Coladepez

Networks for Citizen Participation (CP-Network)

New professional profiles for new needs

The VKSN requires something fundamental of what is incessantly spoken about, but is not specifically dealt with: the need to have new professional profiles, the professional profiles of the networks era. Along with guaranteeing access to so-called Information Society Technologies and promoting projects of this type, it is necessary to promote the formation of new professional profiles capable of designing virtual structures of network tasks to manage projects such as those mentioned, and to extract the knowledge generated there, as well as to develop, experiment and apply the appropriate methodologies for each project.

The combination of all these aspects guarantees the four pillars of activity in virtual collective networking areas:

* Continuity, or eliminating the leap from the ephemeral to the persistent. In this way the variable of the participants dedication to the projects of collective work online is reduced considerably.

* Sustainability, to minimize the impact of the degree of dedication and the different levels of knowledge of the participants, regardless of when they first acceded to the VKSN, applying proven management methodologies, context creation, the production of synthesized materials about what has been done on the network and, above all, the organization of information and knowledge flows in the virtual structure.

* Interaction, to ensure that feedback of ideas, experiences, cases, lines of research, new contributions, etc. are adequately reflected and combined in the debates, in the participatory intervention to create contexts and in the elaboration of knowledge products to obtain applicable results in function of fixed objectives.

* Visibility of everything that is done, both for members of the network and for citizens interested in accessing the materials contributed or created through the network’s communication media to apply them to their own circumstances. What you don’t see, it does not exists.

In all the VKSN we have organized, the participation of network members has never been a problem. The marriage between «goal setting» and «CIN citizens» has always proved be unbeatable. What are CIN citizens? Concerned, Interested Citizens, who Need to reach agreed objectives to solve the issues raised.

Which is the same thing as saying that if the citizen is the main character in the generation and management of information and knowledge, in the definition, creation and evaluation of the policies in which they are involved, then they are part of the decision-making process. As a result, we will have overcome the difficulty of the technological barrier for starting to explore the possibilities and potential of information society technologies (TSIs) as part of the CP-Network.

Citizen participation and social innovation

At the same time, we will have experienced first-hand that the much-vaunted social innovation is actually the realization of projects conducted by the citizens themselves, for those interested, to enjoy the results, without the need for mediation by external agents who determine how and when to achieve what is intended. If we accept this definition, VKSNs are, and function as, authentic machines of social innovation.

In the coming weeks we will examine projects that we have worked on in VKSN since 1999, projects which we are currently developing and projects based on knowledge networks in other parts of the Internet planet.

Translation: Miguel Angel Pérez Álvarez