About us

COLDIGIT Collective Intelligence through Digital Tools is a project involving

University of Helsinki (Finland)

who coordinates COLDIGIT. The project is led by Adjunct Professor Mikko Rask from the Centre for Consumer Society Research, where he heads the Politics of Co-creation research area. The research team consists of D. Soc.Sci., PI Nina Kahma, Post-doctoral researcher Pekka Tuominen and Bokyong Shin.

For details on their expertise, see profiles on the University of Helsinki research portal: Mikko Rask, Nina Kahma, Pekka Tuominen, Bokyong Shin.

 

Nesta (United Kingdom)

is the UK’s innovation foundation for social good. In COLDIGIT, Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design will be leading the work identifying the main barriers and enabling factors to mainstreaming and scaling the use of Collective Intelligence tools and methods in public institutions, as well as creating policy advice based on the lessons of the project. 

The Centre for Collective Intelligence Design helps institutions and communities to tackle complex social problems by bringing together diverse perspectives, new sources of data and digital technologies. Their work draws on a wide variety of different methods and disciplines, from crowdsourcing to AI, with the ultimate goal to help groups of people to become smarter together. 

Relevant previous publications include the Collective Intelligence Playbook, Using Collective Intelligence to Solve Public Problems, Civic AI and Digital Democracy. The Nesta team for COLDIGIT consists of Oli Whittington (research lead), Aleks Berditchevskaia, Issy Gill and Peter Baeck, who can be reached through collective.intelligence@nesta.org.uk.

 

SINTEF AS  (Norway)

is a multidisciplinary research organisation with expertise in a wide range of technological and scientific disciplines, medicine and the social sciences. It is Scandinavia’s largest independent non-profit research organisation and conducts contract R&D for the private and public sector. SINTEF is represented in COLDIGIT by SINTEF Digital, a multidisciplinary entity revolving around information and communications technology.

SINTEF has a wide expertise on the design and evaluation of digital socio-technical systems, in particular ICT systems that support crowd collaboration and engagement applied to social innovation.

In the COLDIGIT project, SINTEF will lead the efforts related to identification and description in a database of digital tools for collective intelligence. Through collaboration with the City of Trondheim especially, SINTEF will contribute to the investigation of the usage of such digital tools by various stakeholders and the re-design of participatory mechanisms in a pilot. SINTEF will assess how digital tools and their various features perform during the conduction of initiatives involving the public and how these tools contribute to the participatory process. COLDIGIT fits SINTEF Digital’s strategy of being a reference on public sector digitalization process, user-centred design and social computing.

SINTEF research team in COLDIGIT consists of Jacqueline Floch, Matthieu Branlat, Asbjørn Lein Aalberg and Siri Mariane Holen.

 

University of Gothenburg and Digidem Lab (Sweden)

The team has a mix of academics and civil society with long experience of researching and executing dialogue processes in which residents influence urban development:

From Gothenburg Research Institute (GRI), University of Gothenburg (UGOT), participate Jenny Stenberg and Jaan-Henrik Kain with competence in action-oriented, complex, multi-stakeholder design, planning and policy-making processes, including citizen participation in urban transformation and transdisciplinary learning and knowledge production. Stenberg and Kain participate in the process of shaping the processes and analyze the results in relation to a set of criteria. They will lead WP4 Piloting and co-lead WP2.

From Digidem Lab participates Sanna Ghotbi and colleagues. Digidem Lab is a democracy lab that supports municipalities, city districts, and public institutions in designing participation processes to increase power to those groups that according to the Swedish Democracy Investigation are underrepresented in decision making: women, immigrants and young people. Their role in the project is to bring expertise on digital platforms and methods for increased citizen participation as well as carrying out a pilot with a public housing company in Biskopsgården in Gotenburg, implementing a participatory budget process for their tenants.

 

Together with