Civic Engagement Innovation: How ICTs Shape the Relationship Between State and Citizens

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to introduce an important area where ICT-Enabled Social Innovation has a particularly high impact, civic engagement, and building a typology of ICT-Enabled Civic Engagement innovation. The idea is that ICTs are becoming increasingly pervasive in the design, development and delivery of social innovation and of civic engagement initiatives and, as a consequence, the relationship between the state (intended as government as well as administration) and citizens is increasingly mediated by the technology in what is now widely known as Smart City/E-Government and relative applications. The provision of services by the state is not only set to become more efficient/effective because of the streamlining effects of the technologies, but also new services are emergent. The framework within which our typology is set out refers to the recent literature on social innovation and ICTs studying the types of relationships between government and citizens. The typology is developed upon empirical considerations based on 41 ICT-Enabled Social Innovation Initiatives selected during the 2014 – 2016 Mapping and Analysis carried out under the aegis of the JRC. The initiatives considered emerged from a research strategy based on systematic mapping of initiatives with policy relevance where ICTs played an important role either as enabler or driver of the innovation process. The initiatives selected had proven evidence of outcomes and/or long-term exceptional output. The sample includes a wide variety of cases from different sectors dealing with the different dimensions of civic engagement. There are grass-root movements and initiatives based on or oriented towards volunteerism; it includes also initiatives engendering citizen participation and those enhancing civic engagement through crowdsourcing/funding activities. The typology developed in this chapter highlights how ICTs underpin innovation in civic engagement initiatives in two main ways; first, it provides instruments and tools to deliver efficient and effective services through modernising existing processes and, second, it has become integrated part of the service design promoting the integration of existing services or the diffusion of new services. However, between the two modes there is not a clear-cut distinction between the roles and uses of ICTs.

Assessing the value of civic crowdfunding: Goteo.org social impact calculator

“…Considering all the previous, and its connection with Platoniq Foundation's goals of increasing open knowledge practices around civic technologies (Gagliardia et al, 2021), the main objective of this project was the development and application of a tool to measure the social impact of individual crowdfunding campaigns, tailored to its specifics during the design phase but also afterwards, once the derived project has been implemented. Developing this impact calculator would allow, more concretely, to: (1) Sensitize the promoting teams behind each crowdfunding campaign by "budgeting" the potential social impact that their initiative will have, if funded, with a global vision taking into account all interested parties and stakeholders; (2) Give more context and motivation to potential donors, and in particular to "matchers" (campaign multiplier organizations and public institutions in match-funding schemes), to understand in a measured way the potential social impact of the campaigns they support; and (3) Create a pioneering tool that can be of reference for other crowdfunding platforms, and that can also be adapted to them, this way promoting the social impact of civic crowdfunding as a standard model -rather than for an unique platform.…”