Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation

a. Innovation Actions: pilots of Collective Awareness Platforms (CAPs) demonstrating new forms of bottom-up innovation and social collaboration exploiting digital hyper-connectivity and collaborative tools based on open data, open knowledge, open source software and open hardware, harnessing crowdsourcing or crowdfunding models. Within this vision, target areas for pilots include:

• New participatory innovation models for economy and society, such as the collaborative or circular economy, collaborative public services and collaborative making;
• Solutions for sustainable lifestyles such as collaborative consumption and production, smart reuse and low carbon approaches;
• Emerging ethics of digital innovation, such as social entrepreneurship, direct democracy, privacy preservation and digital rights.

Proposals are expected to leverage on fresh grassroots ideas and civil society participation in the broad digital social innovation domain, and should:

• Include in consortia an existing and motivated community of citizens, to drive platform development;
• Base the platforms on an appropriate combination of existing or emerging network technologies (e.g. distributed social networks, wikis, sensors, blockchains);
• Demonstrate a durable multidisciplinary collaboration by including in the consortia at least two entities whose main focus of interest is beyond the ICT domain.

Proposers are encouraged to integrate different platforms, addressing several sustainability challenges at a time, in order to achieve critical mass and measurable global impact.

Preference will be given to proposals engaging civil society at large, for instance through NGOs, local communities, social enterprises, non-profit organisations, students and hackers.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 1 and 2 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts. Minimum one action per target area will be selected.

b. Coordination and support Actions, to coordinate and support the CAPs initiative and the underlying broader digital social innovation constituency, by identifying links and synergies among different projects, and ensuring visibility and contacts at European and international level.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 0.2 and 0.8 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Today Europe fails to capitalise fully on participatory innovation; more models and blueprints are needed to lead to new ways to produce collective intelligence in key sustainability areas, leveraging on open data, knowledge networks, open hardware and Internet of things. The challenge is to demonstrate that innovative combinations of existing or emerging network technologies enable new Digital Social Innovation which can better cope with emerging sustainability challenges, achieving mass adoption and measurable global impact.

Proposals should address as many as possible of the following criteria, possibly defining appropriate metrics to measure impact

• Demonstrate increased effectiveness, compared to existing solutions to societal and sustainability challenges, of new bottom-up, open and distributed approaches exploiting network effects and based on open data and open hardware;
• Capability to reach a critical mass of European citizens and to transpose the proposed approaches to other application areas related to sustainability;
• Achieve effective involvement of citizens and relevant new actors in decision making, collective governance, new democracy models, self-regulation, citizen science and citizens' observatories, new business and economic models.
• Achieve measurable improvement in cooperation among citizens, (including elderly), researchers, public authorities, private companies and civil society organisation in the development of new sustainable and collaborative consumption patterns, new lifestyles, and innovative product and service creation and information delivery.
• Demonstrate the applicability of concrete and measurable indicators to assess the social impact and the ""social return of investment"" of the proposed solutions.