Author: Balint Balazs, ESSRG, Hungary

The SciCafe 2.0 Consortium and the European Observatory for Crowdsourcing proposes to hold this workshop for exchanging insights on approaches to social innovation community support management. The SciCafe 2.0 project has aimed to support a social engagement eco-system with an adaptive participative engagement platform plus community management support providing specific observatory services for Best Practice sharing on Community Engagement Support amongst real communities with real societal challenges and specific problems to resolve.

The SciCafe2.0 Platform as integrated with Citizens’ Say knowledge exchange tool was adapted to serve the specific engagement requirements of two communities: the Municipality of Rome Second district (“Osservatorio Scienza per la Società del Municipio 2 di Roma) and the Florence Science Cafe Network. Some of our results have already been reported in our Handbook of Online Participatory Methodologies: Analysis of Community Network Interactivity and Participative Engagement Models and Methods available online.

We invite participants to an open setting to freely drop in and out of the session and benefit from an informal style of interaction and discussions inviting contributions on the topic from all participants.

As a start we will outline the SciCafe 2.0 mission and its achievements to-date essentially as promoting and facilitating the uptake and customisation of the SciCafe 2.0 platform to suit the preferred modes of participative engagement of various communities.

We will also present the SciCafe2.0 Platform in action through a quick online demonstration. After the demonstration we will discuss the practical issues of building and maintaining social engagement communities and the scale up challenges e.g. privacy protection, flexibility in engagement modes (offline, online), transparency of proceedings, raising the floor for the ICT-non-savvy to be able to have access to the session reports and contribute as they wish.