The Catalyst project would like to recognise and highlight the outstanding work that the COLEARN community of the ENGAGE project has been doing using the Catalyst LiteMap tool. They have been working with LiteMap on collective intelligence applied to three scenarios: European debate,  Science Teaching community and Secondary School – smart cities. They have been creating various collective knowledge maps using LiteMap with innovative outcomes! 

Firstly they created three large data maps of the debate with 50 experts of European Projects on Responsible Research and Innovation and Inquiry based learning in 2014

Resources:

Engage RRI seminar from Alexandra Okada

LiteMap RRI teacher’s CPD,

LiteMap RRI informal learning
LiteMap RRI partnerships

Secondly, they used LiteMap to gather the collective intelligence of the teacher community of the ENGAGE project in the UK with more than 3,500 teachers and 18,000 materials downloaded in their OER Hub and MOOC in 2015.

Resources:

1. LiteMap MOOC 
2. LiteMap OER

Engage hub poster from Alexandra Okada

 Thirdly, they used LiteMap with Secondary School students in the Urban Inquiry activities for participatory deliberation on key issues for smart cities: electric cars, solar panels and energy consumption. LiteMap helped students create their posters and present them to scholars and citizens in 2015.

 Resources:

Urban Inquiries – smart cities from Alexandra Okada

Poster Urban Inquiries from  Alexandra Okada

Their work with LiteMap has helped further the stability and depth of the tool and we want to congratulate the colearn community of the ENGAGE project for their excellent work and formally thank them for the contribution they have made to the Catalyst project.

The activities performed within the CATALYST project provide all partners with inputs to contribute to further research on Collective Intelligence.

Alberto Cottica, member of CATALYST community partner Wikitalia, presented a paper at the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference 2015 held in Brighton, United Kingdom, on June 23-28.

This paper, entitled ‘Online community management as social network design: testing for the signature of management activities in online communities’, is now available online and is currently being peer-reviewed to be published in Network Science. It explores the characteristics of a successful community management in terms of in- degree distributions and deviation from the power law form.

Starting with an introduction explaining the two main strands on which this essay is based, the paper describes the experiments and results gathered during the research period with a particular focus on each steps, including the data gathering and exploitation.

The paper can be accessed through the website “Presentations & Research Papers” section.

Started at the very end of January and ended at the beginning of August 2015, the OuiShare test of LiteMap allowed the creation of seven extensive maps of OuiShare discussion groups.

The proposal of OuiShare aimed at using and testing new tools to centralise and sum-up the information from OuiShare’s groups, which were already using three other tools including Loomio, another CATALYST open-call winner.

The report of this test in now available and brings CATALYST partners ways of improvement to make the ecosystem developed within the project even more efficient. It also allows all researchers to have a clear vision of what communities can expect from Collective Intelligence tools.

« LiteMap has possibilities for extensive analytics, as well as for displaying and arranging data in different ways, which could be used for a variety of purposes like interactive presentations or as collaboratively created illustration material »

The full report is available in the “Reports & Deliverables” section of CATALYST website

We thank again OuiShare for their work and implication in the project.

The OECD, and more specifically its Wikiprogress website, successfully won CATALYST Open Call and experimented brilliantly Assembl for their consultation on Youth Well-Being between end of March and mid-May, 2015.

Gathering more than 300 hundred participants and almost 500 posts, this test was the real first large-scale online consultation managed with CATALYST platform Assembl, and proved to be extremely successful.

The OECD’s report goes through the advancement of the consultation all along its lifetime and provides extensive lessons-learned on the implementation of a Collective Intelligence tool within a community.

We thank the OECD for their precious inputs and for their efficient collaboration in the testing of Assembl.

The whole report can be found in the “Reports & Deliverables” section of the website.

Following its successful application to CATALYST Open-Call, the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Naples conducted tests of DebateHub and the CI Dashboard, two of the five tools of CATALYST Collective Intelligence ecosystem.

The Italian academic institution wanted to test our project innovative web-based technologies to harness Collective Intelligence and support large-scale collaborative decision-making processes, with a particular focus on argument mapping.

The two tools were tested on a group of 140 undergraduate students in Economics divided into 4 groups. The future price of crude oil was the leading topic of a debate that generated a total of 741 posts and 1437 votes.

Following the discussions, the students involved gave very positive feedbacks on DebateHub and highlighted its capacity to organise knowledge in addition to an easy identification of the relevant posts. In the meantime, University of Naples’ researchers tested the CI Dashboard to map the conversations that took place during the debating period.

We thank the University of Naples for their commitment and highly valuable inputs. The whole report of these tests is available in the “Reports & Deliverables” section.

As one of the winners of CATALYST Open-Call, Edgeryders tested the use of CATALYST Collective Intelligence tools Assembl and Edgesense. Edgeryders is a considerable community of almost 3,000 members aiming at solving global societal, economic, environmental, security and energy problems threatening Europe.

One of the challenges that Edgeryders face is the unstructured debate resulting from the exchanges between its community members and thus the difficulty of reaching the sense of a real “network thinking”.

Edgeryders’ test report is now available and goes through the findings and improvements the community reached from the use of both Edgesense and Assembl. It focuses on the context, the challenges and the lessons learned in addition to proposals to improve the tools developed by CATALYST.

We thank again Edgeryders for their valuable inputs in the course of our project.

The whole report is available in the Report & Deliverables section of CATALYST website.

Ashoka is a non-profit organisation and the World’s #1 network of social entrepreneurs. It was one of the winners of CATALYST Open-Call to test one of the tools developed within the project.

Ashoka ran a pilot with a group of social entrepreneurs in the field of learning and play, using Assembl between March and May 2015. Contributors from 32 countries participated to the tests led by eight activators in partnership with the LEGO Foundation in the frame of the « Reimagine Learning Challenge ».

Following the testing period, Ashoka published a detailed report showing how they managed to integrate the use of a new tool within an existing community. This report goes through the technical and adoption challenges faced during the experimentation and the valuable content obtained thanks to CATALYST Collective Intelligence developments.

The whole CATALYST consortium thanks Ashoka for this successful test and for their valuable inputs for the project.

The whole report (34 pages) is available in the “Reports & Deliverables” section of the website.

As part of his involvement into CATALYST, Lee-Sean Huang, Strategist and Designer at Purpose Europe, one of CATALYST community partners, launched StoryEurope aiming at catalysing new narratives for Europe through Collective Intelligence.

Europe is currently facing social issues due to the Eurozone crisis and he found that the best way to challenge them was public debate to influence policy-makers and lead to concrete actions. If « New Narratives Europe » have already been explored, it will be the first time it is made through the eye of collective intelligence. Until Summer 2015, StoryEurope is accepting submissions of short narrative ideas, which will be published and discussed on DebateHub, one of CATALYST tools, to be able to map and visualize the semantic and social elements of the conversations.

By Autumn 2015, all contributions to the online conversations will be analysed and summarized to publish a “StoryEurope 2015” book.

The CAPS2020 project invite everybody to submit papers for this great project for future Europe and to take part to the coming tests of DebateHub, a tool developed by the Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University.

You can submit your paper(s) to Lee-Sean Huang by email (leesean@purpose.com).