http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/collectiveawareness (Digital Agenda For Europe)

Collective Awareness Platforms, or how to use networks to connect citizens and ideas for social innovation, leveraging on collective intelligence and action to address sustainability challenges.

The Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPS) are ICT systems leveraging the emerging “network effect” by combining:

• open online social media,
• distributed knowledge creation, and
• data from real environments (“Internet of Things”).

The objective is to create awareness of problems and possible solutions requesting collective efforts, enabling new forms of social innovation. The Collective Awareness Platforms are expected to support environmentally aware, grassroots processes and practices to share knowledge, to achieve changes in lifestyle, production and consumption patterns, and to set up more participatory democratic processes. Although there is consensus about the global span of the sustainability problems that are affecting our current society, including the economic models and the environment, there is little awareness of the role that each and every one of us can play to ease such problems.