Better Together – Empowering Citizen Collectives with Community Learning

Citizen collectives have the potential to contribute significantly to various societal transitions. Rather than focusing on the individual, collective action improves empowerment and agency, and can contribute to effective collaboration between citizens, policy makers and other institutes. This can be facilitated by enabling efficient monitoring, reflection, and multi-level learning, but an infrastructure is missing to scale bottom-up approaches and bridge the gap with the systems world of government policy makers. We discuss four open problems that need to be addressed in order to create this comprehensive data and learning infrastructure for empowering citizen collectives: 1. Providing value and accessibility for all; 2. Handling privacy, providing trust and autonomy; 3. Enable community learning from observational data; 4. Enabling scaling in order to accelerate and link to the ‘systems world’. We conclude with sketching the research methodology that we plan to use to address these challenges.