Exploring Impacts of Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation

Collective Awareness Platforms for social innovation and sustainability is more than € 50 million EC initiative which over five years promotes a collaborative economy based on collective intelligence and 'bottom-up' citizen engagement platforms (as opposed to traditional top-down or push-based technology approaches). All CAPS platforms are developed as open source. Most deploy low-cost open hardware (e.g. Arduino boards, Raspberry Pi). Today over 33 CAPS community pilots are busy sharing data and solving everyday problems with collective intelligence and digital network setups. They are innovative in the 'social innovation' sphere. They seek crowdsourced and crowdfunded solutions to sustain local communities' development needs. Some will be successful enough to go global and scale-up the social innovation. Grass root communities, civil society organizations, charities and social entrepreneurs are all involved in this EU programme. IA4SI is the CAPS project responsible for facilitating other projects to measure their actual impact. The methodology is broad enough to cover all of the domains listed above. This book gives an overview of the findings. A Self-Assessment Toolkit was developed to find out (based on real user data) if achieved impact is anywhere near what they expected it to be. Benefits are quantitative or qualitative, can be in the short or long term, based on subjective or objective measurement. The impact assessment toolkit requires specifying the results of real users testing CAPS and naming the targeted beneficiaries inside or outside the project.