INSITE news, at one year...

Thursday, 16 February 2012
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David Lane, project leader of INSITE, reports on what's happened over the first year of INSITE:

INSITE has now been in existence for a year -- and 10 months have passed since our kickoff meeting.  That meeting featured many interesting presentations and some good discussion during coffee breaks and at the conference dinner -- but it provided few clues to me and the other members of our science board about how to go about building a community of research and practice around the themes of innovation, sustainability and ICT, the principle mission of INSITE.  

We decided to try a distributed strategy for the first year and see where it led.  This strategy consisted in an invitation, issued at the kickoff meeting, in some follow-up emails and a pair of meetings of the science board, to form groups to organise INSITE-relevant workshops, to submit INSITE-relevant research projects to funding and to communicate to INSITE members and relevant others INSITE themes and why we think they are important.  Some of our partners and friends responded enthusiastically to this invitation, and I'd like to report on some of the ensuing activities.

The website:

At the kickoff meeting we were challenged us to develop an "engagement" strategy -- and perhaps there was shared perplexity about just what we would be requesting those we engaged to do.  We still haven't resolved this dilemma, but we've made some progress -- and I hope collectively we can make a lot more next year.  In the meantime, rather than an engagement strategy, we concentrated on developing a communication strategy.  Our first effort was carried out by Mozart and consisted of "translating" the INSITE proposal into a web-readable form.  I sent you all a letter asking you to take a look that this first version of the website.  It was quite pedantic -- perhaps useful as a sort of introduction-manifesto, but chillingly abstract and not easy to convert into an "open" format, where we could begin to dialogue with one another and other interested people and organizations.  

Petter and Anton Tornberg, Michele Zappia and Ruggero Rossi created a new web format and have contributed some material to it in the sections we call "Musings" (brief essays on INSITE-relevant themes) and "Meanderings in the Innovation Literature" (reviews and discussions of books and articles, stressing their relation to INSITE ideas).  

We have recently put this new website on line, and we hope all of you will take a look at the new website (www.insiteproject.org) -- and will join us in contributing Musings and Meanderings, as well as Papers to post on the site.  or commenting on others' posts.  The site also provides information about INSITE-related activities -- any of you who want to add information about additional events and activities, please send an email to Michele (Michele Zappia <miguelz76@hotmail.com>).  Michele will also be in touch soon with you about linking personal webpages to the site.

Visit the INSITE website here

Presentation at FET11 in Budapest: 

Sander van der Leeuw, Filippo Addarii, Chris Sigaloff and I gave a presentation on INSITE at the FET11 meeting in Budapest in May 2011.  Find a "manifesto" that we wrote below, based on our presentations; it provides our view at that time of why INSITE is important and what we hope it might achieve.  The four of us organized a workshop, described below, based upon the ideas presented in this manifesto.  

FET Manifesto available here.

Workshops: 
INSITE co-sponsored (with the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena) a workshop, held in Modena December 5th-6th 2011 and organized by Margherita Russo (Officina Emilia) and Ruchida Ghose (Crafts Museum, New Delhi).  The theme of the workshop was the role of ICT in museums dedicated to promoting social and cultural values, related in particular to the INSITE theme of generalized ICT as well as the idea developed in the manifesto of "constructing a socially sustainable future."  The workshop is part of a process for formulating an international research project around this theme.  Information about the workshop can be found at http://www.homm-museums.unimore.it/site/home/articolo15691.html.  
Sander van der Leeuw, Filippo Addarii, Chris Sigaloff and I organized a workshop on Mobilizing Civil Society to Construct a Socially Sustainable Future, held Jan 26-7, 2012, at Ca' Foscari in Venice.  During the workshop, participants from the worlds of policy and public administration, civil society organizations and academia discussed strategies to begin the process of transforming the way our society organizes its innovation processes.  You can find the program of the workshop and many of the presentations on the INSITE website here.  Workshop participants are currently engaging in follow-up discussions aimed at generating proposals for further events and projects to build on the momentum generated during the meeting.
Two other INSITE workshops are scheduled for the next months:
The first of these, organized by Claes Andersson, focuses on innovation theory.  It will be held in Venice March 21-23. 
The second will be held in Venice in May.  It is being organized by Alberto Masetti-Zannini and Tatiana Glad of the Hub (London and Amsterdam respectively) and will be focused on Facilitating Networks of Social Innovators.  
 
"Spin-offs":
At the end of the INSITE kickoff meeting, a group of researchers (from Chalmers, ECLT, Tech4i2, The Hub, Euclid Network, Knowledgeland, Alberto Cottica from the Alicante team, Guy Melancthon from the Lausanne team and Gordon Rios (along with his Facelink partner Merijn Terheggen) from the Cork team) met to plan a research proposal on Emergence by Design.  The group drafted a proposal for an FET Strep Open, which was accepted.  The project held its kick-off meeting Jan 24-25 at ECLT.  You can find information about it on the INSITE website here.  I'd be happy to send copies of the proposal to anyone interested in reading it. 
 
Two other proposals involving multiple INSITE teams are currently under review.  One is a proposal for EC funding for social innovation competitions, building on the successful International Social Innovation Competition for Naples sponsored by Euclid Network and several other partners (and in which several INSITE members served on the jury), held last September; ECLT, Euclid Network and Knowledgeland are all partners in this consortium, along with the cities of Amsterdam and London and several civil society organizations.  The other is a research proposal on sandwiched emergence, related to INSITE's innovation dynamics theme, submitted as a STREP in response to an FET call for projects in the dynamics of multilevel systems.  The INSITE teams from ECLT and Chalmers are members of the consortium for this project.
 
Several other research proposals, including one building on the HOMM work, are now in the works.  If there are others now in the works, or someone would like to propose an idea for one, please let me know.  Coordination is a lot more fun when there's something going on to coordinate!
 

Euclid Network is supported by the European Commission and is a strategic partner of the British Government's Office for Civil Society.

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