Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation

CAPS (Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation) is a Horizon 2020 and FP7 programme funded by the European Commission and launched in 2013, which has the aim of helping grassroots initiatives contribute to societal change by harnessing existing and emerging network technologies. The objectives of the programme are to foster participation and inclusion around aggregations of interests between experts, practitioners, policy makers, civil society players on online platforms. CAPS projects build on available or emerging networks where Data ownership, equal opportunities and inclusiveness are central, unlike other FP7 and H2020 projects, which usually define themselves around technological goals.

The areas of focus of the program are:

  • Open Democracy: enabling citizens' participation in democratic processes by developing and applying new tools (e.g. voting, online consultation)
  • Open Policy Making: better decision making based on open data
  • Collaborative Economy: lending, exchange, swapping made to operate at scale
  • Collaborative Making: developing new ways of manufacturing
  • Collaborative Consumption: rethinking consumerism
  • New Collaborative approaches to inclusion, agriculture, health, disaster management

Background

The term was first used by the European Commission in 2012 in the context of the Seventh Framework Programme of Research (FP7).

There have been three CAPS calls so far: one as part of the FP7 ICT Work Programme 2013 (objectives 5.5 and 1.7b) with a budget of €19 million, one in the H2020 ICT Work Programme 2015 (topic ICT-10) with a budget of €36 million and one in the H2020 ICT Work Programme 2017 with a budget of €10 million. A total of 12 projects from the first call are running at the moment and since 1 January 2016, they are complemented by 24 new projects from call 2. Five of these projects belong to the Internet Science cluster. The deadline for the third call expired on the 25th of April 2017.

The title conflates three components: "collective awareness platform", "sustainability" and "digital social innovation". The first indicates the community-driven aspect and engagement of civil society, which is to be maintained over a period of time. The third term is reflective of a larger field, which is using digital means to create alternative solutions to problems encountered by a specific community. The title "digital social innovation" has been questioned as it implies that it is a subsection of social innovation which is entirely digital.

First call

The first call for projects combined two objectives part of the FP7 ICT Work Programme 2013: CAPS (objective 5.5) and Internet Science research (objective 1.7b) addressing reputation, network neutrality, identity, crowdsourcing, citizen involvement in content generation, new collective economic models, privacy by design, as well as behavioural and societal changes. Ten projects from the former, 5 pilots and 5 CSAs (Coordination and Support Action scheme) worth a total of €15 million and two from the latter field worth a total of €4 million were funded. Key priorities for the proposals were innovativeness and effectiveness, social value, scalability, portability, user take-up and motivation and a multidisciplinary approach. The FP7 CAPS call's objective was to ‘to stimulate and support the emergence of innovative ICT-based platforms for grassroots social innovation […] The vision is that individuals and groups can more effectively and sustainably react to societal challenges by acting on the basis of a direct extended awareness of problems and possible solutions.’

The call coordinators for 2012-2013 were Fabrizio Sestini for CAPS and Ragnar Bergström for the Internet Science collaborative projects. A hundred and five submissions were received.

Second call

The second call was part of the H2020 Work Programme 2015 under the topic ICT 10. The call had four subsections: CAPS pilots, multidisciplinary research on CAPS, digital social platforms and coordinating pilots and research activities in CAPs. The call distanced itself from technological determinism by defining also what was not in the scope: proposals without a clear existing (and physical) community of motivated users, proposals for technology-push per se and consortia without at least two partners which bring non-ICT disciplines to tackle the innovation context or focus area. Twenty four projects were funded, from which 17 pilots, 3 Internet Science, 2 DSP and 2 CSA.

The call coordinators for 2014-2015 were Fabrizio Sestini, Loretta Anania, Johanna Schepers and Horst Kraemer. The number of submissions was 193.

Third call

The third call was part of the H2020 Work Programme 2017. It combined the CAPS programme with Distributed Architectures for Decentralised Data Governance (ICT 11 2017 and ICT 12 2016) programme.

Illustrative projects

CAPS projects are ICT-enabled initiatives that address pressing social issues and sustainability issues by promoting citizen engagement on a network scale.

CAPS2020

The CAPS2020 project was initiated to coordinate, support and promote the CAPS projects and movement in Europe. CAPS2020 ran alongside the twelve projects partially funded by the FP7 ICT Work Programme 2013 under the organisation of Marta Arniani from Sigma Orionis. It ran until August 2015. During this time, the events CAPS2014 and CAPS2015 were held in Brussels in July 2014 and July 2015, where information about CAPS in Horizon 2020 was provided to stakeholders and diverse players from outside the existing community.

P2Pvalue

This project fosters the CBPP (commons-based peer production) phenomenon by providing a techno-social software platform specifically designed to facilitate the creation of resilient and sustainable CBPP communities.

The project focuses on three key areas of improvement over current platforms:

  • Enhancing community sustainability by adopting the governance, legal, economic, and technical infrastructures that favour value creation and resilience;
  • Supporting the contributors with systems of reward that allow value to flow back to the creators;
  • Integrating the functionalities of online social networking services and collaborative software in a privacy-aware platform based on a decentralised architecture.

Wikirate

WikiRate's mission is to spur corporations to be transparent and responsive by making data about their social and environmental impacts useful and available to all.

D-Cent

D-CENT creates digital tools for direct democracy and economic empowerment. It helps communities to share data, collaborate and organize their operations by creating a social networking platform for large-scale collaboration.

The abbreviation D-CENT refers to Decentralised Citizens ENgagement Technologies. Besides the platform, the project explores how communities might manage common goods and facilitate online exchange with Bitcoin-style digital social currencies. The project started in 2013 and finalised in 2016.

Digital Social Innovation

Simultaneous to the awarded projects in the first call, a research department was funded called "Social Innovation in the Digital Agenda". The outcome was a foundational study on digital social innovation (DSI) in Europe funded by the European Commission, DG Connect and run by Nesta, in partnership with the Waag Society, ESADE, IRI and Future Everything. The study looked at grassroots civic innovations that use the Internet for social good. The DSI research is identifying examples of Digital Social Innovations (DSI) that are exploiting the network effect of the Internet and merging technology trends such as open data, open hardware, open knowledge, open and distributed networks to bring people together to solve social challenges.

In February 2017, CAPSSI, the official platform for CAPS projects, organised the Digital Social Innovation Fair. During his presentation at the fair, Fabrizio Sestini, Senior Expert (Advisor) in Digital Social Innovation within the unit "Net Innovation" of DG CONNECT of the European Commission and leader of the multidisciplinary team behind CAPS, presented CAPS as a subsection of digital social innovation.

During the two day event, the Manifesto for Networked Innovation has been presented and worked on. It included a set of recommendations for policy-makers indicating how digital social innovation processes can be enforced, transferred and potentially reused for an effective scale-up of social innovation initiatives across the whole European society. On the 23rd of May, a version of the Digital Social Innovation Manifesto, which has sprung from the Manifesto for Networked Innovation, will be finalised.