social innovation from the edges

keynote from ‘On the Margins of Technology’ Symposium

February 29th 2008

dr. dan mcquillanwww.internetartizans.co.uk/contact

What happens when the 'architecture of participation' meets the margins?

A few years ago, a global broadcast video platform would have cost $millions.

Now kids from the estates can use youtube to talk about their reality...

A film made by Young People on the Andover Estate in Islington, London in response to Anne Widdecombe vs The Hoodies shown on ITV. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gbX_wCHlzo

And hispanic kids in LA used myspace to organize school walk-outs against anti-immigrant legislation H.R. 4437

people are using the social web for transparency and accountability

not by campaigning for it, but by using the internet to enact it

examples: maplight & wikileaks

we are seeing spontaneous self-organisation at scale around crises (katrina, tsunami, burma)

Katrina PeopleFinder used an open source development model to make searchable 640,000 missing person and survivor records

reearch in to open source innovation shows that “broadcasting” problems to outsiders yields effective solutions

there are peer-ro-peer models for development, such as kiva loans and the nabuur network

but we need online civil rights, so that web2.0 Terms of Service don't trump the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

...as they did when YouTube suspended the account of human rights activist Wael Abbas...

semiotic democracy means we all get to participate in making meanings

incumbent monopolies are extending so-called intellectual property rights to prevent this

remember The Grey Album...

RECOMMENDATION 1. design platforms for participation

FixMyStreet also encourages people to join together to tackle local problems ...which was exactly Saul Alinsky's starting point for community action

pledgebank opens up the Long Tail of social organising

RECOMMENDATION 2.cultivate the fringe: The boldest new ideas often come from far outside the mainstream

see Charlie Leadbeater's paper 'The Difference Dividend: Why immigration is vital to innovation'

use the technology of the young to tap into the wisdom of experience

“If eBay is about the stuff you’ve got locked up in the attic, then horsesmouth is about the stuff you’ve got locked up in your head and heart”

RECOMMENDATION 3.design for play

ARGS, world without oil

jane mcgonigal “reality is broken; why aren’t game designers trying to fix it?”

RECOMMENDATION 4.design for sustainability

consider social enterprise: it's a good fit for the social web

go with the grain of digital culture, not against ithttp://www.openrightsgroup.org/creativebusiness/blog/

RECOMMENDATION 5.design for hacker ethic

web-enabled social innovation is like open source: scratch the itch...

hacktivism - campaigning by creating part of the answer

social innovation camp

Our aim is to find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.

THANK YOU.

dr. dan mcquillanwww.internetartizans.co.uk/contact

www.sicamp.org