Participating Social Cities of Tomorrow workshop
Last week I participated Social Cities of Tomorrow conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The preconference workshop Designing Social Cities of Tomorrow took place at ARCAM, and was co-organized by The Mobile City. I joined a workgroup that worked on a topic provided by Amsterdam Municipality, Office of Economic Affairs: finding ways to create / enable / stimulate civic innovation network.
Our focus with the team, consisting of 7 people of diverse professional and national background, was not on sketching the outlines of any platform, tool or 'the solution' to support civic innovation. Instead, we developed an understanding of the requisites to make any network - or better name it social infrastructure - sustainable. We mapped the possible motivations of stakeholders to contribute to such a network, investigated the new role of the city government and highlighted that strong citizen innovation requires power shifting from the city towards the public.
As a proposal, we outlined a roadmap of three steps:
- connecting to existing networks, platforms
- open up city administration both internally and externally
- let civic innovators' network grow
I hope we will go on with topic and hopefully there will be a small report could pu