There are many cases of Digital Social Innovation (DSI) being spread throughout society that are transforming governments, businesses and society. 

At the heart of the DSI research is digitalsocial.eu, a dynamic and crowdsourced map of organisations that work on digital social innovation. Together with Variable and Interago, we have redesigned the crowdmapping website and increased the DSI network. In the DSI Open Data-Set, there are a total of 575 organisations with 629 projects as of August 2014.

Most, if not all, of the case studies mapped on digitalsocial.eu take place via the Internet or are highly enabled by new technology trends such as open networks, open hardware, open knowledge and open data infrastructures. 

The dynamic map shows the working connections between the various digital social innovators and will enable both practitioners and policymakers to understand what services, standards or digital projects are being developed, and what is the density of DSI activities in Europe. The main purposes of the DSI site are:

• Learn about DSI and get inspired, being able to explore projects and organisations in the field, learn about new technology trends, learn about emerging DSI areas, explore case studies 
•  Discover funding opportunities and support you can get from investors, incubators, accelerators or policy makers. Funders can also discover great DSI projects on the living map
• Find potential partners to collaborate with, interact and discover other interesting DSI projests
• Enhance and visualise your network of collaborators and raise your visibility

We have highlighted six areas that capture key dimensions of DSI:

1. New ways of making including the Makers movement and open hardware projects like Arduino that is revoluzionising open design and manufacturing. 

2. Open democracy featuring new projects pioneering direct democracy and citizens paretcipation such as Open Ministry or Citizens Foundation that are transforming the traditional models of representative democracy; or Openspending that encourages transparency and accountability, participatory web platforms such as Wikigender and Wikiprogress developed by the OECD that facilitate the linking of National statistics to actual individual living conditions; organisations like mySociety and the Open Knowledge Foundation in the UK that are developing services like FixMyStreet allowing citizen to report city problems and CKAN, the biggest open source data platform in Europe that is underpinning a new bottom up ecosystem for digital public services.

3. The collaborative economy that includes crypto digital curencies like Freecoin and many sharing economy platforms such as Peerby and Goteo creating new forms of crowdfunding methods, exchanges and new economic models.

4. Awareness networks enabling sustainable behaviours and lifestyles such as the Smart Citizen Kit – an initiative that empowers citizens to improve urban life through capturing and analysing real-time environmental data, and Safecast – a project that enables citizens to capture and share measurement on radiation levels.

5. Open access including cities like Vienna and Santander pioneering new practices in Open Data and open sensor networks; and mesh networks projects such as Guifi.net, projects such as Confine, Commotion, and Tor that are using bottom up privacy-preserving decentralised infrastructure for the open Internet. Other projects are exploring the potential of federated social networking, such as D-CENT and Diaspora, the promotion of Digital Rights, such as Open Rights Group and EDRI, and the diffusion of knowledge systems in the Public Domain, such as Communia.

6 Funding, incubators, accellerators and impact invesment schemes have been set up by public and private funders to support digital social innovation. Good examples are Bethnal Green Ventures and Wayra.

By registering on digitalsocial.eu and mapping your organisation and your projects, you will have the opportunity to join a network of potential collaborators and showcase your work to funders of DSI and policy makers, including the European Commission.

If you work on digital social innovation we would be grateful if you could join the network and Get on the Map, It will only take five minutes!

You can access here the Open Data set, and reuse it to learn more about DSI. You can read more about the research and the work to date in our interim study report and by following @Digi_Si on twitter. If you have any other question about the research send an email to [email protected]