Visualising open communities. Guidelines from three case studies

Abstract

One of the most interesting and promising phenomena of the last years is the emergence of social innovation initiatives, a loose and world-wide movement of people, projects and organisations that are addressing social challenges in fields like healthcare, education, employment, democratic participation, migration and the environment. We especially consider to be very promising those initiatives that are based around communities that adopts digital platforms, develop digital solutions and are open in their processes and results. The importance of online open communities in developing and scaling social innovations could then lead to an improved and broader understanding of the dynamics of social innovations and online platforms. The article aims at improving the knowledge about the use of graphical visualisations for understanding open communities, which data sources and formats are available and which ones are missing for this task, which are the main design requirements and strategies for this task, and which are the common elements in existing ongoing experiences in visualising open communities.