Social innovation and digital platforms

The rapid rise of digital platforms that bring innovative solutions to social and environmental problems reflect changes in the ways that civic engagement is exercised in many parts of the world. These digital social innovations span domains like civic crowdfunding, governance and political participation, neighbourhood information systems, crowd science, geographic information systems, and recycling platforms among others. DSIs are diverse in terms of their sectors, beneficiary populations, the nature of innovators, and organisational forms. During the recent years, although DSI have attracted public attention in Europe and specialised organisations and supportive institutions have emerged, the field remains under investigated by academic research. This prevents a systematic analysis of the extent to which DSIs effectively contribute to more sustainable societies. In this paper we discuss various definitions of DSI, describe this ecosystem in Europe and Turkey, present illustrative examples, and distinguish between four types with respect to their scale of operations (local versus global) and the nature of networks between users they help develop (dense clusters based on shared interests, versus loose and distributed networks).