Wikipedia and the Open university; holistic health care, and hospices; microcredit and consumer cooperatives; the fair trade movement;
or the Internet to strengthen local communities. Indeed, the Internet is now generating a host of new business models that are set to have enormous impact in the social field. 7 Other possibilities may derive from new organizational forms,
like the Community Interest Company recently launched in the U k.,or the special purpose organizations increasingly used in global development (for example in developing new drugs for HIV/AIDS.
The web-based company Innocentive, for example, offers cash rewards for innovators who have workable solutions to problems they solve,
what became Wikipedia was a failure in its first outing. In business, people talk of the chasm that innovations have to cross as they pass from being promising pilot ideas to becoming mainstream products or services.
With the help of the Internet, innovations can spread very quickly, and indeed there can be little point in doing local pilots
because the economics of web-based pilots may make it as inexpensive to launch on a national or continental scale.
Email<editors@innovationsjournal. net>.The Process of Social Innovation 5. CIDA believes itself to be the world's only free, open-access, holistic,
Perennial Library, 1970). 9. See Global Ideas Bank,<http://www. globalideasbank. org/site/home/>./>The top 500 ideas that will change the world are at http://www. globalideasbank. org/site/store/detail. php?
articleid=178. For a list of similar organizations, see Stuart C. Dodd Institute for Social Innovation,
/MIT Community Innovation Lab<http://web. mit. edu/cilab/>;/>ETSU Innovation Lab http://www. etsu. edu/innovationlab/.
and at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of Internet-enabled networking platforms.
The nature of innovation has changed dramatically over the past decade due to globalisation, the widespread diffusion of ICT, the Internet and the rise of social media, the emergence of new global innovators such as China
and the DSI dynamic mapping shown on the www. digitalsocial. eu website, which engages, builds and maps the DSI community.
we are adopting social network analysis to detect patterns of relations and argue that the causal success of DSI located in the social structure.
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 scalable results and
and understand the DSI community through events, workshops, social media blogs and articles. Highlights of activities include 640 organisations with 695 projects mapped on www. digitalsocial. eu;
590+followers of the@Digi si twitter account; 15+events and workshop on DSI including workhops at the international Fablab Conference in Barcelona
and Participation Practitioners Forum in Warsaw and more than 25 blogs and articles written on DSI including articles in The Guardian (UK) and Empodera (annual Spanish publication on ICT and social innovation).
such as (including the need for open data distributed repositories, distributed cloud, distributed search, and distributed social networking);
continue our social network analysis to better understand the needs and opportunities to nourish and scale DSI in Europe.
and at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of Internet-enabled networking platforms.
taking advantage of the network effect caused by the spread of the Internet and the Web throughout society.
many of these actors are difficult to identify using traditional means due to the tendency of the Internet to be used for much wider and diffuse innovation by civil society actors,
The nature of innovation has changed dramatically over the past decade due to globalisation, the widespread diffusion of ICT, the Internet and the rise of social media, the emergence of new global innovators such as China, Brazil and India,
knowledge co-creation platforms, wireless sensor networks, decentralised social networking, and open hardware, can potentially serve collective action and awareness. 7 However,
and reach of commercial Internet models and the relative weakness of alternatives. These alternatives mainly fill marginal niches
A description of the latest development of the DSI open data mapping website an overview of the engagement strategies to involve the DSI community, outreach and communitcation activities.
and policies addressed to cover such gaps. 8 2. Dynamic crowdmapping of the DSI community We have redesigned the crowdmapping website
Most, if not all of the case studies mapped on digitalsocial. eu take place via the Internet or are enabled highly by new technology trends such as open networks,
In time, the site will be an open database of relational links between DSI organisations and projects,
We then created a new visual layout for the 36 DSI case studies that are showcased in on the website and also directly on the DSI map.
as we don't have the resources to do get the developer to do a translated version of the survey on the site,
We will then create a profile on the site for The french or Spanish organisation using the survey data.
One way of doing that has been through guest blogs and articles-where we have placed a DSI related blog on another network's or organisation's blog:
Crowdmapping digital social innovation activities in Europe mapping the DSI community. Empodera network. They are currently translating a editing the book with an aim to publish in July 2014.
New funding and Research to support grassroots innovation (also published on Nesta and D-CENT website.
In addition to the guest blogs we have done a large number of blogs, communicating the project on the Nesta blog and digitalsocial. eu blog.
A sample of these include 1. 000+readers to date Lists have proved the best way of getting a lot of attention around the project
published on Nesta website) 6. 000+readers to date (published in the Guardian) 8. 000+readers to date The 1st interim study report has been received well
To date the interim study report has had more than 10,000 readers on web/Isuu (combined figures from www. waag. org
and www. digitalsocial. eu sites) 16 Social media+other Media outreach Twitter@Digi si. The twitter account has proven an effective channel for both engaging new organisations
As the number of followers grow the effect of this will increase accordingly. and Waag (8. 000+followers) twitter accounts.
/Direct email and newsletter mentions We have promoted the project and project content through the Nesta (44.000 readers) and Waag society newsletters.
sending out an email to offer an insight into the project's objectives and inviting them to map their organisation at Digitalsocial. eu,
Where possible we connected also by telephone or via social media. Given the focus on digital collaboration
The DSI mapping website and the overall research was presented during a dynamic debate about policy
We demonstrated how the website worked and how organisations could be added, and went over some of the high points of the final report regarding the potential of digital social innovation in Europe.
The Chest project website (www. chest-project. eu/)has a description of the DSI project along with the project logo and a link to www. digitalsocial. eu,
Research project and website which list 100 short case studies of social innovations using digital technologies.
and the redesign of the website has been successful in helping us map 500 organisations and establish the research project and the term Digital Social Innovation within the community.
Social media In addition to continuing our ongoing work on engaging DSI organisations via twitter we will more actively tap in to
and promote www. digitalsocial. eu in relevant Linkedin and Facebook groups working on digital social innovation. pcoming events Workshop on barriers to scale for digital social innovation
and how these can be overcome with representatives from the international network of living labs. Half day event in London,
Mrs Neelie Kroes launched the No Disconnection Strategy 11 to support decentralised infrastructures for the Internet as a means of effectively empowering citizens and democratic participation.
and partnerships that can play a central role in the development of Future Internet platforms,
thereby shaping the evolution of the Internet and of social spaces. In recent years, new methods to foster entrepreneurship and innovation have grown rapidly across the world.
including envisioning different kinds of Internet infrastructure in the future Internet programme. Considering the level of complexity that the Internet Ecosystem has reached,
and the potential significance of the interactions between Internet and societal developments, a systemic, holistic and multi-disciplinary approach is needed. 14 Only by adopting a multidisciplinary research approach that encourages researchers from various disciplines to work together,
can issues such as trust and security, privacy, net neutrality, e-democracy, and e-governance be tackled.
Future Internet developments should, therefore, include technologically-led research, together with business models and socially and environmentally conscious approaches,
as reflected in the Internet Science Network of Excellence funded by the European commission. 15society in Future Internet development to achieve these goals is one of the main goals of this study. activities in this area can be summarised under two broad
The most relevant initiatives are the European Innovation Partnerships16, Smart Cities17, the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership Programme (FI-PPP) 18,
The development of the Future Internet is addressed mainly through a number of mainly technical objectives and projects,
Further support, investment advice and funding for SMES and young companies is also available through the Commission's Startup Europe programme for web and tech entrepreneurs.
At a time when the Internet has become so central in our societies, it is important that bottom-up approaches (based on the involvement of users) more often complement traditional top-down approaches that can help build resilience through user empowerment;
One of the risks of Future Internet is that big industrial players (mainly US-based) will reinforce their dominant position by implementing platform lock in strategies,
Web entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs in the field of active and healthy ageing, digital champions, innovation camps and so on.
or collaborative innovation in the Internet domain should be explored thoroughly. These platforms can gather and integrate information
described by Wikipedia as the creative practice of appropriation and free sharing of found and created content.
combine or turn into web-based or mobile applications that citizens may find useful. There are other local governments around the world that are successfully developing open data portals.
and Metropolitan Rennes in France have also set up open data websites at the regional level that can be considered good practices.
Some cities participate cooperatively in initiatives led by the private sector through web-based platforms. Others are taking the initiative to license tools
and that have become stronger by means of intensely using social media and civic digital platforms. 28 4. 4 Macro analysis of communities In this section,
firms Tech blogs and magazines Decentralized Cluster governance High entry barriers (technological skills) Lack of interconnection between developers Lack of visibility Innovation labs Innovation
good practices Lack of visibility of datasets Apps'discovery problem Internal conflicts in governments Smart citizens Citizens Intermediary organizations providing structure Project-based Use of social media
and between initiatives Lack of awareness Lack of skills Open democracy Political activists Organizations Evangelists Distributed Use of social media platforms Lack of interconnection among groups Table 6 Macro level
The best example of them is Github44 a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use Git, an open source version control.
Often, this authority is a natural consequence of the leader being the founder of the project, such as Linus Torvalds for Linux or Jimmy wales for Wikipedia.
The case of Wikipedia, and its internal struggle between deletionists and inclusionists, has been studied widely and analysed as an example of an open-sourced peer project characterised by having unclear governance rules and an uncoordinated structure,
Entrepreneurs and developers also use social networks to get in touch with one another. Some of the most popular social platforms include Entrepreneur Connect48 and Startup Nation49.
They read blogs and tech magazines as well. Some of them belong to entrepreneurs themselves like Steve Blank's50,
Wikipedia defines it as financial capital provided to early-stage high-potential, growth start-up companies.
or join social networks to interact with other individuals or they might gather around other enablers.
tech (software/Internet), biotech, clean tech, natural foods, and lifestyles of health and sustainability. Feld (2012) states that these clusters can be considered as networks for their members do not lend themselves to a command and control system.
Despite gathering around certain events and activities or participating in social networks, they usually are disconnected and, at any rate,
Another type of living lab is the fab lab. According to Wikipedia a fab lab (short for fabrication laboratory) is a small-scale workshop offering (personal) digital fabrication.
In this respect, social media networks play a significant role. They are a great place for developers to learn from colleagues
Of particular interest are also those sites devoted to developers'interaction that are embedded in open data portals.
Data. gov. uk77 the open data portal of the United kingdom, has an Interact section, with blogs and forums.
it describes a web-based business model that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals through what amounts to an open call for proposals.
the United states Geological Survey's Earthquake Program, a US multi-agency programmme, has a crowdsourcing site,
One of them is Goteo85), a social network for crowdfunding and distributed collaboration (services, infrastructure, microtasks,
Steven Clift is one of them89 He keeps a website where he posts articles and news Chris Quegley is another one.
No matter the type of initiative, social media platforms play an outstanding role as a way of organizing
One final example is the use of social media platforms. The nature of government decision and policy making problems (that increasingly become wicked problems) necessitate stakeholders'participation and consultation,
and the web 2. 0 social media can play an important role in this direction, and enable the application of crowdsourcing ideas in the public sector. However,
the collection of a large amount of citizen-generated content from various social media on a particular decision
According to Wikipedia, seed funding is a form of securities offering in which an investor purchases part of a business.
These same sites can also be an interesting tool in order to share examples of using/reusing open data.
Crowdsourcing sites fall into one of two categories in terms of their compensation: pay-on-task or contest/prize.
The pay-on-task sites offer a nominal level of compensation for a completed task.
Contest/prize sites pay significantly more money or offer job contracts, product prototypes and royalties.
some may be more informal (such as movements that revolve around different social media platforms. Also, Wikipedia refers to specific initiatives/activities such as town hall meetings, opinion polls,
participatory budgeting, referenda, protests or voting. More individual engagement may take the shape of e-mails to government officials, signing an online petition or making a political contribution.
Participation in such projects is facilitated usually by specific participation platforms, wikis, social media, and blogs. Legislation is another significant tool that is used by governments.
which stakeholders and policy makers should form a bottom-up social network to co-design policies. The new approach to policy making being experimented with by digital futures supported by the Futurium online platform126 is characterised by:
using the internet to gather instantaneous real world data from which knowledge is extracted and used to dynamically (re) shape policy actions.
Your Priorities is a web app that allows people to submit new ideas, debate and discuss ideas and vote up or down based on their priorities.
and EC funded projects will remove barriers from social innovators who often rely too much on Facebook,
and standardised public digital ID for all citizens Powers of companies such as Google and Facebook have a lot of control over an individual's online identity.
Citizens engagement and feedback Democratic and distributed social network Social network based on open source code to promote the most interesting news decided by the people,
but with a new user interface more similar to actual social networks like Facebook or Twitter. I would call it Yups. com:
distributed search, decentralised social networking, public identity management, and encrypted email service. The internet ecosystem today is highly centralised The current Internet is dominated by a handful of mainly US companies that control all the layers of the tecosystem (app store, cloud, machine learning, devices),
and are imposing their rules of the game. Europe needs to invest in future infrastructures that reflect the European values,
support SMES and civic innovators and deliver public good. Distributed, privacy-aware enabling infrastructures can also reestablish trust.
and continue to campaign for the internet to remain a neutral space. Keep bottom-up innovation feasible and affordable.
Also the internet needs to continue to be a neutral space where creativity can continue to flourish.
DARPA led to the creation of the internet, the R&d funding at CERN led to the invention of the Web) Encourage people to think about:
Who could implement it (European commission, national governments, municipal etc.?Who will benefit? What are the barriers?
and told them we'll email their pledge back to them after six months (this keeps people on their toes
and practitioners of DSI, there are a number of perceived future Internet threats (such as concentration of power and surveillance),
A main Internet trend-threat in the current and future Internet ecosystem is recognised today: an increasing concentration of power in the hands of a few data aggregators (e g. over the top players), none of which is located in Europe (Google controlling nearly 82%of the global search market and 98%of the mobile search market,
Facebook dominating the Social networking and Identity Ecosystem, whilst Apple, Amazon and Microsoft controlling the mobile market and cloud-based services platforms).
Furthermore, the Digital economy is now mainly based on business models that aggregate, analyse and sell personal data, turning personal data in what has been defined as the oil of the Internet economy.
Most users have accepted exploitative business models based on privacy infringement and often hidden surveillance mechanisms in exchange for free services.
and distributed social networking. It can also include the development of new mobile platforms alternative to Apple
we are adopting social network analysis to detect patterns of relations and argue that the causal success of DSI located in the social structure.
By studying behaviours as embedded in social network structures, we will be able to explain macro and mesolevel patterns that show the dynamics in which DSI organisations and their initiatives create scalable results and
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
Social networks are defined formally as set of nodes (or network members) that are tied by one or more types of relations (Wasserman and Faust, 1994).
In the case of the DSI social network collected in this study, the nodes in a graph are communities,
This social network analysis examines the structure and composition of DSI organisations ties in a given network and provide insights into its structural characteristics,
Furthermore, this visualization of the DSI network, embedded in our website, is interactive and aims at engaging the larger DSI community itself.
We still have concerns that the data-set is biased heavily towards English speakers due the lack of translation of the website into languages outside English We still believe that many more actors in countries such as Italy, France,
Howver, the website was designed not using standard internationalisation techniques and adding them is outside of the budget allocated for this project.
We would argue that future work after the end of the DSI project should allow the website
or that all smaller communities were composed simply on a single lone organisation being linked to another very heavily linked super-connector organisation (as would be the case in a graph of links to and from Wikipedia, for example.
including its social media presence (500+twitter followers). In addition to the research we will work with the European commission on developing a sustainability plan for the DSI website
and community before the final event on December 16th 2014.66 Endnotes 1. http://www. nesta. org. uk/develop-your-skills/challenge-prizes 2. http://ec. europa. eu/information society/digital
. org. uk/areas of work/assets/features/the startup factories report feature 15. http://paradiso-fp7. eu/16. http://www. internet-science. eu/17.18. http://setis
28. http://www. internet-of-things-research. eu/29. Bria, F. 2012. http://files. openinnovation platform. eu/policydocs/open innovation 2012. pdf 30.31. http://ec. europa. eu/information society/activities/collectiveawareness/index en
and start independent development on it, creating a distinct piece of software (Wikipedia) 47. http://www. barcelonastartupfestival. com/48. http://startupfestival. com/home/)67 49. http
http://opendata. euskadi. net/w79-ejemplos/es/contenidos/informacion/ideas ejemplos opendata/es apps/ideas ejemplos app. html 113. https://open. wien. at/site/anwendungen/)114.115
. https://www. crowdrise. com/116. http://www. innocentive. com/117. http://en. wikipedia. org/118. https://www. mturk. com/mturk
see the Communia website: http://bit. ly/V2knnk 134. To take an intuitive example, in a world with one 3000 foot tall giant being compared against a normal population of a hundred people evenly distributed between 5 and 6 feet tall,
While travelling, you use the in-car wireless network to send an important email. You indicate you want to take the quickest, most expensive route.
and say that social media give them the access to their world that would once have been associated with cars.
however, SMES are networked heavily in a web of business and social links with their suppliers, clients,
and information over Internet links enabling networked transactions, and the distribution of all the digital‘objects'present within the infrastructure.
ICT networks, social networks, and knowledge networks. The networked connections enabled by the Internet and the World wide web grew along the links of the preexisting
and underlying social, professional, collaboration, and business networks between governments, researchers, businesses, companies, and friends.
and eventually to the global Internet. Networked computers motivated the development of distributed architectures and shared resources, culminating in the peer-to-peer (P2p) model.
to identify ICT adoption and social networking with a process rather than an event. This required the integration of the technological approach with a social science perspective,
It asks questions about Open source and the Linux phenomenon in the same breath as Schumpeter's (942) oversubscribed creative destruction from IBM to Microsoft to Google.
or institution takes a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet.
and therefore also to the Internet and its applications/services. It was remarked by Lessig when he observed that the code is the law of cyberspace (999).
The Internet's structure determines how the Internet is regulated. The Internet's role in innovation, based on the‘spontaneous'creation and implementation of new protocols and services, would not be possible with a different structure characterised by a centralised instead of an end-to-end and layered‘intelligence'.
'The change of basic structural principles could fundamentally alter the fabulously successful end-to-end Internet: The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design.
The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. The Internet is layered based on a,
end-to-end model that allows people at each level of the network to innovate free of any central control.
By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.
Cerf, 2005) In a similar way, the effort in developing the architectural principles upon which to base the digital ecosystem were to regulate indirectly its functionalities by defining a structure that determines some behaviours
and prevents others. These are the same values and behaviours that were at the base of the Internet's growth and evolution.
This is best understood through the concept of structural coupling. Structural Coupling between the Business and Digital Ecosystemsan important aspect of autopoiesis is its radical relativism,
http://evenet. sourceforge. net) and has been adopted by SMES in pilot regions. 8 Such networks do resemble the behaviours of social networks where node formation
This approach is fundamentally an extension and a conceptualisation of the evolution of the Internet and of the Web.
The Web is engineered an space created through formally specified languages and protocols (Berners-Lee, 2006.
or a mixture thereof. 18 In the Web, due to the pressure of user needs, we see a continuous evolution of the protocols and artificial languages.
and of the layers of the semantic web stack of W3c. 23 In the ecosystem metaphor this research activity can be described as the phylogenetic tree24 of formal languages:
The cathedral of the Semantic web is replaced by a bazaar of descriptions and formalisms. The Digital Ecosystem can support such a bazaar of fragments of knowledge at different levels of formalisation and abstraction.
A good example of this evolution could be illustrated by the recent debate about the integration of the rules in the Semantic web Stack
what exists in the media or on the Internet. The information, or the digital representations of the ecosystem, shapes the user perception of the business ecosystem.
Technology here is meant in a wider sense that encompasses the distributed infrastructure and middleware, the software services and applications, all the attendant web technologies,
Multiple and Subjective Descriptionsthe software engineering approach and the Semantic web approach are based on the description of some aspect of reality through formal ontologies
or simply strange in most technological fields, is actually rather obviously the basis of the Web 2. 0 phenomenon.
Access to code allows the growth of social networks able to build and transform their business/economic environment according to their shared description of the world.
and process view of a Digital Ecosystem that is compatible with the latest software and web technologies, with social systems and social processes,
Creating a Science of the Web, Science, August 2006: Vol. 3 3. no. 5788, pp. 769-77 Berners-Lee, T;
A Framework for Web Science, Foundations and trends in Web Science, Vol..No (2006. -30bessen, J (2002.
Principia Cybernetica Web (Principia Cybernetica, Brussels), http://cleamc. vub. ac. be/SECORCYB. html last visited/5/2007.24 Howe, J (2006.
Articulos y Conferences Diez Años de Post-Racionalismo en Chile (Instituto de Terapia Cognitiva Web, Santiago) http://www. inteco. cl
An Introduction, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law school. http://cyber. law. harvard. edu/bold/devel03/modules/episodeii. html Nachira, F (2002.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
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