Digital Social Innovation Toolkit

Across Europe there is a growing movement of people developing inspiring digital solutions to social challenges. We call this digital social innovation (DSI). These digital solutions have developed thanks to big advances in technology, such as the open source and open data movements, low-cost open hardware, crowdsourcing and Internet of Things (IoT). By empowering citizens and engaging them in civic action, they provide new ways of building social movements, delivering public services and creating social impact in fields as diverse as healthcare, education, democracy, environment, transport and housing. The Digital Social Innovation for Europe (DSI4EU) project aimed to support this growing network of projects providing a bottom-up approach to tech development. To achieve this goal DSI4EU created the digitalsocial.eu platform, which showcases organisations and case studies, helps to identify funding and support opportunities and DSI-related events, releases all open data and visualizations tools to help understand and analyse the DSI networks. Alongside the digitalsocial.eu platform, the DSI4EU project developed a research on what the DSI landscape in Europe looks like, understanding routes to growth and scale; it developed a set of policy recommendations to support DSI. Finally, by holding a number of events and an experimental programme across Europe to bring together the DSI community, the project aimed at aggregating knowledge and tools to support digital social innovators, especially those involved in the open hardware movement. The Digital Social Innovation toolkit is the result of this last project activity: an experimental programme that, from April 2016 to May 2017 involved makers, researchers, practitioners in workshops, talks and online meetups in which they collaborated with us to understand how open hardware and maker projects scale, taking into account societal and community good as a parameter. During the programme we tried to face several challenges such as: how to support the sustainable scalability of projects that are initiated by groups of citizens, makers and associations that do not usually follow established organizational models, but are inventing new ones? What kind of approaches can facilitate growth, where the concept of scaling does not correspond merely to financial sustainability or business opportunities? These are the questions that inspired the release of the Digital Social Innovation Toolkit, a collection of case studies, tools, and curated resources to help scaling as digital social innovators. The toolkit is based on the contribution of the people who participated to the DSI4EU programme. It is a toolkit featuring stories and resources from other people’s initiatives, researches and projects. It is a toolkit of toolkits in which knowledge exchange is at its core because it is time to build upon what’s already there instead of trying to reinvent the wheel from scratch, if a real impact has to be reached. It is an open toolkit whose resources will be expanded on-line in a continuous research work on how to support the growth of Digital Social Innovation in Europ