The Open Call for Collaboration has been a great success. We received many applications and thank all participants.
We warmly congratulate the winners and thank them for their implication in the testing of CATALYST tools: Ashoka, Edgeryders, Loomio, the OECD, OuiShare, CHEST and the University of Naples. You can read their feedback reports in the public resources section.
We also thank AutoConsulta Cuidadana and Ganemos Madrid, which win the Open Call as well but couldn’t commit to the testing phase because of their strong involvement in the preparation of the Spanish elections.The partners of the CATALYST project develop collective intelligence tools for social and societal innovation. These tools can be viewed as comprising a spectrum of capabilities that range from collective sensing (where a collective gathers data on its environment), through sensemaking (interpreting data to identify patterns that warrant action), ideation (developing ideas about which actions to pursue), decision-making (selecting the best actions), and finally collective action (implementing these actions in a coordinated effective way).
CATALYST partners launched in July 2014 an Open Call for Collaboration to community partners interested in trying and testing the collective intelligence tools, processes and methodologies developed through the project activities among their own communities. The tests took place between January and July 2015.
Although the open call is closed, we are always looking for partners interested in using our collective intelligence tools in order to start large-scale discussions around a pre-defined societal issue. All our tools are available in open source.
Below you can find the Open Call rules.Future Community partners will have to meet the following criteria:
- Must be developing or have developed a community of users larger than 50-100 people (ideally a few hundred)
- Already be using a web platform or social media to host their exchanges and discussions
- Be using a non-proprietary platform (open source) for interoperability concerns with the different modules developed within CATALYST
A simple 3-page document is required.
On the front page, you should indicate your organization name and address as well as the name and details of the contact person.
For the proposal abstract, a maximum of 2000 characters should describe your proposed work and interest in testing the CATALYST developments.A 3-page document is required.
On the front page, you should indicate your organization name and address as well as the name and details of the contact person.
For the proposal abstract, a maximum of 2000 characters should describe your proposed work and interest in testing the CATALYST developments.
In addition of the 3-page document, you should indicate in details the costs required to run the tests and specify the funding that would be requested from CATALYST and the resources that your organization may be ready to devote to this project (the requested funding may be lower than the total costs should the organization be ready to cover part of the costs with its own funds). The proposal must be prepared in English. Proposals submitted in any other language will not be evaluated. Proposals must be submitted electronically in PDF format to the following address: collaboration@catalyst-fp7.eu, the subject line of the email being “CATALYST Open collaboration: proposal from <name of your organization>” Proposals must be received not later than October 1st, 2014 at 05:00pm, Brussels time. Late proposals or proposals submitted to any other address will not be evaluated. All proposals will undergo an internal review from the CATALYST Project Steering Committee and will then be submitted for approval to the European Commission. Additional information on the CATALYST project can be obtained by visiting the project website http://www.catalyst-fp7.eu, or by contacting collaboration@catalyst-fp7.eu This page answers to the questions about the CATALYST Open Call. The page will be updated regularly based on the questions we receive. If your question is not answered below you can send your question here.
What type of communities are we looking for the trial of Assembl?
As an online debating tool, Assembl enables large-scale discussions around a pre-defined societal issue. The scope of the test for Assembl is large-scale ideation. We intend to test Assembl in the context of a real discussion about an engaging issue with a community of participants.
The community partner should be able to:
- Identify a mobilizing issue to debate upon (societal issue generating interest in large communities)
- Engage participants online (at least 50, preferably 100-200+)
- Identify a Community Manager internally who will be trained by CATALYST to use CATALYST tools and methodologies (harvesting, synthesis)
- Provide CATALYST with a complete feedback on the outcomes of the test and formulate recommendations
If the community partner already uses an existing platform (social media, wiki, forum, etc.), CATALYST will integrate it with the CATALYST modules that will be used for the debate. If the community partner does not use any existing platform or does not wish to use it, CATALYST will provide direct access to the Assembl platform. This second scenario is preferable in order to limit integration costs.
What type of communities are we looking for the trial of DebateHub?
DebateHub is new online ideation and deliberation tool to support more robust debates and discussions than traditional social media platforms.
It provides a new interface for collective ideation, voting and argumentation and an advanced visual analytics dashboard to track, monitor and make sense of the collective dynamics emerging with the community debate. Thus, DebateHub is meant for :
- A distributed community of citizens, learners or employees,
- That are tacking a specific challenge for their neighbour, city, school or organisation,
- And that need to identify potential innovative solutions to this problem,
- By discussing and assessing the pro and con of each alternative solution.
Then, the community partner should:
- Manage or be part of a community with at least 5000 members and
- Guarantee that at least a group of 50-100 people will actively engage in the testing of DebateHub by hosting an online discussion on a key problem for your community
What type of communities are we looking for the trial of LiteMap?
LiteMap is a tool for collaborative web annotation and knowledge mapping. It can be used to map out visually a social debate that is happening in different forums, social media and community Website. It is a place to harvest the main issues, ideas, pros and cons happening in an online debate and to connect and visualize them in the form of network graphs. This tool has a bookmarklet to harvest content from the Web, and 2-D canvases (the Maps) in which harvested content can be connected to build argument maps. These are network representations of the issues, ideas, and arguments around a specific discussion topic.
So, if you:
- Are part or manage a group of journalists, policy advocates, community activists, social leaders, community managers etc and
- Need a tool to summarise the state of a public debate and to present it to a specific audience or community
Then you are the right candidate to submit a project proposal to use and test LiteMap.
What is Edgesense offering?
- Case 1. Community manager/moderator
Every conversation has a structure. Community managers can check who is talking to whom, which users are central vs peripheral in the conversation, who are the gateways etcetera. This is useful for curating the debate from a relational point of view: it also helps determine which users carry more authoritativeness (eigenvector centrality or Pagerank type measures).
- Case 2. Advanced user
Individual users might use Edgesense to find herself in the graph and get an idea of her position in the conversation. Is she central or peripheral? Which subcommunity is she a part of? Is there a dense network of relationships somewhere else, that she is not participating in? A competitive user might even try to implement strategies to increase her centrality!
In both cases, a nice plus of Edgesense is that it lets its users learn about conversation networks in a natural, intuitive way (intuitive because the learning happens in the context of the online community that the user is a part in and knows well).