U-Hopper at DSI Manifesto Workshop

Representatives of CAPS EU-funded projects and relevant DSI (Digital Social Innovation) initiatives met in Rimini, Italy to capture views and contributions on the priorities to set out in the Manifesto for Digital Social Innovation in Europe.

CAPS is an EU initiative for designing and putting into motion online platforms for raising awareness about sustainability, an area requiring creative solutions from across Europe. DSI initiatives develop digital solutions to social challenges. A new platform funded by the EU, DSI4EU, has been developed for consolidating the networks of digital projects across Europe tackling social obstacles.

The manifesto sets out the opportunities and challenges for DSI, and defines the measures needed to maximise success and explores the best practices in social innovation processes. DSI has the potential to contribute to tackling the most important challenges facing Europe today, however most DSI initiatives still operate at a relatively small scale. The DSI Manifesto will contribute to understanding how social innovation processes can be reinforced, transferred and reused for effective scaling up of social innovation initiatives.
Daniele Miorandi and Andrea Cuoghi from Scent partner organisation U-Hopper attended the workshop on behalf of Scent. Scent’s participation in the DSI initiative is important for:

1. Ensuring the visibility of Scent (and other COs) within a relevant community of innovators, researchers and policy makers
2. Contributing to the DSI community with key learnings from the design, deployment and running of COs with regard to user engagement strategies and enabling supportive ICT tools and platforms.

Daniele and Andrea were active in discussions on the topics of “Collective intelligence: adoption, interoperability, real needs of online communities, motivation, open data and privacy standards” and “From the Internet of Things to the Internet of Communities”. Daniele and Andrea were active participants in the discussions, engaging in meaningful dialogues with institutions across Europe. It was clear from the discussions that, while not a formal DSI member, Scent shares many features with other DSI initiatives. An ongoing knowledge and best-practice exchange will therefore be mutually beneficial and open up exciting opportunities for future collaborations.