Resilience through digital platforms
The research project investigates how municipalities can improve their resilience to multiple social crises by orchestrating citizen-driven innovation. Through the transdisciplinary involvement of civil society, municipalities can benefit from new innovation impulses or leave parts of the innovation process to them in order to be able to react more agilely to crises and challenges and at the same time enable civil society to participate more by strengthening their own capacities. The project is therefore researching what characteristics an open digital innovation platform for municipalities must have to enable low-threshold self-organization by innovators from civil society. On this platform, they should be able to develop robust and variable solutions for crisis situations together, ideally in collaboration with the municipality and on an equal level.
In urban contexts, the socio-ecological challenges in the area of sustainability, such as mobility, climate change, food supply, local recreation, housing or education, tend to require solutions at regional level that comply with the principle of subsidiarity. For this reason, an additional focus of the research project is on the active interweaving of urban and rural areas as socially and functionally complementary spaces for the common good. For the design and provision of such a platform, the study also considers issues of data protection and provision as a public service. The permanent and sustainable establishment of a digital platform for networking civil society actors in urban-rural constellations is intended to support municipalities in orchestrating innovations initiated by citizens and to strengthen the resilience of a municipality's society and its spatial interdependencies.
The core objective of the project is to investigate how the resilience of municipalities can be improved by orchestrating citizen-driven innovation. As a pillar for achieving the goal, an open digital innovation platform for municipalities is being designed on which innovators from civil society can organize themselves to jointly develop solutions in crises, possibly in cooperation with the municipality. The project aims to provide answers to the question of how these digital platforms must be socio-technically designed and embedded to increase the resilience of municipalities in urban-rural constellations. The intention is to gain insights into the conceptual aspects of such a platform with regard to the initiation of innovation projects through the broad and active participation of the population, data protection and possible provision as a public service.
In the project, fortiss focuses on the question: How can an interoperable and trustworthy platform be established?
On the one hand, the capabilities of people, organizations, physical objects, etc. are modeled and mapped to the requirements of an innovation project in order to make the data, information and knowledge required for the innovation process efficiently and interoperably accessible. On the other hand, legal and organizational requirements are recorded and modelled so that the trustworthiness of the innovation platform can be increased, especially with a focus on conformity.
02.01.2024 - 31.12.2026
