of social network, providing collaborators an easy way to discuss issues in a project,

and to follow other users and projects of interest. 118 Furthermore, by making use of the latest HTML5 API,

activities like navigating through a code directory structure are enhanced greatly. As the system of record for software, it is natural that the rest of the software development ecosystem (bug trackers, project management,

continuous integration and testing tools) are now scrambling to integrate with Github. This will continue to reinforce their leadership position

and will result in better quality software. Github has remodelled how programmers engage with Source code Management (SCM) a fundamental tool for programmers, that stores,

versions and branches source code being developed by teams of programmers. While traditionally SCMS have been a highly complex,

esoteric and cumbersome systems to manage; they have also been notably asocial in their nature.

Because modern programming tends to be about assembling code in the form of libraries, open source work,

In essence this people-centred approach to programming has meant Github has become a social networking site for programmers.

and merge software code, this same logic can be applied to any types of files that make up the Github repository,

what was closed in the past a, asocial aspect of software coding. By making its coding repository far more transparent,

or register for barely usable software before they too can get involved, etc. What were the main barriers to innovate?

Open source vs. Closed: While Github has stood out as an outrider of how e-businesses might operate in an open-source landscape;

Healthcare. gov is intended a platform to enable users to navigate through its site, and to choose the most suitable healthcare package.

The code for the informational part of Healthcare. gov the frontend of the site was written by a Washington, D c. startup (Development Seed) and a small team of consultants.

Source code Management: According to Preston-Werner (a Github founder), the main problem is the site's forbiddingly technical approach.

We've got a lot of educating to do, he said. Github is built on top of Git, an eight-year-old source-code management tool that most users still manage via a command-line interface.

(i e. a series of tests designed to test a software program has specified a set of behavior),

Github's‘Freemium business models'(a term which relates predominantly to the fact that organisations will pay a premium price to host their source code privately with Github) is underpinned by the fact that as the cost of computing, storage,

Operating a web service Key facts: 14.000 registered users, launched 100 successful projects and sourced more than 700 nonfinancial contributions Website:

http://goteo. org/Organisation Name Goteo Short description Goteo. org is an open source social network for crowdfunding as well as distributed collaboration based in Spain.

The explicit mission of Goteo. org is to help finance and support the independent development of creative and innovative initiatives that contribute to the common good, free knowledge,

'Type of organisation Goteo is managed by the nonprofit organisation Fundacion Fuentes Abiertas (Open source Foundation. History and mission The explicit mission of Goteo. org is to help finance

when Platoniq (a collective of cultural activists, open source practitioners and Internet researchers) came together to explore initiatives for giving monetary support online to different people and causes with a social purpose.

This included looking at new models for financing ventures such as the micro credit site Kiva, P2p lending models and emerging crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter.

The aim of the exercise was to understand how compatible crowdfunding was with crowdsourcing lessons learned from the open source world.

This meant both replicating some features of crowdfunding from other sites, but also adding new features such as optimum and minimum costs needed, petitions for collaborations as well as monetary help,

At its simplest Goteo can be described as a social network that helps facilitate both the collective funding of and distributed collaboration or crowdsourcing of projects.

free knowledge and/or open source. Unlike most other crowdfunding platforms Goteo operate with two funding windows for a campaign, each with a duration of 40 days.

As an example, Nodo Móvil is a campaign to create a mobile wifi connection unit for social movements and public spaces.

it also succeeded in attracting support from developers, a hacklab space for working, a 3d printer for prototyping, volunteer testers for their prototype solutions,

which allows people to follow the wrap as it is used on future presents with web geolocation,

A core criteria for Goteo is that all campaigns the platform helps have to meet a cultural, scientific, educational, technological or ecological objective.

'Therefore projects are built on collaborative, open source and open design principles. As an example the Infinit Loop cloth mentioned above is built for example with an open design license.

and significant social media attention as well (the platform has more than 8, 000 Twitter followers and 3000 Facebook likes).

Most importantly more than 100 open projects have been funded fully and supported to date via the platform, raising a total of nearly €350, 000, with more than 700 offers of different types of contribution and collaboration from volunteers.

just as social media and networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Youtube are a crucial part of launching,

and have made the source code for the platform available for everyone to access on Github. While not directly technologies, the project relies heavily on the open hard

and software standards developed by and for the open source community, such as creative commons to set the standard for how campaigns launched on the platform should use

Modern crowdfunding and its ability to quickly mobilise large groups of often very geographically dispersed people online around a common cause, would not have been possible before the emergence of the Internet.

and open hard and software solutions to develop their products. The Nodo Móvil project campaign is built,

for example on the Arduino Open Hardware board. Other projects, like the Tuderechoasaber an online platform for accessing

relies on open data. How is funded the organisation? The Spanish Minister of Culture has helped co-fund (amount unclear) the early development of the Platform.

Operating a web service Key facts: Landshare has got 55,000 members worldwide Website: http://Landshare. net Organisation Name Landshare Short description At its simplest, Landshare can be described as an open platform that allows people to share land.

Anyone who wishes to be involved in the Landshare project can register and to search the list of other Landshare Members to identify people who they may wish to contact to assist them (whether as a grower, landowner or helper) in setting up their own landsharing arrangements.

by using its site as a social network where interested D. I. Y. growers can join forces to form a growing collective,

Having said that, the site boasts over 73,000 members, and claims to have a community of over 60,

In August 2010, Landshare launched a free iphone app. The app featured a‘landspotting'camera tool

The app was developed by KEO Digital. 127 The Landshare. net website includes some built-in social networking features such as message inbox, forums,

and crowdsourcing has evidently proven useful resource for growers, sharers or helpers interested in getting involved

This same feature is available to those who opt to use the website. The website also includes a number of sharing

and support platforms that promote digital collaboration related to finding or sharing land, finding groups in a member's local area,

By entering in your postcode to the searchable map on the website members are presented potentially with a number of helpers, sharers or growers in their area.

Individual Landshare initiatives have been funded using Landshare's sister site the crowdfunding platform Peoplefund. it, which, like the Landshare website and app, was also set up by KEO Digital.

Peoplefund. it works in a similar way to crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. As an example the platform was used to successfully raise £4, 401 (109 per cent) of the £4, 030 target for the proposed Dyfi Landshare.

printing and office supplies; website fees; travel expenses and Welsh translation services. Recently, Landshare. net has decided to run a trial to test the inclusion of some‘contextual advertising'to help pay for the continued development and maintenance of its website.

According to the site, the income from these adverts will help to fulfil the initiative's primary objective:

to connect as many growers with available growing space in the UK and beyond. What really helps reach goals?

Undoubtedly Landshare's success has been largely a consequence of the immense media muscle power the project has had since its inception:

Operating a web service Key facts: Used by the pirate party in Germany to source policy from members Website:

http://liquidfeedback. org/Organisation Name Liquid Feedback Short description Liquid feedback is free open source software

which enables platforms for bottom-up political opinion formation and decision making. Developed by the Public Software Group based in Berlin, Germany,

the platform combines aspects of representative and direct democracy enabling participants in the platform to both vote directly on issues

Type of organisation The Public Software Group who developed the Liquid Feedback software is a not-for-profit organisation based in Berlin, Germany.

History and mission The Liquid Feedback software was published first in October 2009 by Public Software Group.

The software was used first by Germany's Pirate Party that same year, and has, amongst others,

However the developers are fully independent from the users of the software. The Liquid Feedback software is published under an open MIT license

and free for anyone or any organisation to download and use. 130 At the core of Liquid Feedback sit an ambition to create a platform that addresses the gap between representative democracies where people elect representatives to represent

and vote for them on policy decisions and direct democracy, where one person equals one vote.

The basic activity of Public Software is to make the Liquid Feedback software freely available to organisations interested in using the platform to create a more deliberative process around shaping

Finally, and on a more general level, Liquid Feedback is built on an open source licence. The rationale for this is that everyone interested in adopting the platform to their organisation should be able to do so freely.

At heart of Liquid Feedback sits an ambition to create a platform that lets people come together online to crowdsource and prioritise ideas.

and time consuming to work efficiently, before the advent of the Internet. Finally, the open source approach,

as described above, allows the platform to be adapted by organisations that are both diverse in type and their geographical base.

Open networks, Open hardware DSI activities: Organising an event Key facts: 165,000 people attended the two flagship Maker Faires in in 2012.30,000 people attended the Rome 2013 Mini Maker Faire Website:

http://makerfaire. com/Organisation Name Makerfaire Short description Maker Faire is created an event by Make magazine to celebrate arts, crafts, engineering science projects and the Do-it-yourself (DIY) mindset.

Topics and areas include electronics, 3d printing, technological product demo, design, craft, sustainability and domestic arts,

For example the event featured demonstrations on the DIY opportunities in the Arduino open source electronic board and Raspberry Pi.

social networks, crowdsourcing and 3d printing, and the benefit of participating in such open innovation environments for DIY product designers.

The Maker Faire creates a real-time sharing platform that is offline. Lots of products or projects that will be shown in Maker Faire have a strong focus on using digital social innovation technology such as open hardware,

but the faire provides an offline stage where makers can share their digital creation face-to-face.

The highly interactive approach brings not only the chance of making the ideas more valuable, but also a party-like gathering event,

Attendees at Makerfaire showcase and work on a wide range of soft and hardware, some of the most popular and frequent of these include open hardware such as Arduino micro controller and personal 3d printing.

Several advantages of open source hardware show its importance to the Maker Faire community: Help streamline the design Makers can reduce risk by basing designs on open-source hardware

and taking advantage of a proven design that has operated successfully in the past. Thus, they can work from a known starting point

and easily see what's there, what's missing, and what is unnecessary. It saves development time.

Giving back Open-source hardware is about sharing work with others for everyone's benefit. It is beneficial for all parties to provide upgrades

and additions to the community whenever possible so that the next user can add other enhancements. When a user adds a function to hardware

it affects the software, which adds a reason to enhance and improve the overall performance of the software to take advantage of the new feature.

Low cost access open hardware gives grassroots audience the ability to turn their ideas into products or services,

and even build business upon it. There are also many applicable business models for implementing some open-source hardware even in traditional firms.

For example, to accelerate development and technical innovation the photovoltaic industry has experimented with partnerships, franchises, secondary supplier and completely open-source models.

How is funded the organisation? Maker Faire is made possible with a variety of sponsorships. Equally, some mini maker faires are financed partially through charging fees for attending.

Open data; Open knowledge DSI activities: Advocating and campaigning; Operating a web service Key facts:

The Whatdotheyknow app has helped over 130,000 Freedom of Information requests. The Fixmystreet app has helped report more than 250,000 problems reported Website:

http://www. mysociety. org/Organisation Name mysociety Short description mysociety's key mission is to help people become more powerful in the civic and democratic parts of their lives, through digital means.

Since 2004 they have launched various websites that made it easy to do tasks such as identifying which politician (s) represent you,

tangible benefits'that e-commerce sites give people, but in the civic and democratic parts of their lives.

Building websites that make it easy for people to write to their politicians to get potholes fixed,

Providing consultancy, bespoke software development and software products to organisations keen to meet the expectations of digital natives.

Developing free and open source software for individuals and organisations around the world who want to build copies of the sites mysociety builds.

Some of the most prominent websites and software solutions developed by mysociety are listed below. Fixmystreet-Fixmystreet Platform is built open-source software to help people run websites for reporting common street problems

like potholes and broken street lights. It has been used in many countries around the world, from Norway to New zealand to Georgia to Italy-where versions based on the original UK Fixmystreet website have been built.

ALAVETELI-Magnify the power of Right to Information laws in your country. Alaveteli is the popular‘Right-to-Know

& Freedom of Information software',designed for easy reuse in any country or jurisdiction. Citizens can use Alaveteli to request information from governments,

and official responses are published automatically openly for anyone to see. This can turn a request by one person into a request of use to thousands of people.

Alaveteli powers mysociety's busy Whatdotheyknow. com website. MAPIT-Mapit Global's API uses Openstreetmap data to‘establish the location of different administrative boundaries, anywhere in the world.'

'Boundaries data is essential for anyone creating geographic web and mobile services that rely on locating a particular point within the correct country, district, county, city or region.

POMBOLA-Helping you keep tabs on your national parliament or congress. In 2012 mysociety worked closely with Kenyan NGO, Mzalendo, to relaunch Kenya's independent parliamentary monitoring website.

The software created for this purpose is called Pombola. It's free, open source and available for use anywhere in the world.

The core features of this website are: 139 A structured database that links people to places, organisations and roles.

It's an accessible display all of the members of a particular house of parliament, all of the elected representatives of particular areas and even all of the politicians who attended a specific college.

A database of parliamentary transcripts linked to the individual speakers, making it easy to display how often a politician has spoken in parliament and

what they have said Boundary information (stored in Mapit) allows users to search any location covered by the Pombola instance

and discover the elected representatives for that area Integrated tools allow users to comment on

and socially share individual pages Twitter streams on the home page and a blog for news items The Pombola code has been

since been used to run sites in Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. What is the social impact it is seeking,

including any evidence of impact to date? mysociety believe that strong democratic accountability and a thriving civil society are vital to our common welfare,

because they believe that the Internet can meaningfully lower the barriers to taking the first civic or democratic steps in a citizen's life,

so at scale. mysociety's UK sites are the best showcases in terms of pure volume and engagement:

One of the candidates running for President in the 2013 Kenyan Election contacted the site personally to query the data behind their scorecard rating. mysociety emphasize the fact that,

if Presidential candidates care about how they are being represented on the site, then that is an indicator of impact not least because awareness that they will be held to such a level of scrutiny in the future could help drive higher standards of behaviour.

mysociety's sites are all open source. Some of the mysociety codebases have been worked on extensively to make them easy to use for the newcomer.

Mapit's code is also available on Github, another open source project which can be installed locally,

those interested in setting up a site using Pombola in their own country are encouraged to first contact the team to get more information.

mysociety's websites seem to have used technology to achieve their objective of holding governments more to account,

It is questionable how an organisation like mysociety could have had such obvious results in the absence technological advances made with the Internet.

As mentioned above all of its sites and applications use Github Issues for tracking bugs and feature requests,

One of the benefits of mysociety being a digital NGO is that presently software development is globally a relatively lucrative profession.

open source projects without having to employ a huge factory of staff. After recognising in the period following 2006 that official government funding streams had been wound down,

As part of this they began to solicit commercial requests to do software development or consulting. In order to keep this activity within the bounds of UK charities law,

while developing‘a reputation as a software company that can solve problems that more traditional web companies can't.'mysociety Ltd.,

Realities of open source: Before accepting contributions to a project, the practical considerations around the overheads of testing, checking,

many socially focused websites set up at similar times were expected to deliver immediately, and then were killed off by virtue of short term budgets.

so that even in the‘lean times'the organisation could afford to keep sites running for years at a time.

To grow the open-source communities around some of their core websites and components so that they are of ever greater value to larger numbers of people.

To upgrade their UK sites to make sure that they are always serving the needs of local users as best as is possible,

Open networks, Open data DSI activities: Operating a web service Key facts: has released 160 datasets

which has lead to the development of more than 109 apps Website: https://open. wien. at/site/Organisation Name Open Government Wien (Vienna henceforth) Short description Open Government Vienna is part of the Smart City and Open Government

strategies of the City of Vienna. Open Government is defined as the comprehensive redesign of politics and administrative activities according to the principles of modern Public Management and Public Governance.

In simpler terms the Open Government Vienna project has seen the city adopt an open data policy and share data related to population, economics and science.

Relevant data also comes from around the areas of statistics, geospatial, transportation and economics. This shift to transparency

collaboration and participation has seen a whole host off web and phone apps emerge to enhance how citizens engage with the city.

Type of organisation The Open Government Vienna strategy is part of the Smart City strategy of the City of Vienna,

and as such is a project that is housed with the city authority. History and Mission The Open Government initiative of the City of Vienna started in May 2011 with opening up datasets on data. wien. gv. at.

The main targets of the Open Government strategy for Vienna are: transparency, collaboration and participation.

Furthermore the data and spin-off apps that come about as a result of the Open Government Data strategy are hoped to have positive impact on citizen engagement and participation;

business and research; and administration in the city of Vienna. 144 What does it do,

and development coming out from the open data generated to deal with the particular needs of citizens in the city,

One particularly novel application that has been created is Fruit fly an app that offers users a visual map that captures data on all fruit trees on public ground in Vienna.

Crowdsourced data is used also to index which fruit is ripe or in season. The result is a quirky app that citizens

In opening its data records to the public, the City of Vienna is taking an important step towards implementing its Open Government Strategy.

Due to the new structures, the city administration makes increased use of Internet technology. A summary of the city's Open Government activities and the first edition of the Open Data catalogue are available online,

to be accessed via an all-new web portal. Presently 109 apps and visualisations have been made that make use of Open Government Data Vienna,

and the community of over 500 users is made up by a diverse demographic of students,

teachers and professors, professionals, makers and hackers. Undoubtedly, initiatives like Open Government Vienna have played a part in Vienna being voted Europe's most innovative city.

and government organisations that bring forward the most important improvements with regards to technological and strategic issues in the field of Linked Open Government Data (such as strategy forms and consultation).

The Open Government Vienna initiative has clearly been influenced heavily by recent technology trends around open data and open networks.

'the City of Vienna offers‘a comprehensive range of e-government options',‘with about 600 official e-government web pages and a variety of administrative services available online.'

In addition to this, the City of Vienna launched an Open Data portal and an Open Government Portal in 2011.

Four times a year new datasets are published which now stands at over 160 datasets with geographic and statistical datasets in several open formats and APIS

and for the first time the aggregated data has been made open to the public as an Open Data Catalogue. Lastly 109 apps and visualisations were created by the community, some

'Open Government Implementation Model'suggests that a‘focused look at public sector data management has been missing so far In public Management

'and that‘a control gap has become evident due to the trend toward the release of data in Open Government Data Portals.'

'It also concedes that the Open Government Data Implementation Model‘is a contribution toward closing this gap'by producing‘data catalogues,

implementing evaluations in the context of internal data monitoring and the planning and implementation of approval cycles in the first stage of Open Government constitute a contribution to Data Management and Data Governance as new disciplines of Public Management.'

'Yet advances in public management of this sort would doubtlessly be impossible without the improvements in computing storage and high levels of Internet penetration.

Enhancing collaboration and engagement: DSI network effect Open Government Vienna has centred itself around interaction, communication and collaboration with the community in several ways:

while the Open Government project looks to more‘conventional'digital communication channels such as Twitter, Facebook and emails, there are public life platforms where users can chat

or meet the experts of the City of Vienna, as well as an online forum. In 2012 two participation projects based around ideas of‘collaborative democracy'took place:

Data quality: data management tools like CKAN are necessary to build up a range of datasets that are of a high standard,

and that can in turn generate useful cross-referenceable findings. Data islands: transferring data over from older devices posed a challenge for the Open Government's push for open data.

What really helps to achieve goals? Political buy in: the scope and breadth of what Open Government Vienna has achieved would not have been had possible the city authority not voted to make open data a major priority focus.

How to achieve better European collaboration? The model implemented in the Open Government Vienna initiative has already been used by other Authorities in Austria (e g.

Environment Agency Austria, small municipality of Engerwitzdorf, City of Graz, Region of Styria and others.

Operating a web service Key facts: Five citizen driven law proposal have reached support from 50.000 people

and have subsequently been debated in the Finish Parliament Website: http://openministry. info/(The Finnish language platform is at http://avoinministerio. fi/)Organisation Name Open Ministry (Avoin Ministeriö in Finnish) Short description The Open Ministry

It was set up with the aim of enabling the crowdsourcing of legislation, promoting deliberative and participatory democracy and citizens initiatives.

Type of organisation The Open Ministry utilizes crowdsourcing in the preparation of citizens'initiatives and it is operated fully by volunteers independent of governmental organisations and political parties.

History and core mission The overarching purpose of Open Ministry is to help citizens and NGOS with national citizens'initiatives

While it was proposed that citizens could submit draft proposals onto an official Ministry of Justice website due to be launched in Autumn 2012

To gain 50,000 votes broad campaigning on social media and beyond is required, needing directed energy from many people.

Through Open Ministry's novel system of crowdsourcing legislation, the Finnish parliament has for the first time been forced to tackle issues identified

Importantly, the Open Ministry goes further than the Ministry of Justice web platform by providing citizens with the tools

They purport that the peer-learning aspect could be made even stronger through the addition of design elements in the process and on the crowdsourcing hardware.

and boasts an Internet penetration rate of 89.3 percent, according to data released by the International Telecommunications Union in June 2012) more needs to be done to understand some of the potential barriers that might exist

if other countries with less Internet penetration were to adopt or replicate this model. What technological methods and tools is it using and

what did technology enable that was not previously possible? The Open Ministry website was developed using a YUI API a free, open source Javascript and CSS library for building interactive web applications.

Demographic metrics are gathered using Quantcast. The site's source code is also available on Github where anyone can fork the project,

contribute to it, or use it in other countries. 150 As part of its aim to crowdsource legislation,

the nonprofit organisation had been collecting signatures for various proposals in paper since 1 march, when the citizens'initiatives came in.

To ensure the site was compliant with security standards the National Communications security Authority audited the site's code,

its security policies and its service/hosting providers to ensure that the details of citizens are safe

The system verifies the people's identity through the APIS offered by banks and mobile operators,

so that people can sign the initiatives online with the online banking codes or their mobile phones.

Undoubtedly this would not have been possible in the absence of the Internet and the online platforms that Open Ministry has been built on.

DSI network effect The Open Ministry aims to facilitate the crowdsourcing process and to provide collaboration tools that enable citizens to develop their ideas into actual law proposals with the help of volunteer experts.

For instance, Pekkanen is a member of the Open Government Partnership committee in Finland, sitting on the Open Knowledge Finland Core Team,

and operators were providing the use of their strong verification APIS for free, as part of their social responsibility policies, it seems this has not been uniform across all banks.

Part of the functionality of the website has had to be discontinued because not all banks were enabling Open Ministry to use their ID verification for users.

This meant that certain users were 151 able to use the site for free to sign particular initiatives,

Instead users can now use the website to sandbox ideas find support amongst the community of users,

and support existing initiatives on the official Ministry of Justice website, which is approved where initiatives are hosted.

to provide easy access for people not using Internet or not yet accustomed to e-Democracy.

Open networks, Open data, Open Knowledge DSI activities: Operating a web service Key facts: Created open data sets with more than 60 million companies registered Website:

http://opencorporates. com/Organisation Name Opencorporates Short description Opencorporates is the largest open database of companies in the world.

It is a website which shares data on corporate entities as open data under the share-alike attribution Open Database Licence.

It aims at creating a URL with such data for every corporate entity in the world,

as well as importing government data relating to companies and matching it to specific companies. The site also shows groups of companies that are legally part of the same conglomerate,

which helps provide transparency on networks of corporate subsidiaries and holding companies spread around multiple jurisdictions.

Basic company information is available as open data in XML or JSON format. Today the site has grown from 3 territories and a few million companies to over 75 jurisdictions and 60 million companies,

and is working with the open data community to add more each week. Type of organisation Opencorporates is a for-profit company, based in the UK.

History and mission Opencorporates was created by Chris Taggart and Rob Mckinnon, under the auspices of their company, Chrinon Ltd,

and launched on 20 december 2010.154 The mission of Opencorporates is to make information about companies and the corporate world more accessible, more discoverable,

and more usable, and thus give citizens, community groups, journalists, other companies, and society as a whole the ability to understand,

monitor and regulate them. Opencorporates seeks to do this through opening up data and providing tools for analysing it.

To do this, Opencorporates is not only creating a general database, but also a database that has certain focuses,

and an open data community, to make the open information sharing more open, and thus effective.

What does it do, and how does this activity enhance social innovation? The core business of Opencorporates is to collect data on companies through web scraping tools

and then visualize the data. Web scraping data: The main activity within Opencorporates is to collaborate with Scraperwiki,

a platform for doing data science on the web, to help get the company data. The basics that are needed

in order to create a company record at Opencorporates are the company number, the jurisdiction and the company's name.

People only need to write a scraper for a country if there is not standard data available for this already.

The Opencorporates database has been built by the open data community, under a bounty scheme in conjunction with Scraperwiki,

by offering a small fee for new jurisdictions opened up (explained in more detail below).

Web scraping (web harvesting or web data extraction) is a computer software technique of extracting information from websites.

The site also has a Google Refine reconciliation function that matches legal entities to company names.

A bounty scheme: Opencorporates offered a small fee for new jurisdictions opened up, in order to encourage people around the world helping them open up data sets.

It offered £100 for any jurisdiction that had not yet been done and £250 for those territories that Opencorporates saw as a priority (such as Australia, France, Spain.

There's an initial cap of £2500 on the bounty pot. According to Scraperwiki, the scrapers can often be written in a couple of hours,

and neither the code nor the data will belong to Opencorporates, but to the open data community.

Data visualisation: The main output from Opencorporates work on capturing data is searchable maps and visualisations of complex corporate structures with multiple layers of control below the headquarter of the organisation and it in some cases thousands of subsidiaries.

One example of this is how Opencorporates visualised the complex corporate structure of Goldman sachs's based on data from public filings and company registrations in the U s.,New zealand, the Cayman islands, Luxembourg and the UK.

This helped visualise how Goldman has 1, 475 subsidiaries registered in the U s. and 739 in the Caymans alone.

Chris Taggart one of the founders of Opencorporates has described the benefits of this, noting that by visualising it by country,

That's the sort of thing you could have done as an academic study based on this data, but maybe half a dozen people would have read it.

and a number of other people in the open data community had around access to data,

since its inception been lauded for its work on opening up data. In 2011 it won the 3rd prize in the EU funded open data challenge

and was recognised by the vice president of the European commission, Neelie Kroos as‘the kind of resource the (Digital) Single Market needs'.

'To date Open Corporates have managed to grow an open database with information on more than 61 million companies in it.

Getting and Returning Data Making open data more open: Opencorporates inspires a social sharing concept to people who want to get data from it.

All Opencorporate's data where the company has the right to share it, is made openly available under the share-alike attribution Open Database Licence.

In return, any product of that data must also be open for others to use. For organisations that don't want to give back data,

they pay Opencorporates a fee. Innovating data driven journalism: As part of the development of their offer Opencorporates is making a new open database of corporate officers and directors available to the world.

This will enable journalists to be able to search not just all the companies with directors for a given name in a given state,

but across multiple states. What it the role of the organisation within the DSI ecosystem?

Not applicable What technological methods and tools is it using, and what did these enable that was not previously possible?

Open data: Open data sit at the core of all Opencorporates work. This is both a tool to scrape,

capture and analyse data, as well as a way for the organisation to release data to a community of collaborators.

Open source: Opencorporates wants to make its product and the database accessible and scalable. It would not be possible without a huge number of open source programmes, tools and resources, such as Twitter Bootstrap and Linux.

It is mostly feasible to have the open data database as well as the community accessible online.

Within five years the database has expanded to over 61 million companies, without the Internet and the participation through Internet,

this would not have happened. Technical specs behind the website: Opencorporates is built on the Rubyonrails framework, uses the Mysql and Neo4j databases, on servers running Linux.

Famfamfam icons and flags, Twitter Bootstrap, and Justvector icons are used also. The Scraperwiki allows people to write scrapers in Python

or PHP. 156 How is funded the organisation? Chris Taggart and Rob Mckinnon started Opencorporates from their existing company Chrinon Ltd in UK.

The company is being incubated in the UK Open Data Institute, and has received also a grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation.

Opencorporates licence the information and database under a sharealike attribution license, allowing free and open reuse even commercially.

Organisations or companies that wish to use the information on a nonshare-alike basis will need to pay for a non-share-alike version (for the privilege of not releasing the resultant information to the community),

thus ensuring Opencorporates has a sustainable business model and giving an incentive to release information back to the community.

What are the main barriers to innovate? Access to data: The main driver behind Opencorporates is access to data on the businesses

whose corporate structures they want to capture and release data on. However, accessibility to good data varies significantly from country to country,

depending on governments'willingness and capability to release this. New zealand as an example have easily accessible data sets

which Opencorporates with very simple coding can integrate into their data base, where as others release data in pdf files,

which makes scraping and accessing the data significantly harder. Linked to this is the varying quality of data available.

When mapping US companies data from The Federal reserve system is for example more granular structured and detailed than data from the Securities and exchange commission.

To address issues around quality of Opencorporates assing data confidences to links, with higher or lower confidence depending on data they were able to access.

What helps to reach goals and overcome barriers? Just as lack of access to data can be a barrier,

the easy access to open data sets from countries like New zealand has helped Opencorporates grow their database.

Building on this it can be argued that the ability to access a global open data community who as part of the bounty scheme helped Opencorporates scrape data from countries around the world has played a big role in their growth of the dataset.

Finally, the incubation within the Open Data Institute helped Opencorporates grow their business model and receive expert support from open data peers.

How does it achieve better European collaboration? Not applicable 157 Open Garden At a glance:

Type of Organisation: Private business Aim: Participation and democracy, other Technology Trends: Open networks, Open Knowledge DSI activities:

Operating a web service Key facts: 3 million users in 2013, which is tripled from 1 million a year before registered Website:

http://opengarden. com Organisation Name Open Garden Short description Open Garden is based a San francisco start up,

focusing on innovating in Internet use, through its mobile app and network building, and creating new ways to grow the Internet.

The simple mobile app enables users to connect to each other seamlessly and share their Internet connection.

With the largest scale implementation of a mobile Mesh Network, Open Garden is pioneering work on exploring ubiquitous connectivity.

Type of organisation Open Garden is based a San francisco for-profit start-up. History and mission The Open Garden Mesh app was launched in Beta on May 21st 2012 during Techcrunch Disrupt in New york city.

Open Garden aims to change the way mobile users are using and sharing the Internet.

The business is based on an understanding that with the ubiquitous mobile Internet, mobile consumers have become data users,

and data transfer activities are constantly taking place among mobile users. Skyrocketing consumption of mobile data is becoming curbed by a finite amount of licensed spectrum and the capacity limitations of cellular networks.

Capacity and spectrum limitations can impact the user experience in very important and very negative ways.

They can result in slower or incomplete downloads for content such as games or music, and video chat sessions that are intolerable due to poor quality

or incessant buffering. They can produce inconsistent data services that leave consumers wondering when and where they can access the network,

and 158 how fast their connections will be. Seeing all these limitations, entrepreneur Micha Benoliel, Internet architect Stanislav Shalunov and developer Greg Hazel, decided to make the mobile web fit that could address this challenge.

What does it do, and how does this activity enhance social innovation? The Open Garden App,

when downloaded and installed on a smartphone, laptop, tablet or other compatible device, helps turn the hardware into a router.

Working with similarly equipped devices within a range of approximately 20 meters, the mesh app then discovers,

shares and coordinates access to any available Internet off ramp, optimizing users'Internet access. By crowdsourcing connectivity, Open Garden enables users to connect to the mobile web more frequently and with better results.

The Open Garden App can be turned into an open network, which improves the experience of mobile Internet users,

optimizes the service of wireless carriers, as well as benefits the handset and tablet manufactures. The Open Garden app is free for anyone to install on his or her smartphone, tablet or computer,

and it also licenses its technology to carriers, device manufacturers and Organisations. For consumers this has the potential to offer:

Seamless and Free Hotspot: It enables users to access the most appropriate connection without configuring their devices or jumping through hoops.

It also enables users to access the Internet as cheaply as possible. Faster Downloads: Users can find the fastest connection and most powerful signal without checking every available network,

and can move between networks seamlessly. Open Garden provides a way to access more data at faster speeds in more locations.

Stronger Coverage: Consumers actually become part of the network, sharing connections when and where they provide the best possible access.

This means higher quality streaming video and audio and faster downloads. For carriers the benefits according to Open Garden are:

Faster Downloads and Stronger Coverage: Open Garden provides a way to access more data at faster speeds in more locations.

Use of Multiple Networks At once: 3g or 4g and Wi-fi: It enables seamless handoffs and simultaneous use of multiple networks, providing the strongest and fastest connection available.

Multi-Hop Wi-fi Offloading of Their Network: Its multi-hop Wi-fi offloading solution crowd sources bandwidth via existing residential and business Wi-fi connections.

Open Garden creates an overlay mesh network using Bluetooth and Wi-fi connections across a range of mobile devices, from smartphones to tablets to laptops and desktops.

Operators can boost their offerings even as they offload traffic from their networks, particularly in urban areas where cellular coverage can be inconsistent.

What is the social impact it is seeking, including any evidence of impact to date? Open Garden believes that everyone should be able to access the Internet easily.

On the one hand, there are still places that people have poor Internet connection, on the other hand, there are also capacity and spec 159 trum limitations,

which requires the network provider to go beyond the traditional mobile data solution. Open Garden therefore wishes to speed up innovation from both the technology perspective and social perspective,

to create a new way of Internet sharing through users installing a mobile app, and to build up a community network where more people see the need for innovation,

so that it is then possible to gather wisdom from the crowds. Open Garden believe that Internet access is a critical component in the value chain,

which is why it dedicates its efforts and resources to ensure that everyone has access to it.

Open Garden's social impact consists in making mobile Internet access ubiquitous, providing everyone with a fair chance to access information regardless of where they are.

With its system Open Garden can measure: number of users, shared access/karma metrics, and user stories on how it positively impacted their community.

What it the role of the organisation within the DSI ecosystem? Its mobile app directly and practically creates an open network,

where all users could share their Internet to make it much more accessible. Together with these benefits it is creating an ecosystem among consumers, wireless carriers, and manufacturers.

With its built-up community, it also functions as a central point in an open network,

where it provides the access to connect knowledge and communication. What technological methods and tools is it using,

and what did these enable that was not previously possible? Open Sensor Networks: Using technologies such as Multi-Hop, Channel Bonding, Bluetooth and Wi-fi Direct,

Open Garden's technology provides an opportunity for carriers to address the shortcomings of cellular networks even as they deliver a superior experience for mobile data users.

It enables faster, more efficient data transmissions without requiring users to manually sift through available networks to find the best one available.

It minimizes network traffic without the use of data caps and network throttling, which consumers abhor.

How is funded the organisation? No information available What are the main barriers to innovate and how are they i n the domain?

Open Garden had to overcome various challenges such as educating the market and industry players, and accessing funding from partners who are aligned with the values.

In the meantime, Open Garden has created also solutions to a multitude of challenges, such as: reducing power consumption, enabling Wi-fi offloading,

channel bonding and multi-hop connectivity. 160 What helps to reach goals and overcome barriers?

Open Garden has built up an online forum, which with more and more active users, is forming into a community,

Since Open Garden aims at working on providing everyone everywhere fair access to Internet it motivates all kinds of groups to join into the community and to experiment

such as mobile data costumers, makers, hackers, the DIY community, urbanites and crowds, events attendees and organizers.

Open networks, Open data, Open Knowledge DSI activities: Participation and democracy Key facts: Developed CKAN Website:

http://okfn. org Organisation Name Open Knowledge Foundation Short description The Open Knowledge Foundation is a global movement to open up knowledge around the world

to developing tools such as the Ckan tool for releasing open Data type of organisation The Open Knowledge Foundation is a nonprofit organisation founded in 2004.

The Open Knowledge Foundation is dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all their forms including government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural content.

The Foundation is sees itself as an international leader in its field and has extensive experience in building tools

Web and Software Development: Through developing software OKF are trying to create tools that support a global open knowledge and open data community.

One of the most prominent of these is the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), one of the world's leading free open source data portal platforms.

CKAN is aimed at data publishers (national and regional governments, companies and organisations) wanting to make their data open and available.

CKAN also has a number of built-in features catered to data users, enabling users to browse

and find the data they need, and preview it using maps, graphs and tables-whether they are developers,

journalists, researchers, NGOS, citizens or professionals. CKAN also offers a powerful Application programming interface (API) which allows third-party applications

and services to be built using the published data. It was developed originally in 2006 by the OKF to run Thedatahub. org, a public registry of open knowledge datasets.

As a powerful data management system which makes data accessible, discoverable and presentable on the web by providing tools to streamline publishing,

sharing, finding and using data; its obvious usefulness has been evidenced by its wider adoption. CKAN now powers more than 40 data hubs around the world,

including portals for local, national and international government, such as the UK's data. gov. uk and the European union's publicdata. eu. Open Data Training:

In addition to building software tools for open data the OKFN also seeks to build the open data skills and capacity of governments and civil society organisations,

through providing a range of open data training programmes. Challenges: In 2011 the Foundation ran the Open Data Challenge,

which was Europe's biggest open data competition to date, attracting 430 entries from 24 Member States.

Events: Finally the OKFN seeks to stimulate the debate about open knowledge through events, from small scale policy workshops and coding sessions to its annual international OKFESTIVAL and OKCONFERENCE events.

What is the social impact it is seeking, including any evidence of impact to date? The OKFN overarching goal is a vibrant open knowledge commons that empowers citizens

and enables fair and sustainable societies. They describe how they aim for a social impact in the four following areas:

Better governance: Openness improves governance through increased transparency and engagement. Better culture: Openness means greater access, sharing and participation in relation to cultural material and activities.

Better research: For research to function effectively, and for society to 163 reap the full benefits from research activities,

and more rapid reuse of material and open data and content are the key raw ingredients for the development of new innovative tools and services.

The open source software is used by more than 70 organisations from Berlin to Nigeria globally to release their data in to open data sets.

Some of the most prominent users of CKAN include the UK's data. gov. uk website, the United states government's Data. gov and the Australian government's data. gov. au.

The open data challenge, for example, helped identify more than 430 open data entries for the challenge.

Through creating software that can be used to enhance the use of open knowledge, it supports organisations on furthering their work on, for example, open data.

Just as the engagement of tens of thousands of people in Open Knowledge events help further the debate.

A variety of technologies are being used in Open Knowledge Foundation, mostly web and software development related.

Naturally most of its projects rely heavily on open data, open data and open source standards.

but it also relies on open source platforms for developing and sharing the code for its projects.

Its core activities are focusing on using the web and online technologies to better open

None of which would have been possible without the advance of the Internet and the ability to aggregate

and distribute large quantities of data. How is funded the organisation? The primary funding source is from grants to provide advice

or develop new web services and events related to the open knowledge agenda. What are the main barriers to innovate

English and Spanish under a Creative Commons license Website http://ouishare. net Short description Ouishare is a global collaborative consumption network.

Different members of the global network have specific areas or projects they are responsible for such as our online magazine, a local community,

create and share on the web. Ouishare calls this paradigm shift and the sum of these developments‘the collaborative economy'.

'The network was born in January 2012 out of a Facebook group in Paris, Ouishare now counts 400+members from 20 countries in Europe,

either offline or on specific online topics) is now bootstrapping Ouishare and co-designing this collective adventure with the community.

In its early stages, the Ouishare community was a Facebook group created in April 2011 to connect people who believed in the potential of the collaborative economy

P2p Foundation, Open Knowledge Foundation, Makesense, Edgeryders, Transition Network, Open source Ecology, hackerspaces & makerspaces. What is the social impact it is seeking,

Ouishare is an open knowledge network using social networking channels to promote collaborative consumption. Ouishare draws on the input

driven by digital fabrication tools like 3dprinters, facilities like Fablabs, open source hardware designs and DIY communities.

Open Knowledge, Open Data DSI activities: A network, A research project, Operating a web service Key facts:

A‘wiki'with nearly 8000 pages of information, which have been viewed over 5 million times. Website:

http://p2pfoundation. net/Organisation Name P2p Foundation Short description The P2p Foundation is registered a institute with the aim of studying the impact of peer-to-peer technology

in contrast to the centralized client server model where client nodes request access to resources provided by central servers.

in contrast to the centralized client server model where client nodes request access to resources provided by central servers.

bandwidth) directly available to other network participants, without the need for centralized coordination by servers.

The primary activity P2p foundation undertake to achive its goal is running the P2p foundation wiki, a website with with nearly 8, 000 pages of information on the P2p economy.

and organisations to create custom social networks) with a few hundred members, and a number of mailing lists,

Moreover, the P2p Foundation maintains a P2p Lab based in Ioannina (Greece), a blog and a wiki in Greek,

To data it has organised two annual physical meet-ups in Belgium and the UK, and also have some national groups organsing meetings in Netherlands and Greece.

which aims to map the entire Internet, and thereby identify vulnerable off switches that governments could use to pull the plug on their society's online world.

The project was initiated a response to how some regimes‘turned off'the Internet during uprisings in the middle East in 2011,

and any form of identity and organisation which makes sense for the people involved The zero node website,

i e. the site of the P2p Foundation, would have a website with directories, an electronic newsletter and blog,

In the context of the above, the primary impact of P2p Foundation is demonstrated through traffic on the site.

and the P2p blog alone reached about 35,000 unique users in 2012. In addition to this the foundations work on Choke Point was recognised with a‘The next Idea'award (previous recipients include Wikileaks) by the organisation Ars Electronica in 2011.

The main technologis applied directly by P2p foundation include Wiki, blog, the Ning social network platform and standard mailing list. 172 However,

its core focus is on furthering advancements in P2p Technology-networks in which interconnected nodes (peers) share resources amongst each other without the use of a centralized administrative system.

The most commonly known application is popularized file sharing, which the technology. Other applications are, such as, instant messaging systems and online chat networks for communications;

Peer-to-peer-based digital currencies, electronic money that acts as alternative currency, such as Bitcoin, an open source P2p money,

A peer-to-peer network is designed around the notion of equal peer nodes simultaneously functioning as both clients and servers to the other nodes on the network.

This model of network arrangement differs from the client server model where communication is usually to and from a central server.

P2p's network in practice creates a platform for‘unbounded knowledge with open sources and open access.'

and knowledge exchange in ways not conceivable prior to the advent of the Internet, and more specifically the‘digital commons.'

what the P2p Foundation do continued on a basis by donating in a similar way to that adopted by Wikipedia with users being given the option to donate preset or other amounts through a Paypal platform.

Are they different according to different core domains? No information available What really helps reach goals/how to overcome these barriers?

Operating a web service Key facts: Online community with More than 220,000 members, has 2, 000+conditions, 35+published research studies,

and over 1 million treatment & symptom reports registered Website: http://www. patientslikeme. com/Organisation Name Patientslikeme Short description Patientslikeme is a free patient network where people can connect with each other to better understand their diseases,

or, as Ben Heywood, one of the sites founders has described it‘Our goal ultimately is that every patient's decision is informed by every patient before them'.

The primary service provided by Patientslikeme is a social network for people living with a long term health condition.

Patientslikeme allows members to input real-world data on their conditions, treatment history, side effects, hospitalizations, symptoms, disease-specific functional scores, weight, mood,

Answers come in the form of shared longitudinal data from other patients with the same condition (s),

Its research professionals have completed studies with real-world data that have helped refute and preempt traditional randomised clinical trials.

a US government funded site which provides access to information on publicly and privately supported clinical studies to members of their system,

The list of available trials is refreshed each night from the open data from Clinicaltrials. gov,

Members of the site can search for trials for which they are eligible free of charge; the company also offers a commercial service to actively message potential participants for clinical trials.

Sharing and selling data: Both a part of Patientlikeme's business model as well as its mission to create better treatments for its members,

Patientlikeme sells aggregated de-identified health data from patients to relevant parties such as companies that are developing

and do not do with their data. Memebers, Patientslikeme argue, are compelled to get involved as their sharing of this information,

it has helped published more than 35 research studies based on its patient data and it has generated over 1 million treatment & symptom reports.

In the United states, approximately 10 percent of newly diagnosed ALS patients register on the site each month

With its community's growth at Patientslikeme, the practical and individual data and information from patients becomes extremely useful for clinic research,

because when patients share real-world data, collaboration on a global scale becomes possible, new treatments become possible,

Operated as a web-based community where it shares open knowledge and generates an database that is being used to return the benefit to the community. 176

What technological methods and tools is it using, and what did these enable that was not previously possible?

The main technological feature of Patientslikeme is the creation of an online social network that specifically targets people living with a long term health condition.

where patients share data about their treatments, symptoms, and disease outcomes. Internet: Patientslikeme has used to Internet to cooperate online

and to allow for greater democratisation of patient medical data. Social networking and Community Power: Peer-to-peer networks are becoming the cornerstone for a new era of patient-centered health care.

Patientslikeme allows people to directly report on their disease experiences. As patients come together to share treatments and symptoms in a structured way,

they learn from each other about how to improve their care. Information flows freely so that everyone can learn from the collective.

The result is that patients get support from others, come to understand their illnesses, and become empowered to work with their health care team to manage their condition.

Different online social networks involve different social contracts for participants and different sets of tools. Patientslikeme's tools allow people to manage their health,

and contribute data directly to research. Patientslikeme also combines an enhancing collaboration with the actual measurement of medicine,

and share their personal health data. The more data generated from users, the more detailed insights the network can garner from the data

and in return provide a higher value service for its members. How is funded the organisation? Patientslikeme has been funded by a group of philanthropic organisations and investment companies such as Commercenet, Omidyar Network, LLC, and Invus.

Commercenet was an key part of Patientslikeme's success as they provided the seed capital, guidance, additional management experience,

Most time hospitals do not have data or keep a long-time track of information from patients that they treated.

Currently, most healthcare data is inaccessible due to privacy regulations or proprietary tactics. As a result, research is slowed,

if people share data, and open up the healthcare system. In this way people can learn what's working for others,

In spite of the structural barriers in accessing patient medical data Patientslikeme's fast uptake illustrates the obvious need for services of its kind. 178 179 Peerby At a glance:

Open Data, Open Knowledge DSI activities: Operating a web service Key Facts: About 15,000 members in September 2013 Website:

https://peerby. com Organisation Name Peerby Short description Peerby is a Dutch for-profit start-up that operates a peer-to-peer sharing service for products.

Users can share or request items from people in their neighbourhood online, via the Peerby website, their mobile or social media channels.

The platform was launched in Beta as a service targeting people in Netherlands in August 2012,

and how he wanted to facilitate this for others by creating a website for the neighbourhood that would allow people to meet

The core service of Peerby is the online platform which enables users to borrow and share anything from trumpets to laptop chargers with their neighbours.

Peerby's uniqueness lies in its proactive approach: activity on the platform begins with people posting requests for things they need,

'Once a request has been posted using either the Peerby website or app the Peerby seeks to further encourage the matching between people looking for an item

Using a smart search algorithm the platform immediately asks the 100 closest Peerby neighbours if they have the item right after a request has been logged.

Networking infrastructure and high-bandwidth penetration reaching a level allowing Social networks and Consumer-to-consumer marketplaces,

The service is based on Internet and the principles of open knowledge and the sharing economy.

Thanks to the social web, people can now share anything with anyone in the world.

however, with the Internet acting as a facilitator, there is a growing trend of websites that offer to facilitate peer-to-peer rental transactions.

All of these sites are encouraging something academics call collaborative consumption in other words, peer-to-peer sharing or renting.

Crowdsourcing, a‘thank you'shop and insurance are all options they have explored. The last service seems to be most promising,

Over 2 Million Organisation Name Raspberry Pi Short Description Raspberry Pi is an ultra-low-cost credit card-sized fully-functioning computer.

It was designed to bring about a paradigm shift in the way young people engage with computing with the hope of transforming them from passive consumers into active creators.

a team based at the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory. The idea behind the Raspberrypi came about as a way to try

and interacting with computers, as the team was concerned about the yearon-year decline in the numbers

and skills levels of prospective undergraduates applying to study Computer science. Upton has hypothesised that this drop in skills

and that this change in turn has had the effect of reducing the pipeline of potential computer programmers. 186 The Maker Movement is,

Upton and the Raspberry Pi team sought to develop a tiny, cheap computer for kids

which would encourage programming experimentation and encourage a new generation of students to pursue computing science scholarship,

which would become the Rasperrypi. What does it do, and how does this activity enhance social innovation?

Raspberry Pi is a simple computing device that looks like a motherboard with the mounted chips

only if you opened up your computer and looked at its internal boards). Although seemingly basic in design, it has needed all the components to connect input,

output, and storage devices and start computing. When switched on, users are greeted first by a command line code (which in recent years has tended to remain in the background of closed software programmes),

meaning that from the point of startup users are encouraged to begin tinkering and experimenting with the device.

While a user's skill level will naturally vary from person to person there's a user forum on the Raspberry Pi site,

the Raspberry Pi supports MIT's Scratch platform meaning kids can gain a deeper knowledge of computer game programming by building their own game

As is suggested above Raspberry Pi seeks to inspire an emerging generation of young people to become more engaged with computer programming (and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education more generally STEM education henceforth.

Its small size and portability make it suitable for applications that other computers can't reach. 187 It has very low power consumption,

Other than the fact that the demand for the Raspberry Pi computers have exceeded far the team's original predicted figure of 10

Heeks and Robinson have examined also the impact of Raspberry Pi amid an emerging class of computing devices they refer to as ultra-low-cost computing (ULCC.

These are defined as devices that wrap computing peripherals around a cellphone hardware core; meaning that such devices can be produced for just a few tens of dollars.

For this reason Raspberry Pi computers have already been used as as learning tools in the context of various developing countries such as Afghanistan, Cameroon and Bhutan.

While the UNDP-backed One Laptop Per Child programme demonstrates that more rigorous assessment is needed to verify that the ICT (Information

which included 6 Raspberry Pi's. These have been networked via a switch to a wireless router to facilitate access to RACHEL (one of the Raspberry Pi's dedicated educational servers).

and students can now access large amounts of educational content with having to rely on poor and expensive Internet connectivity.

On 18th of November it was announced that over 2m Raspberry Pi computers have been sold globally since going on sale for around £30 in February 2012.

It actively encourages collaborative coding for instance the open source coding for its collaborative project with Google,

and seeks to redress shortfall of computer programmers. What technological method is it using? The Raspberry Pi is based around a 700mhz ARM11 system on chip (SOC) with a powerful graphics co-processor.

Typically this sort of processor was used in mobile phones five years ago. Apart from the graphics processor, which is propriety to Broadcom,

the Raspberry Pi is completely open source, which helps to keep costs down. From the circuit schematics to the applications and the operating system, anyone can examine

and contribute online. The Foundation provides a version of Debian Linux that presents users with a basic text login rather than a slick GUI 188 by default

with the entire operating system and user files stored on a swappable SD card. How has technology enable that was not possible before?

With regard to Raspberry Pi's hardware, the board's low cost was made possible thanks to advances in integration that have shrunk effectively all the components of a desktop computer into a single silicon chip.

Furthermore, thanks to advances in technology, Raspberry Pi, unlike conventional PCS, has very low power consumption.

This means that it work more easily in electrical off-grid environments, making it an ideal device for educational purposes in developing countries, etc.

DSI network effect Due to Raspberry Pi's programmable and simple open source model, a variety of Pi projects have emerged on the Web.

These range from making your own retro Pi-powered arcade machine to adapting your Raspberry Pi to log all relevant data in your own weather station.

and the Wolfram Language installed into future Rasbian images, making Raspberry Pi devices a first-class platform for teaching computer-based mathematics techniques to children of all ages.

Raspberry Pi has collaborated also recently with Google to deliver a new open source coding tool called Coder.

users can develop their own apps for the web and then host them on a miniature server located directly on the Raspberry Pi.

The overall cost for the DIY programming project, using Google's recommended materials, is under $50 and, importantly,

all of the educational materials are free. After procuring a Raspberry Pi, eager students simply follow instructions to download information onto an SD card,

plug it into the tiny computer, and connect to a shared Wi-fi to access Coder through Chrome.

The whole process, according to the developers, should take just 10 minutes. This joint venture also situates both organisations comfortably within the DSI ecosystem as a completely open-source project

Coder is designed also to work alongside instruction from other programming websites like Codeacademy and Khan academy.

users can host their own websites via Raspberry Pi or zip them to share with friends. 189 How is funded the organisation?

In late January 2013, Google announced it was giving the Raspberry Pi Foundation a grant worth an estimated £670

Offline Environments: While the Pi's design ensures it is suitable for off-grid environments,

For this reason Khan academy Lite was developed as an offline version of Khan academy‘s curriculum of free learning materials.

and a Wi-fi dongle, allowing for the MP4 lectures that make up the core of Khan academy's material to be brought to areas with poor Internet connectivity.

where the Internet didn't come until 1999, and coverage is still very minimal, so an offline solution like this is vital. 190

What really helps reach goals? Raspberry Pi's success has been the largely the result of the board's very low price

and open design (which was a conscious shift from the fixed function, commoditised products they felt had left an emerging generation as being unable to penetrate the system's interface to experiment with programming.)

191 Safecast At a glance: Type of Organisation: Grassroots communities Aim: Health and wellbeing, Energy and environment, Participation and democracy Technology Trends:

Open Networks, Open Hardware, Open Data, Open Knowledge DSI activities: An event, A network, Running/hosting maker spaces

and hackerspaces, Operating a web service Key Facts: In 2013 over 10,000, 000 individual data points collected.

Website: http://blog. safecast. org/Organisation Name Safecast Short description Safecast is both the name of a Geiger counter built by the open source community as well as a global sensor network where Safecast owners can map

and freely share their radiation measurements in open data sets. The overarching aim of Safecast is to encourage people to actively contribute to the generation of a body of data that might alleviate environmental problems.

The original impetus for the Geiger counter and network was the lack of good and open hard

and software solutions for citizens to contribute to the mapping of radiation levels in Japan following the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011.

Type of organisation Safecast is a joint project between Tokyo Hackerspace, Crashspace LA, MIT Media Lab and Keio University,

In an effort to help, the partnership decided to take part in surfacing data on radiation levels across Japan,

and there were massive holes in the public radiation data sets available. As a response to this

and help launch a sensor network where bgiegie owners could share the data they were collecting.

which amongst others enabled users to mount the counter on the outside of a car and use GPS technology to timestamp the data and log the location.

The history of Safecast is very much one of global network of people using social media and open tools to come together around a common cause.

The team behind Safecast initially connected on Twitter, and have described in interviews how they managed to connect with people through social networks

whenever they were trying to address a new challenge in the development of Safecast. For example, Dan Sythe, who ran International Medcom-a high quality geiger counter manufacturer,

and people at the Tokyo Hackerspace took part in the initial twitter discussion about building the device.

Later on Ray Ozzie a data expert based in Boston joined the conversation when the question of how to release

and analyse the data arose. Looking beyond Japan: While Safecast was focused initially on mapping radiation levels in Japan the network has gone now global.

999 grant from the US based Knight Foundation to build a network of low-cost air quality monitoring devices and data collection in Los angeles and Detroit,

Spread information via Social media: While Geiger counters make it possible to produce narratives of nuclear risk as numbers,

measurement data per se cannot be a useful resource for nuclear risk knowledge production. Volunteer Geiger counter users and social media users among others are necessary to produce specific type of nuclear risk knowledge.

To date, Safecast volunteers have mapped radiation levels of over 11 million data points, providing a comprehensive and accurate dataset that was inconceivable before the Safecast project.

The majority of data is captured through the bgeigie mobile sensor. A Geiger counter designed to be mounted on a vehicle,

while other prototypes can be linked to a mobile phone). These counters are available at different costs,

All data captured via the Geiger counters is captured and released in an open data set, and the radiation measurements are color-coded

and plotted on a radiation level map which lets people easily understand the radiation level in a given geographical area.

While the Safecast team along with a wider open source community is providing the hard and software behind Safecast,

the engine behind the success of the project is the large group of volunteers who use the Geiger counters to capture the data that makes the platform a valued resource.

the main drivers for Sean Bonner and his Safecast cofounders was a belief that people needed more and better radiation data,

and that currently a lot of governmental data is not adequate or transparent. Building on this Safecast intends to bring the attitude of citizen help themselves where the government failed.

designing and developing hardware, building a community, collecting and sharing open data, as well as educating, without input from government.

To date, this has enabled Safecast volunteers to map radiation levels of over 11 million data points, providing a comprehensive and accurate dataset that was inconceivable before the Safecast project.

As a pro-data organisation, Safecast generates nuclear risk knowledge by harnessing measurement data in multiple ways.

Open Data: As mentioned earlier, a cornerstone of Safecast is its commitment to open data,

which means that anyone with an interest in global radiation can freely contribute to and access the large data sets created by the Safecast community.

In addition to this, the team behind Safecast also seek a social impact by conducting radiation measurements on request, conducting seminars,

and developing open hardware and software. Safecast describes itself as not being anti nuclear, or pro nuclear but pro data.

The goal is to provide more informative data where it didn't exist so that people can make more informed decisions based on facts rather than the fear

and speculation that comes from uninformed sources. The goal is not to single out any individual source of data as untrustworthy,

but rather to contribute to the existing measurement data and make it more robust. 194 What is the role of the organisation within the DSI ecosystem?

As described in more detail below, Safecast relies heavily on working on and with several open source hard and software solutions.

Open hardware such as Arduino forms part of the actual build of the Geiger counter, crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter have been used to raise funding for developing different versions of the Geiger counter

and open coding platforms such as Github have been used to develop the code behind Safecast. What technological methods and tools is it using,

Open Hardware: The hardware developed by Safecast is open source and, in their own words, people who buy it are free‘to open,

manipulate, hack, break and or improve anything, 'and it uses open hardware such as Arduino in the build of its sensors.

As described earlier it has used Hackathons at Tokyo Hackerspace to design and build devices, such as the bgeigie.

Whilst it has used open hardware and open source approaches to develop the original prototype Geiger counters, Crowdfunding has been crucial in the funding

and scale up of the Geiger counters. Safecast successfully ran campaigns on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter (it raised $36,

Following on from this Safecast has used open source platforms such as Github to develop the code that sits behind the platform.

Open data: Safecast provides an Open Application programming interface (API), allowing people to access raw measurement data.

More importantly, Safecast presents useful information on measurement data such as geo-location information and time of upload.

Such information not only makes it possible to locate when and where each datum was captured and uploaded,

but also allows people to process the huge volume of raw measurement data for their own ends.

Social media: Social media has helped Safecast in two main ways. It was through Twitter that many of the first connections were made between the original founders and developers of Safecast.

Building on this, it is through social media channels such as Twitter that Safecast publish their findings.

Engagement through visualisation and apps: Finally, Safecast visualizes measurement data on the Safecast Map in six coloured layers.

This provides information for people on the level of nuclear radiation in areas across Japan.

None of the activity described above would have been possible without the advance in technology, and in open technologies.

Building on this, one case study of Safecast from researchers at University of southern california describe how the collaboration around Safecast through 195 social media

and open source platforms in many ways can be seen as an example of digitally enabled collective intelligence.

As it relies primarily on volunteer engagement and contributions Safecast needed low cost platforms and tools that could help them easily engage

The web-based online platform also enabled a sharing of data collected by citizens, to citizens, at a scale not possible before the advance of the Internet.

the Safecast community is one large global network. The richness of radiation data grows as people use

and share radiation data. Equally, the variations and development of different Geiger counters grows, adding value to the overall service,

as DIY makers develop new types of counters which can be used by the network. How is funded the organisation?

This provides a barrier in access to public data as well as distribution of data through public channels.

and hardware as well as social media has been instrumental in the success of Safecast. In addition to this, it can be argued that the success of the network was a combination of the identified unmet need,

a lack of open and accurate measurement data, combined with intense media attention in the wake of the Fukushima disaster.

Open Networks, Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Hardware DSI activities: A network, operating a web service Key facts:

More than 400 active users and more backers Website: http://smartcitizen. me/Organisation Name Fablab Barcelona Short description The Smart Citizen Kit is a set of tools (mostly sensors) built on an Arduino open hardware platform.

These tools enable anyone who purchases the kit to contribute to the collection of environmental data,

which it is hoped can be used to generate useful research and analysis. The Smart Citizen Kit project creates a platform to generate participatory processes of people who own the kit.

Through connecting data, people and knowledge, the objective of the platform is to serve as a node for building productive and open indicators

and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the city for its own inhabitants.

History and mission There are two core aims of the Smartcitizen projects. Firstly it wants to produce new types of data and information

which people previously couldn't get good access to. For example what are the real levels of air pollution around your home or business?

and bringing the capture and analysis of city data as close to the public as possible.

Therefore he has always been interested in different data that is around the city, as well as how citizens interact with it.

Believing that citizens can interact with the city data more often and in an easier way,

and share data themselves, and make this a tool that could be used by citizens. At the IAAC Tomas met a group of people who were working on similar project prototype.

The Smart Citizen Kit is based on two core components; the‘kit'itself and the platform used to share data between people operating a kit.

The Smart Citizen Kit itself is a an electronic board based on the open hardware solution Arduino,

equipped with sensors that can capture data on air quality, temperature, noise, humidity and light. The board also contains a solar charger

and a Wifi antenna that enables the direct upload data from the sensors in real time to the online platform Anyone who has owns a kit,

eventually becomes part of a wider network of users, who will capture, collate and share their data online on smartcitizen. me/pages/sck online platform.

The platform is open to anyone as is captured the date and uploaded to the platform. The IAAC team behind the platform is very research oriented,

and their aim with the kit is a focus on the use of digital technology and open hardware for the development of a citizen based platform for the city.

With the sensors the team tries to make it possible for citizens to know the data,

fosters participation of the general public in the process of producing open data used for the purpose of monitoring the environment.

from the bits to geography. 199 While the focus is generated on citizen data, the Smart Citizen Kit has attracted the attention of cities across Europe, such as Barcelona and Amsterdam,

designs and develops open hardware, which is also open source. The team also operates an open network,

where all the sensors and kit-owners can share and compare data and information in real time. On a grander scale,

however, the very ideas underpinning the Smart Citizen project is one that is being adopted readily in a number of cities across Europe, such as Barcelona.

the Internet and relies on a range of open hard and software tools. Open Hardware:

The Smart Citizen Kit itself is built on the Arduino open hardware board. Open Data and Open source:

The web platform is developed with Open-Streetmap, Leaflet, Raphaël, jquery, Cakephp, and many more. The actual project is open source and available on the open source platform Github.

The fact that it is open has led already to replications of the kit for other purposes,

such as the Whale project, where people placed the sensors in the sea to detect its condition.

Open Knowledge: As described in more detail below, the original financing of the kit happened via crowdfunding platform Goteo.

and distribution of data The generation of analysis and further research as a result of this open data being generated Enhancing collaboration and engagement:

The second round of crowdfunding helped the Smart Citizen team achieve their aim of purchasing bulk orders of hardware components to offer kits at the lowest possible costs

developing additional features for the smartphone app to interact with the hardware, and finalizing a 3d-printable, resilient enclosure.

To be sustainable in working the data, motivate users to send data Smart Citizen kit has its own community,

where users collect and share the data online. But to keep users being motivated and therefore to keep the community active,

is essential to what Smart Citizen Kit wants to achieve. In response to this challenge, the team is frequently designing new features

To make the data and the technology meaningful: The team consider their Smart Citizen Kit as very effective data producers.

The next step is to find how people can make use of the data and how the data can help people to participate.

To achieve this, Tomas believe that it is necessary to make more and more people aware that they all can do something good with the data.

I think for Smart Citizen Kit it is important that people will feel it as a big name,

like same important as IBM, otherwise it won't Work on one hand, the project is now slowly by slowly generating more attention,

through people who are already participating. On the other hand, Tomas and his team are also working hard to get big companies and investors to support Smart Citizen Kit project,

Internet freedom and security Technology Trends: Open networks DSI activities: Operating a web service Key Facts:

Tor has a staff of 30 paid developers, researchers, and advocates, plus many dozen volunteers who help out on a daily basis. In a year Tor has grown from 500,000 daily users worldwide to more than 4 million users.

Website: https://www. torproject. org Organisation Name The Tor Project Short description The Tor project is a nonprofit organisation that conducts research and development into online privacy and anonymity.

It has developed software tools designed to stop people including government agencies and corporations learning web users location or tracking their browsing habits.

It offers a technology that bounces Internet users 'and websites'traffic through relays run by thousands of volunteers around the world,

making it extremely hard for anyone to identify the source of the information or the location of the user.

The software the Tor browser bundle can be downloaded and used to take advantage of that technology,

with a separate version available for Android smartphones. Type of organisation The Tor Project is a US 501 (c)( 3) nonprofit dedicated to research, development,

Tor, or The Onion Router, is a cryptographic technique first implemented by US NAVY research to permit intelligence agents to use the Internet without being traced,

by encrypting and routing communications through many different Internet servers. Subsequently Tor has been developed by the US University MIT and by the California Internet rights watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Today, it is used every day 202 for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists,

the Tor project's emphasis was on protecting Internet users'privacy from corporations rather than governments.

We were concerned increasingly about all these websites-in the 2000/01 dotcom bubble, everyone was offering free services,

And let you take decisions about do you trust Google, do you trust Amazon, do you trust the BBC, whatever.

normal people who want to keep their Internet activities private from websites and advertisers; those concerned about cyberspying;

Tor notes that its technology is used also by military professionals the US NAVY is still a key user as well as activists and journalists in countries with strict censorship of media and the Internet.

and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It also enables software developers to create new communication tools with built-in privacy features.

Tor provides the foundation for a range of applications that allow organisations and individuals to share information over public networks without compromising their privacy.

The Tor network's 3000 volunteer relays carry 16 Gbps for upwards of half a million daily users.

Advancements in Tor's core technologies including real-time voice and video over the Tor network, improving usability, security and anonymity,

stronger cryptography capabilities and exciting new tools designed to probe for censorship on the Internet.

Internet freedom and anonymity: The Internet offers exciting new opportunities for individuals to express their views,

parody politicians, celebrate their favourite movie stars, or criticize businesses. Not everyone feels the same way though.

and governments more vulnerable to analysis. Using Tor protects you against a common form of Internet surveillance known as traffic analysis. Traffic analysis can be used to infer who is talking to whom over a public network.

and destination of your Internet traffic allows others to track your behaviour and interests. This can impact your chequebook if, for example, an e-commerce site uses price discrimination based on your country or institution of origin.

It can even threaten your job and physical safety by revealing who and where you are.

and you connect to your employer's computers to check or send mail, you can inadvertently reveal your national origin

and lead to a harmful balkanization of the Internet. Internet users around the world must be able to trust that their information,

communications and documents are safe and secure. The alternative is a race to the bottom where only those users who seek out complex,

or worse yet become reluctant to use digital communications and avoid services that both improve their lives and drive commerce.

The original data, including its destination, are encrypted and re-encrypted multiple times, and are sent through a virtual circuit comprising successive, randomly selected Tor relays.

in order to pass the remaining encrypted data on to it. The final relay decrypts the last layer of encryption and sends the original data,

without revealing or even knowing its sender, to the destination. This method reduces the chance of the original data being understood in transit and

more notably, conceals the routing of it. Needless to say, the connection between a global network of volunteers who help reroute traffic would not have been possible with technological advances in sensor networks and the development of the web itself.

Open source: The Tor software itself is open source and free for anyone to download and use.

Enhancing collaboration and engagement: DSI network effect The strength of the Tor network relies on being able to relay traffic through a large network of routers owned by a global network of volunteers.

As more routers are connected the strength of the network and its ability to provide privacy grows.

How is funded the organisation? Tor's success is in large part thanks to the funding partners,

including the Knight Foundation, The Broadcasting Board of Governors, SRI International, The United states Department of state, the Swedish International Development Agency and many individual donors.

In addition to this Tor received support from research partners at the University of Waterloo (Canada), the University of Cambridge (United kingdom), Georgia Institute of technology and many others around the globe.

The majority of people using Tor are citizens who may simply want to stop advertisers from following them around the web.

It's an issue that people are just beginning to think about now especially in the context of sites like Facebook that attract advertisers with personal data that people opt to share.

Dark web: The cloak of anonymity provided by Tor makes it an attractive and powerful for criminals.

but also host their websites via its hidden services capabilities, which mean sites can only be accessed by people on the Tor network.

This is the so-called dark web element, and it's not unusual to see Tor pop up in stories about a range of criminal sites.

We work with law enforcement a lot, Lewman told the Guardian. They are fully aware of bad guys on Tor.

However, the criminals already have all the privacy they could ever need because they're willing to break the laws:

The main enabler behind Tor is the access to a global network of volunteers who make the out the network, that is the backbone of the service. 206 207 Ushahidi At a glance:

Open data*;*Open Knowledge Organisation Name Ushahidi Short description Ushahidi is a nonprofit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for the collection, visualisation and interactive mapping of information.

Some of its product offerings such as Crowdmap enable users to operate outside of traditional communication barriers to potentially monitor elections, map crisis information or curate local resources.

What type of organisation is it? Ushahidi is a nonprofit tech company. History and mission Ushahidi,

is a website that was developed initially to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.

In the aftermath of the election the Ushahidi was used to collect eyewitness reports from‘citizen journalist'of violence reported by email

and text message and placed them on Google maps. This website had 45,000 users in Kenya,

and was the central to the Ushahidi team realising there was a need for a platform based on it,

The current team (of 22 full-time staff) is comprised of individuals with a wide span of experience ranging from human rights 208 work to software development.

The main services provided by Ushahidi are three free software products that enable social activism and public accountability, through crowdsourcing of information from citizen observers by mobile phones or the Internet.

The Ushahidi platform was built as a tool to easily crowdsource information using multiple channels, including SMS, email, Twitter and the web The Swiftriver Platform:

Swiftriver is an open source platform that aims to democratize access to tools for filtering & making sense of real-time information Crowdmap:

When you need to get the Ushahidi platform up in two minutes to crowdsource information,

Crowdmap will do it for you. It's the hosted version of the Ushahidi platform. Ushahidi's platforms gather information from a variety of locations (and for various purposes),

The Department of state analysts for the USG interagency task force used Ushahidi in at least one case to help triangulate conclusions about the situation on the ground US military organisations used Ushahidi data

There is also evidence that the volunteer geo-location services offered by the UHP core team were useful for SAR efforts,

At the heart of Ushahidi is the use of online map services to crowdsource the mapping of local information.

The site allows the use of Openstreetmap maps in its user interface, but requires the Google maps API for geocoding.

Ushahidi is often set up using a local SMS gateway created by a local Frontlinesms, a free open source software that can be used to distribute and collect information via text messages.

The case of the Ushahidi Project Haiti offers an interesting illustration of the potential of collaborative technology in instances of human disaster.

Ushahidi has announced the development of a USSD (unstructured supplementary services data) app to reduce the time it takes to process reports

Solutions, was identified to take over the website including overall management of the call/SMS centre function,

211 In the initial stages, event data generated by UHP did not meet the rigid requirements of traditional crisis response organisations.

Interviews also revealed some general suspicion of the crowd and related questions about the representativeness and quality of the data.

USG staff cited outdated computers, browsers as well as Internet communication security policy as significant obstacles to accessing the UHP website and data streams.

Limited bandwidth was cited by organisations on the ground in Haiti. Finally, lack of Internet connection and mobile phone networks that are down

(which was the case in parts of Haiti after the earthquake) has also been cited as a barrier to using the platform in rural areas

and areas hit by a natural catastrophe. 212 213 Zooniverse (citizen science web portal of CSA) At a glance:

More than 878,000 of Community Members Worldwide (as of 30/10/13) Organisation Name Citizen Science Alliance Short description The Citizen Science Alliance is a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators,

and utilise Internet-based‘citizen science projects'in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process.

CSA's projects are housed on Zooniverse the‘home of Citizen Science on the web.''Type of organisation Zooniverse is a project of the run by the Citizen Science Alliance (CSA) via its web portal.

The CSA is a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators primarily coming from universities and public institutions. 214 History and mission Zooniverse grew from the original Galaxy Zoo project first launched in July 2007.

Galaxy Zoo set out the blueprint used throughout Zooniverse's applications, by crowdsourcing the analysis of astrological datasets to the public.

Following Galaxy Zoo's visible success, the applicability of this‘open knowledge'model is evidenced by the fact that the Zooniverse site now hosts more than a dozen projects

which allow volunteers to participate in scientific research. Unlike many early Internet-based citizen science projects (such as SETI@home which used spare computer processing power to analyse data, known as volunteer computing,

Zooniverse projects require the active participation of human volunteers to complete research tasks. Projects have been drawn from a diverse range of disciplines including astronomy, climate science, ecology, humanities and cell biology.

it is clear that Galaxy Zoo (Zooniverse's pilot project) first came about as a means of handling the enormous volumes of data by enlisting the help of public volunteers.

Overburdened academic departments very often have neither the time nor the resources to dedicate to processing this backlog of data.

Some of the most important data is in forms that computers still can't process,

'and open data forms a powerful synergy; using the web to provide a means of reaching a much larger audience willing to devote their free time to collaborative projects through crowdsourcing initiatives like Zooniverse.

Here volunteers give their time to help with a range of scientific projects, such as the formations of galaxies, patterns of climate change and the classification of cancer cells.

With the launch of Zoo Tools (discussed more fully below) volunteers who seek to interact with the data in a deeper way are given a greater platform to do so.

with the shift to an open source development model (as of February 2013) it is hoped that a community of volunteer developers will be able to assist in the localisation support of the site (translating the content into other languages) thereby having a positive impact on the outreach of the Zooniverse projects.

aims to harness the collaborative force of crowdsourcing to help advance cancer research, which has been restricted in recent years by the sheer abundance of‘big data.'

'Volunteers are presented with a series of image or‘slides'.'Each of these images is a tiny tumour sample from a huge dataset.

volunteers are directly assisting cancer research scientists to accelerate the analysis of this data and‘bring forward the cures for cancers.'

and advance research through open knowledge and open data. What technological methods and tools is it using,

In the Zooniverse there's a clear separation between the API (Ouroboros) and the citizen science projects that the community interact with.

highly scalable application built in Ruby on Rails that runs on Amazon web services and uses Mongodb, Redis and a few other technologies.

Pretty much all of the site's requirements point to having a shared API (Ouroboros) that serves a large number of projects.

Running a core API that serves many projects relies very much upon the maintenance and health of that application.

then the API would currently take out about 10 Zooniverse projects at once and this is only set to increase.

when the site is busy while also spending significant amounts of time monitoring the application performance

The cost of running such an operation has been cited as a factor running a central API means that

the number of servers they're running can be scaled back to a minimal level(‘automagically'on Amazon web services).

The actual citizen science projects that people interact with are these days all pure Javascript applications that are hosted on Amazon S3

and they're pretty much all open source. They're generally still bespoke applications each time but share common code for talking to Ouroboros.

(i e. opening up data analysis to the public) to process big data sets quicker, while simultaneously advancing scientific research.

As mentioned above, the project was launched in 2007 to help process a data set made up of a million galaxies imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

who still provide some of the images in the site today. With so many galaxies, it was assumed it would take years for visitors to the site to work through them all but within 24 hours of launch the site received almost 70,000 classifications an hour.

In the end, more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, contributed by more than 150,000 people.

Furthermore, data analysed through crowdsourcing in this way provides quantitative estimates of error thanks to multiple independent interactions with the data. 216 Enhancing collaboration and engagement:

CRUK) that allows the massive volumes of data to be processed through a platform of open data.

For instance, the data collected from the various projects has led to the publication of dozens of scientific papers.

With the launch of Zoo Tools users have been given yet another platform to collaborate with the data generated even further.

This application will offer community members tools of analysis to enable them to interact more deeply with the data generated.

In addition to this, the decision February 2013 to start making Zooniverse officially open source has allowed for new avenues for collaboration to be pursued other than the analysis of data.

While Zooniverse had made not the move to open source a priority (because behind the scenes they had been willing to share their coding with anyone who had approached them often talking them through the thought process that led them to design our software in a particular way) the decision to move to an entirely open source paradigm was made

so as to broaden the tools available to enable people to start projects of their own. This open source development model allows a community of developers to flag any bugs to the Zooniverse developers;

to contribute towards the creation of new projects; but also to assist in the site's localisation support (translating sites into multiple languages.

This latter point demonstrates how this process of collaboration can aid in the scaling up

While it the origins of the initiative might be thought principally of as a means of handling huge volumes of data,

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