Building ecosystems for digital social innovation: tell us what really matters
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/building-ecosystems-digital-social-innovation-tell-us-what-really-matters/
www.nesta.org.uk/blog/building-ecosystems-digital-social-innovation-tell-us-what-really-matters/
For the next stage of the DSI Index, we need your input! If you’re involved or interested in DSI, tech for good or civic tech, we want to understand more about what you think helps support a thriving ecosystem. Complete our short survey to have your say.
Over the past six months we’ve been developing a framework for our experimental DSI Index, the primary aim of which is to help policymakers and other stakeholders understand how they can support DSI, tech for good and civic tech to grow and scale its impact. This is the first stage and over the coming months we’ll begin selecting, gathering, checking and processing data.
Building upon previous work such as last year’s What next for digital social innovation?, we've been carrying out interviews, roundtables and a review of the literature to understand the most important factors for starting, sustaining and growing DSI initiatives.
Through this process we have identified 32 factors which are considered important for starting, sustaining and growing DSI initiatives. We’ve then grouped these factors into seven overarching themes. Click on the below to read more about each.
The next step is to understand how important Europe’s DSI community considers these different factors to be, relative to one another. Assuming that not all the 32 factors are equally important, it makes sense for the more important ones to have a heavier weighting in the final index than the less important ones.
Ranking these factors isn’t an exact science, and so we want to tap into the collective mind of Europe’s DSI community, hearing from as broad a range of people as possible about what they think helps create a thriving ecosystem. It’s not always an easy exercise - ranking different factors can sometimes seem like trying to compare chalk and cheese - but it’s an essential step in creating an index which reflects reality, and the community’s opinions, as closely as possible.
To that end, if you’re involved in or interested in DSI in any way - practitioner, entrepreneur, researcher, policymaker, frontline worker, funder, investor… - we are asking you to complete a short survey to rank how important you think different themes and factors are to the growth and sustainability of DSI, tech for good and civic tech.
This is your chance to influence the development of the index, which will in turn be used to help policymakers make the right decisions and allocate their funding in the right way to support DSI in cities, regions and countries. Please complete the survey and share it with your colleagues and networks and on social media using the hashtag #DSIIndex.
Let us know if you have any questions by emailing [email protected] and thank you for your support!
To keep up to date with the DSI4EU project, follow us on Twitter and sign up to our mailing list. If you work with a DSI organisation or project, create a profile on the DSI4EU platform at digitalsocial.eu/register.
