Towards a global participatory platform Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project’s own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed

Towards a "fourth generation" of approaches to HIV/AIDS management: creating contexts for effective community mobilisation

Many biomedical and behavioural HIV/AIDS programmes aimed at prevention, care and treatment have disappointing outcomes because of a lack of effective community mobilisation. But community mobilisation is notoriously difficult to bring about. We present a conceptual framework that maps out those dimensions of social context that are likely to support or undermine community mobilisation efforts, proposing that attention should be given to three dimensions of social context: the material, symbolic and relational. This paper has four parts. We begin by outlining why community mobilisation is regarded as a core dimension of effective HIV/AIDS management: it increases the reach and sustainability of programmes; it is a vital component of the wider task shifting agenda given the scarcity of health professionals in many HIV/AIDS-vulnerable contexts. Most importantly it facilitates those social psychological processes that we argue are vital preconditions for effective prevention, care and treatment. Secondly we map out three generations of approaches to behaviour change within the HIV/AIDS field: HIV-awareness, peer education and community mobilisation. We critically evaluate each approach's underlying assumptions about the drivers of behaviour change, to frame our understandings of the pathways between mobilisation and health, drawing on the concepts of social capital, dialogue and empowerment. Thirdly we refer to two well-documented case studies of community mobilisation in India and South Africa to illustrate our claim that community mobilisation is unlikely to succeed in the absence of supportive material, symbolic and relational contexts. Fourthly we provide a brief overview of how the papers in this special issue help us flesh out our conceptualisation of the health enabling social environment. We conclude by arguing for the urgent need for a 'fourth generation' of approaches in the theory and practice of HIV/AIDS management, one which pays far greater attention to the wider contextual influences on programme success. The full text is available on open access via the publishers website

Sociable Smart Cities: Rethinking Our Future through Co-creative Partnerships

The challenges of tomorrow’s society demand new ways of innovation – a shift in thinking, doing and organising. It requires releasing existing paradigms, changing perspectives and doing things differently. In the current work, we envision a sociable smart city that enables transforming society into a more participative domain where participatory innovation takes place. A city that combines best a two worlds; on the one hand, a social city that is people-centred, values active citizenship and embraces community-driven innovation, and, on the other, a smart city that welcomes the possibility of Future Internet and related technology-driven innovations, such as Open Data, Internet of Things and Living Labs offer. The biggest challenges cities face is not the technology, but having an open mindset and a participatory attitude to rethink our future is far more challenging

Exploiting eParticipation Using an Ontological Approach

Part 5: Techniques and AnalysisInternational audienceWhen building an eParticipation environment, many questions arise. Who will the participants be? What are the outcomes? How will citizens interact? How will they be selected? All these questions will influence the specification of an eParticipation environment. In order to create an effective eParticipation environment, the designer pays attention to all these characteristics, which can be tricky, especially when selecting ICTs to support the eParticipation process. This paper suggests the use of an ontological approach when specifying these eParticipation environments, in order to reduce the designer’s cognitive efforts when designing effective eParticipation environments