Gareth Rogers, technology lead for D-CENT at Thoughtworks, was interviewed at the CAPS2015, the annual international event on Collective Awareness Platforms for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPS). The conference was organised on the 8th of July 2015 in Brussels.

According to Gareth, the biggest opportunity D-CENT has is a chance to work with people who are already doing this on the ground, finding ways to help them. How we can build tools that will help the people who are already working in this space, Gareth ponders. From software point of view, D-CENT’s main challenge is to find ways to build tools that people actually want to use – and which at the same time, are in fact privace-aware.

In the CAPS2015 conference, D-CENT also arranged a roundtable “Technologies for network democracy and citizen actions” chaired by Francesca Bria (D-CENT coordinator from Nesta). The session included following speakers: Aral Balkan (Ind.ie), Jaakko Korhonen (Open Knowledge Finland), Daniel Freund (Transparency International EU), Carsten Berg (The ECI Campaign), Miguel Arana Catania (LaboDemo), Gareth Rogers (ThoughtWorks), Joonas Pekkanen (Open Ministry), Samer Hassan (P2PValue project) and Fabrizio Sestini (DG Connect, European Commission). Read our blog post here.

The CAPS projects are leveraging the emerging “network effect” by combining data coming from people, social media and real environments (“Internet of Things”) in order to build public, distributed, and privacy aware collective awareness platforms to address social challenges and present possible solutions. D-CENT is one of the projects in the CAPS project portfolio.

This blog was originally published on dcentproject.eu. View the original blog. 

Photo Credit: Valentina Sommariva