EVENT REPORTNadia EL-Imam, Irene Ingrid, Adrian Wagner, Inga Popovaite 30 August 2016

PART ONE

DATA AND FINDINGS

• The Digital Festival, an initiative of Forum Europe and its partners, is designed to provide a space in the EU capital where the impact and potential of digital technologies can be both challenged and better understood.

PURPOSE

METHODS & DATA• Edgeryders collected and analysed

ethnographic data collected during Digital Festival 2016 using OpenEthnographer, one of the software tools we are developing.

• The dataset consists of 15 wiki-style session summaries contributed by participants, as well as 13 in depth interviews.

• Ethnographic coding was applied to 23 posts in a closed environment on the Edgeryders Collective Intelligence platform.

• Coding is a standard ethnographic technique. It consists of reading all contributions and assigning relevant keywords to snippets of texts. Keywords become then second-order data, and can be analysed in various ways.

• 133 tags in 10 categories were identified as recurring all along the Digital Festival Conversation

CATEGORIES & KEYWORDS

• Participants in Digital Festival are 20-65 years old and mostly working in large corporations, public administration or traditional third-sector organisations.

• 30% entrepreneurs amongst those interviewed

• Individuals, not organisations: Participation is based on disintermediated conversation

PEOPLE

• In total, the participants discussed more than 30 different initiatives in 9 different topic areas

• Initiatives are implemented by grass root activists, industry players, institutions and policy makers.

PARTICIPANTS WORK ON

• DroneGrid eliminates the need for human interaction with drones to perform various tasks.

• Drones fly and function fully autonomously. When a mission is completed, they land on charging stations to recharge while being protected from the weather.

• Missions are scheduled and monitored on a cloud platform.

• Learn more at http://dronegrid.io

DRONEGRIDAUTOMATING DRONE OPERATIONS

DEEPSTREAM VRPIONEERING VIRTUAL REALITY GAMES TO BOOST PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH

• DeepStream is pioneering and researching therapeutic uses of virtual reality for improving physical health and rehabilitation, promoting healthier lifestyles, and addressing mental health challenges

• It offers an alternative to narcotic drug therapies in clinical practice. Applications include reduction of chronic pain in patients.

• Learn more at www.deepstreamvr.com

“ I think our challenge when we deal with health care and trying to move forward that is that we've got 2 different cultures. We've got health care and then we've got

technology.

Technology is a culture of disruption. In that culture people look at disruption as there's an opportunity, there's something going wrong, we can go in and make a lot of money. We

love disruption. Healthcare hates disruption, they are incrementalists. They want to study it a lot and then they want to be very slow. Then the pharmaceutical companies, the

drug manufacturers, the health industry, it's just enormous.

There's this interesting clash that comes with this technology between these 2 big forces in society.” - Howard Rose, DeepStream VR

ON CARE AND TECHNOLOGY

Mambu - Cloud Banking Platform http://mambu.com

Resonate - Streaming Music Cooperative http://resonate.is

Social Media Charter - Financial Services http://smcharter.com/

BLOCKCHAINS, FINTECH & SMART CONTRACTS

ON BLOCKCHAINS, FINTECH & SMART CONTRACTS“Governments could use smart contracts to enable the workers to make a contract and settle their tax to very low transaction costs”

“I do not think that we will fall back and give up all workers rights that we established in the 20th Century just because of new tech and smart contracts”

“Bitcoin and Fintech is not even the most interesting application of blockchain technology, but it is the first one. We will see much more application of it in the future. The internet of things will be build on this technology.”

“Even if we can build a lot into smart contracts we still will need to have legal advice, laws, regulations and dispute resolutions through courts. Government will not just

disappear because of blockchain technology”

Train of Hope - Creating care structures in refugee camps - http://bit.ly/1MwxuBD

Telecoms Sans Frontiers - emergency telecommunications - www.tsfi.org

OPENandChange - Community driven innovation in welfare - http://openandchange.care

THREE APPROACHESCONSTRUCTIVE RESPONSES TO MIGRATION

UNMONASTERYA SOCIAL CLINIC FOR THE FUTURE

• Edgeryders identified a gap in support for the pre-market phase of innovation processes and devised a low-cost, sustainable model for bridging it.

• unMonastery is an online-offline program to find and nurture bottom-up innovation initiatives and connect them with their peers and supporters all over Europe and the world. It draws inspiration from Western monasticism.

• A prototype was deployed in the city of Matera, Italy, as a collaboration between the City Hall and Edgeryders: http://edgeryders.eu/unmonastery

• Access to internet is key to navigating the complexities of a new country, and staying in touch with loved ones.

• Restrictive legislation and a lack of technological infrastructure makes it difficult for many refugee shelters to provide Wi-Fi to their residents

• Freifunk is a community of hackers, programmers and free network activists building ad hoc wireless networks to give refugees internet access.

• It operates without government authorization.

FREIFUNKDISRUPTIVE DISOBEDIENCE AS A PUBLIC SERVICE

• Participants highlight that a disproportionate amount of focus is currently given to fluency of reactive democracy

• Social innovation and direct interventions are competing with traditional politics for the attention of innovators E.g. bottom up urbanism

• Key question: How to appropriately support Civic Start Ups and Grassroots initiatives?

ON DIGITAL AND THE EVOLUTION OF DEMOCRACY“Democracy is not about reacting to opinions, it is about driving collective intelligence”

“Representative democracy could become *representation* and *democracy* in the future”

MAIN KEYWORDS BY OCCURRENCE

• Many digital ventures engage with the citizenry in ways that are potentially extractive. Few examples were presented of data-driven business models that are able to do tech “for the people” purposes.

• As individuals take part in the digital economy, an effort to rethink the social contract across them could unlock more participation and enable scaling.

KEY INSIGHTS: DIGITAL & SOCIETY

• People most value innovation in areas that have a demonstrable impact on health, wellbeing and quality of life. If digital innovation is not seen as improving living conditions of citizens, it risks losing political support.

• Perhaps it is time to decouple the European discourse on digital innovation from the Silicon Valley rhetoric and extractive models of digital entrepreneurship.

KEY INSIGHTS: DIGITAL & SOCIETY

• Many digital ventures engage with the citizenry in ways that are potentially extractive. Few examples were presented of data-driven business models that are able to do tech “for the people” purposes.

• As individuals take part in the digital economy, an effort to rethink the social contract across them could unlock more participation and enable scaling.

KEY INSIGHTS: DIGITAL & SOCIETY

•At the centre elites have little incentive to adapt to systemic shifts. Current inability to cooperate or build interoperability around IOT, Fintech, migration, rise of nativist populist parties etc are symptoms off this.

• In the grassroots movements and marginalized groups at the edges there is an explosion of creative responses to economic, social-ecological and technological changes.

KEY INSIGHTS: DIGITAL & SOCIETY

PART TWO

WAYPOINTS INTO THE FUTURE

INVEST IN BREAKING OUT OF ECHO-CHAMBERS

• Blind faith in big data, filter-bubbles and active misinformation are perceived as growing threats.

• Invest in mechanisms for picking up weak signals and collective sense-making involving people with backgrounds significantly different from your own.

• Encourage innovation around economic models.

• This should be broad-scoped, and include the more radical non-market approaches like self-sufficiency (growing your own food) and moneyless models.

EXPERIMENT WITH NEW ECONOMIC MODELS

•Big Data vs. Rich Data

•Smart Networks vs Organizations

•Credentialed Experts vs Collective Intelligence

•Externalities and Market Failures in the digital economy

EXPLORE AND LEARN MORE

This report was created as part of a partnership between Edgeryders and Forum Europe. It uses the Edgeryders methodology and software for building events as engines of collective intelligence.

Please direct enquires about the methodology or software to Nadia EL-Imam: nadia@edgeryders.eu

Image credits: All photographs supplied by Forum Europe unless otherwise stated on individual pages