SPACES: Decentralised Social Spaces for Crowd and Data Driven Innovation

Following its determined values, DevStat is committed to participating in European H2020 projects putting the focus in R & D + i. In 2018 the company presented a proposal to implement the project “SPACES: Decentralised Social Spaces for Crowd and Data Driven Innovation” pertaining to the Information and Communications Technologies program (Objective: ITC-28-2018: Future Hyper-connected Sociality (c) Support of new Social Media initiatives). The preparation of this proposal was led by INTRASOFT International S.A. company that offers the development of mobile applications, development and testing of applications, content management systems, among others.

Below, we present a brief overview of the SPACES’ project proposed, which, although it did not exceed the threshold, generated a very valuable “expertise” for the company:

In recent years, our society has experienced the proliferation of large online social networks that have evolved to a keystone of civic bringing about numerous challenges among which data ownership, control, security and trust. Much of the controversy lies on the power that social networks can gain by accessing and processing large volumes of user data, which is exacerbated by improved cloud infrastructures and AI potential. In addition, the coupling between data and online social network applications limits the innovation potential of our society. SPACES introduces an innovative, decentralised, people-lead paradigm for Social Media deployment. It presents a trustworthy framework composed of a distributed reference architecture and an open-source technology suite and platform that enables the general public and communities to create multi-purpose Social Spaces while maintaining control over the use of their data and information. SPACES will exemplify the new paradigm by developing a framework for open data-centric decentralised social platforms decoupling user profiles and data from applications. The SPACES paradigm provisions two operational levels: a technology level employing decentralised technologies and architectures, and a business innovation level that will foster a peer-to-peer trusted ecosystem for data-driven innovation aiming to maximise the social and economic value of data. SPACES will foster a marketplace for data assets and data-driven innovation, a co-creation space for tools and services and a crowdfunding space. SPACES will demonstrate and validate its framework by means of three use cases addressing users of high, medium and low media technology literacy, as well as three distinct societal challenges in the areas of innovative data-driven services, trust-worthy data-journalism and crowd heritage. SPACES will also employ two developer workshops during its lifetime, and a large conference and public engagement event at the end.

We would like to underline the importance of the support received from FEDER and IVACE funds within the Business R & D Plan 2018, specifically HORIZONTE-CV, to prepare and develop the proposal of implementation for this project.

PREPARATION OF PROPOSALS FOR CALLS H2020. File number IMAPEA / 2018/54.