Crowdsourcing to co-design meaningful social change

Abstract

Old Town Bari is the center of Bari City and the main city of Apulia region, in the southeast of Italy. For ages, it was a place neglected to its own community due to the high criminality level. This study follows a social innovation initiative launched by a young Bari collective to leverage education using crowdsourcing knowledge, in order to better understand how to develop crowdsourcing for effective social innovation. To address this research question, the author conducted action research on a 12 days workshop, organized by the collective, in the Old Town of Bari. The workshop aimed to create a School Open Source with the help of the crowd, which was engaged on promoting and co-creating the social initiative. Furthermore the researcher collected and analyzed the online discussions, paths and topics from the days of the workshop to the opening of the School. The study reveals how crowdsourcing acted as an opportunity to build a new community which revitalized the local social environment. The author also found that design processes played a major role on the community creation and instructed new governance models. Additionally, digital communications built a network, which is able to generate and regenerate the local socio-economical fabric and connect it with the rest of the world. These results indicate a first step towards a proposal for an open innovation model for social innovation which combines online crowd engagement with offline activities and where design processes nurture the sense of belonging between community and territory.