Digital Social-good innovators bet on blockchains to solve big problems
On the 15th December, ChiC attended the “Blockchains for Social Good conference” in Turin, Italy, for a rich day of presentations, best practices, debates around the Blockhain and it applications for the public good.
In distributed ledger technology, we may be witnessing one of those potential explosions of creative potential that catalyse exceptional levels of innovation. The technology could prove to have the capacity to deliver a new kind of trust to a wide range of services.
The conference participants’ tried to answer to a challenging question: “How can we promote the creation of solutions and applications based on blockchain technology, which address social and environmental issues? How can work to shift economic and social paradigms through blockchain technology, increasing the economic prosperity of individuals and communities?”
Fabrizio Sestini, leading the DG CONNECT initiative on CAPS, launched the Horizon €5m European Commission Prize: “Blockchains for social good”. The
prize has been designed by the European Commission to promote scalable, efficient and high-impact decentralized solutions to social innovation challenges leveraging the technology used in blockchain. He also promoted the Digital Social Innovation Manifesto initiative www.dsimanifesto.eu
Denis Roio presented DECODE (Decentralised Citizens Owned Data Ecosystem), a CAPS project, which develops practical tools to protect people’s data and digital sovereignty. It combines blockchain technology with attribute-based cryptography. The decision of whether to share data (and on what terms) is made by citizens taking part in the pilots in an informed and secure way. It also develops a new system of data rights and entitlements to facilitate the ownership and sharing of information.
Municipalities are at the forefront of the open innovation for their communities’ welfare. They intrinsically collect critical data from citizens while through smart cities applications they gather communities’ sensitive information, which can be reused for multiple purposes. Representatives of Barcelona, Torino and Milan – Francesca Bria, Barcelona City Council, Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer, Paola Pisano Deputy Mayor for Innovation and Smart City, City of Torino, and Cristina Tajani City of Milan Cabinet Member for Labour Policies, Business, Commerce, Human Resources – presented their cities’ plans in developing services based on the block chains technology. They all underlined how “data” is a resource to be treated with care, defining how data can be used and for which purposes should be a subject of critical and political debate.
Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPSSI) is manage by the Coordination and Support Action CHiC project which is funded under Grant Agreement No. 687686 by the European Commission.