Citizens as More Than Sensors, Citizens as Agents for Change.

How might we tap into citizens’ knowledge, context, and passion on social media to have them be much more than just sensors, but rather, agents of change? What would it take to be able to orchestrate citizens on social media to execute ambitious goals, e.g., creating new infrastructure to support the indoor navigation of the visually impaired? The main challenge that is blocking these type of interactions at scale is that citizens have heterogeneous knowledge and usually lack the skills needed to complete the work needed to reach the collective goals. To address this problem, I introduce a novel architecture conformed of Intelligent Civic Blocks that use machine learning to: 1) help citizens on social media to build at execution time the skills they need to complete work associated with the large-scale collective effort; 2) empower citizens to develop their creativity and entrepreneurship to propose creative solutions to build improved societies. In this talk, I will present case-studies showcasing how this proposed architecture can lead to collective action organized on social media in a range of areas (see Fig. 1 for an example). In difference to prior work that focused primarily on using citizens as simple sensors, this research pushes towards new intelligent systems that enable the orchestration of collective action on social media to create improved societies.