Roundtable Discussion of a Manifesto on Social Media for Social Innovation

Most of the current hype around Social Media turns around its use for leisure and entertainement and the opportunities thereby generated for the marketing and advertisement industries: the “attention industry”. While those applications are and will be relevant indeed, they only touch the surface of the “social” potential of the Social Media. Communication mechanisms are one of the threads in the fabric of societies. The new communication and coordination possibilities afforded by the Social Media could be used for a societal evolution going much beyond the economics of leisure and consumption.

In this context, the Telefónica Chair on Social Media of the University Pompeu Fabra, with the support of the Telefónica, is promoting a Manifesto on Social Media for Social Innovation. Its objective is to propose actions oriented extract the best of the potential synergies among those two social concepts. The Manifesto will put forward a frame of principles and intentions that, if widely shared, would help using the Social Media in order to fight the limitations of speed and scale that need to be overcome for Social Innovation to become an alternative to currently established institutional mechanisms.

The agreement on a first version of the Manifesto is included in the agenda of the workshop on Social Innovation and Social Media (SISoM) which will take place during the 5th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM-11) in Barcelona. The objective of the Roundtable, which will be open to a wider audience than the Workshop, is to foster a wider discussion,elaboration and dissemination of the Manifesto.

The final version of the Manifesto on Social Media for Social Innovation will be presented at the event Challenge Social Innovation – Innovating innovation by research – 100 years after Schumpeter that will take place in September in Vienna.