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Citizen innovation
Nowadays, a significant part of value creation that comes with social, cultural
and economic development of our countries, cities and communities
comes from own citizens innovating initiatives, supported largely by the
networking that digital media facilitates.
Current context: technology and citizenship
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) development has supposed
changes, not only in terms of technologic innovation, but in generating
new ways of social interaction too. In this way, some specialists talk
about Knowledge Society birth like an evolution from Information Society
(Castelfranchi, 2007; UNESCO, 2005).
While the Information Society was limited to generate and distribute information,
the Knowledge Society refers mainly to societies in that knowledge
is produced, shared and accessible to every society member who is able to
use it to improve human conditions. This evolution finds in the ICT a good
supporter, especially with the change from 1.0 web to 2.0 web where users
are able to leave being simple content consumers (downloads) to be individual
or collective producers (upload) in real time.
Because of that, nowadays, every internet user can be a potentially producer
and co-producer of actions and contents, and these can go from
collaborative texts until cultural processes, from creating scientific communities
until opinion blogs, from collective processes of politics and public
budget definition until articulating social movements that have impact on
daily life.
Digital technologies further than have extended our social interaction, they
are now part of our citizenship actions. This digital culture is generating
new ways of interaction between people, so between people and institutions.
If digital technology access was necessary for Information Society
inclusion, it is still more necessary in the content generation and knowledge
production era, not being more a technologic issue but a citizen rights
issue. The growth on access levels to digital technologies can carry a range
of benefits to the economic, social, cultural and politic development, for
instance: economy diversification, open and electronic government implementation,
citizen participation on public decision making; and citizens
involvement in different networks that allows them to face problems and
reduce social inequalities and, as we see later, stimulate citizen innovation.