Introduction to the CAPSSI Manifesto

workshopStavroula Maglavera, University of Thessaly

Why a Manifesto? • Manifesto is a EU level Policy outreach document. It includes a set of

recommendations for policy-makers.

• It aims to drive the development of the Digital Single Market to fulfill first and foremost societal and sustainability challenges with the help and engagement of citizens.

• It sets out the opportunities and challenges for the innovation of the digital society, and spells out the measures needed to maximise the benefits and overcome the hurdles that stand in the way of its expansion and success.

The DSI Manifesto Initiative

TO SET PRIORITIES AND ENSURE IMPACT OFDIGITAL SOCIAL INNOVATION INITIATIVES IN EUROPE

• To give a stronger voice to DSI communities in Europe

• To raise public and political awareness of DSI and its impact

• To network diverse activities and share best practices

• To create an instrument to advocate and grow DSI efforts

• A draft has been put together

• An online consultation is now openParticipate now!

www.dsimanifesto.eu

The DSI Manifesto – current draft

The Key Points for the DSI Manifesto

1. Financial Support

2. Experiment

3. Digital Skills and Multi-Disciplinarity

4. Democracy and decentralization

5. Openess

Financial support

• Governance: Redefine the governance rules for public research programmes, assigning a leading role to social innovators rather than to large and established companies with powerful lobbies.

• Methodology: structure funding to fit the distinct stages of innovation - from early stage design to incubation and acceleration and then through to scaling up.

• Additional sources: leverage public sector procurement opening it up to the above-mentioned civil society actors and sustainability areas. Increase access to alternative sources of finance and cross-border crowdfunding.

Experiment

• Bring together existing communities of citizens with entrepreneurs, social innovators and institutions, to assess the real effectiveness of DSI solutions and align regulation, law, technology and user needs in order to eliminate barriers to innovation.

• Set technological priorities of public research programmes as the most effective to cope with societal challenges: low-cost or collaboration potential may be more important than sheer performance.

• Make sure that EU and public institutions are the first ones to test and adopt DSI approaches.

Digital skills

• Promote a much broader base of digital skills among citizens, NGOs and other community organisations, to enable them to get advantage of digital technologies – and contribute to their development into social directions.

• Information technologies and coding skills, as well as a broad multidisciplinary understanding of Internet governance, should be part of the core curricula both in schools and universities – which requires massive training for teachers as well.

• Incentives for multi-disciplinarity: novel approaches and support are sought to fostering collaboration between the tech community, social scientists and civil society organisations.

Democracy

• Accelerate projects which aim at integrating digital tools into every aspect of democracy, from campaigns and proposals to policy design, spending and scrutiny - and encourage leadership from municipalities, parliaments, political parties, whether through funding, advocacy or convening.

• Analyze, compare and give broader visibility to the open democracy and participatory budgeting practices implemented by several European cities.

• Promote citizens' awareness and political attention towards these new forms of citizen engagement and to the risks entailed by centralized solutions.

Openess

• Mandate use and reuse of existing Open-Source software in national and EU funding streams. Encourage development and adoption of Open Hardware.

• Promote Open Data approaches (innovative ways of opening up, capturing, sharing, using, analysing and interpreting open data).

• Sustain Open Knowledge (communities supported by online platforms that collectively analyse data, develop and analyse new types of knowledge or crowdfund social projects).

The purpose of the workshop• Create a forum for discussions and debates helping the

validation and further development of the DSI Manifesto

• Indentify the of key priorities

• Set the scene for further discussions

• Organise the future actions

• Raise awareness about the DSI Manifesto initiative

• Endorsement of the DSI Manifesto

Further actions • Consultation is open. Participate, your opinion and voice are

valuable

• Interviews with key stakeholders and policy makers are on-going

• Awareness of the public opinion and invitation to different communities to participate in the activity

• New version of the DSI Manifesto will be published at https://www.dsimanifesto.eu/ to share it with the broad DSI community for further comments and feedback

• A policy expert workshop will be organised in Brussels (autumn 2017) gathering key DSI experts and active players to finalise the document

Highlights from the interviews• Empowerment of people and re-distribution of power needed

• Expanding commons and creation of a new paradigm of the innovation of commons

• promotion of digital skills should be performed through continuous processes in physical locations in the city, new forms of public places (inclusion of the elderly, immigrants, etc)

• face-to-face contact and trust building, which are truly possible at the local level where the decentralized Internet should be anchored, grounded.

Highlights from the interviews• Companies can support D(SI) through corporate social

responsibility programmes

• Universities can play a role here by spreading digital skills for DSI

• At the current stage DSI solution are used by privileged citizens

• Need for collaboration among communities of different regions, countries, etc. international and cross-borders collaborations

• Need to "do it together" in practices and citizens should know that there will be someone able to help them when needed.

Highlights from the interviews• How to share benefits and transition from monopolies that

ultimately damage innovation and the economy.

• How digital social innovators can overcome organisational, sectoral and geographical silos and work together with companies in the most effective and impactful way.

• Internet decentralization does not come without problems. On the contrary, the lack of control has also been source of cyber terrorism, personal and collective abuses, spread of anti-social values and ultimately a challenge for democratic systems as they are.

Open consultation stats

0

5

10

15

20

25

Academia-research NGOs Government Start-ups Other

Open consultation stats

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Social sciences ICT-related Other disciplines

Open consultation stats

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

female male

Open consultation stats

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

age (20-30) age (30-65) >65

www.dsimanifesto.eu/consultation

Thank you for your attention

capssi.eu