Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 214, 109-152 (2012)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01690-3

Regular Article

Towards a global participatory platform

Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

¹ Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keyness, MK7 6AA, UK
² Distributed Information Systems Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL-IC-IIF-LSIR, Bâtiment BC, Station 14, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
³ Institut für Visualisierung und Interaktive Systeme, Universität Stuttgart, Universitätstraße 38, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany
⁴ Dept. Mathematics, University College London, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT London, UK
⁵ Embedded Systems Lab, University of Passau, IT-Zentrum/International House, Innstrasse 43, 94032 Passau, Germany
⁶ School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK
⁷ Information Systems Laboratory, University of the Aegean, Karlovasi, Samos 83200, Greece
⁸ Serious Games Institute, Coventry Innovation Village, Coventry University Technology Park, Cheetah Road, Coventry CV1 2TL, UK
⁹ Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Building, Aytoun Street, Manchester M1 3GH, UK
¹⁰ Citizen Cyberscience Centre, CERN, UNOSAT, 211 Geneva, Switzerland
¹¹ Dept. Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, University College London, Gower Street WC1E 6BT, UK
¹² Research Group on Artificial Intelligence, Hungarian Academy of Science and University of Szeged, PO Box 652, 6701 Szeged, Hungary
¹³ Skype Labs, Skype, Akadeemia tee 15b, Tallinn 12618, Estonia
¹⁴ Fraunhofer-Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD, Fraunhoferstr. 5, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany
¹⁵ Dept. Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton St, London WC1H, UK
¹⁶ Dept. Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, SW7 2BT London, UK
¹⁷ Disney Research Zurich, Clausiusstrasse 49, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
¹⁸ ETH Zurich, Clausiusstraße 50, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

Revised: 9 October 2012
Published online: 5 December 2012

Abstract

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project’s own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed.