Session 6 – Citizen engagement and collective intelligence for participatory Digital Social Innovation: Opportunities and challenges for Citizen Science in solving everyday sustainability challenges.
Aim and scope
As the citizen science movement matures and social technologies are used by billions of users in daily life, new frontiers are explored. Large groups of citizens can engage in research projects not only as data collectors or annotators but as knowledge brokers and co-designers in the problem analysis and solution development. This is intensely explored in experiments involving citizens in solving everyday societal challenges: Open Social Innovation. Pioneering EU-funding programs such as the Collective Awareness Platforms for Social Innovation and Sustainability (CAPS) place a strong emphasis on bottom-up research that systematically engages citizens in co-creation activities. Such Digital Social Innovations explore new models of collective intelligence where researchers, social innovators and citizens collaborate in co-creating knowledge and solutions for societal challenges.
The key question here is how to successfully involve citizens as co-designers and co-researchers?
How to stimulate and sustain citizen engagement over time? How to design such participatory science and innovation processes in a practical and methodologically sound way?
As societal challenges address inter-connected domains (e.g. environment, mobility, health) such projects are often trans-disciplinary. They combine methods from different disciplines (e.g. engineering, social and natural sciences) with smart technologies (e.g. collective sensing, mobile computing, smart cities) and knowledge co-creation, open data and collective intelligence. This raises the question of how to effectively relate knowledge from different disciplines and constituencies (e.g. scientists, policy makers, citizens). A related challenge is how to gather and measure the insights and results of these processes from different actors (e.g. crowdsourced social impact assessment).
This session is organised by the European Institute for Participatory Media (EIPCM) on behalf of CHEST. It will be chaired by Prof. Dr. Jasminko Novak (EIPCM) and Dr. Loretta Anania (European Commission’s CNECT Net Innovation Unit and CAPS Programme Officer).
We invite you to submit an abstract for Session 6 before the deadline of Monday 22nd February.
To submit the abstract for your proposed presentation, please use the Converia online system: https://conference.ufz.de/frontend/index.php?folder_id=418
All abstracts must be submitted through the online system.
For more information on how to submit an abstract please contact Mathias Becker at EIPCM.
