What is DSI?

Digital social innovation brings together people and digital technologies to tackle social and environmental challenges.

Across the world, thousands of people, projects and organisations are using digital technologies to tackle social and environmental challenges in fields ranging from healthcare, education and employment to democratic participation, migration and the environment. These initiatives use a broad range of established and emerging technologies - including collaborative platforms, open data, citizen sensing, digital fabrication, open hardware, blockchain, machine learning, and augmented and virtual reality - to empower citizens to collaborate and deliver social impact. They have the potential to transform the way our public services operate, revitalise civic life and allow citizens to become direct participants in tackling social challenges.

We call this field digital social innovation (DSI), a term which overlaps significantly with other terms including tech for good, social tech and civic tech.

DSI projects are characterised by:

• the primacy of social or environmental impact over financial return;
• a dedication to openness, collaboration and citizen empowerment.

The broad aims of DSI are to:

• harness digital technologies to improve lives and reorient technology towards more social ends;
• empower citizens to take more control over their lives, and to use their collective knowledge and skills to positive effect;
• Increase the accountability and transparency of government, business and civil society;
• foster and promote alternatives to the dominant technological and business models — alternatives which are open and collaborative rather than closed and competitive;
• use technology to create a more environmentally sustainable society.

To see examples of DSI in practice, take a look at our library of case studies of innovation from across and beyond Europe and explore our data visualisation of DSI projects and organisations. For a deeper look into the field and the most exciting opportunities and most pressing challenges, check out our report What next for digital social innovation?.

If you’re working on DSI, register now and get your project or organisation onto the map in just a few minutes.