Pierre-Alexandre Klein

Civic innovation network (CIN) is an apolitical Brussels-based lab that empowers a collective movement to transform the way our city works around the common values of openness, interdisciplinary and transparency. We want to design an environment where people, projects and communities of Brussels can collaborate using system led approaches to solve challenges of the city that are prioritised by its citizens. The lab embraces a diverse range of people and organisations and hence brings in diversity of experience and skills. At its heart are the core members, individuals who govern and drive the vision of the network. They are supported by the core organisers Hackistan, OuiShare, MakeSense and BIDs Belgium. The circles revolving around the core of CIN are the groups of individuals, projects and communities contributing to the structural strengths of this dynamic network. CIN is financially autonomous as it is supported by donations from citizens and sponsorship from different foundations; our open finances can be found here.

OUR VISION AND MISSION In the last few years several transition actors rose to address the challenges our societies face today: environmental degradation, instability in national and international political scenes, the widening gap of inequality, pollution, habitat loss, poor health and unfunded education, to name but a few. These actors run projects and set-up active movements contributing to a positive change, both in a city and in a global context. However, if these initiatives have served so far as individual trees, now circumstances require us to think in the context of a forest. The challenges mentioned above are systemic in nature and so far we have been applying single enterprise or single sector approach without reflecting on the interdependencies of the complex system. To reach a real impact in the city we require unprecedented collaboration and holistic thinking. Our vision is to push the city of Brussels to innovate at the systems level in order to boost collective well-being and solve local problems in light of global challenges.

CIN, today is a civic sandbox for dialogue, observation, interconnection and support of and for the communities to co-create. Our mission is to nurture the civic sandbox for it to build people public and private partnerships. And, to so we have a suite of tools and processes:

Creating a dialogue forum to identify crucial challenges of the city and to learn about solutions from across industries by meeting different actors. Being an observation centre to grasp and process the collected information in order to map strategic interconnections in the city. Incubating Impact Joint Ventures that can tackle the challenges of the city. Providing support structures like empowerment and financial viability to incubated IJVs by connecting them with public and private organisations.

THE SUMMIT: “ATOMIA - OUR FUTURE” A two-fold strategy to boost civic innovation with an impactful incubation of Impact Joint Ventures: Firstly, with the identification of the challenges in our city with the support of transition actors. Secondly, in this process we will also generate an interactive map of the local ecosystem that will trigger the potential disconnected links. The crucial challenges will then be overlapped with mapping of the local ecosystem which will allow us to detect the first IJVs to showcase at the summit.

Fall 2017 will trek into an uncharted territory with a surprising remix of projects collaborating on focussed Impact Joint Venture that solve civic challenges. The moment of celebration of these pioneering IJVs in Brussels is what we call “Atomia - our future”. The summit is a three-day civic immersive experience that will take place on 27-29 October 2017 in Brussels.

It will be an occasion where citizens, entrepreneurs, cutting-edge innovators, corporate actors and public officials gather for three days of deep immersion, co-creation and formal collaborations. Further focusses of the summit will be building of formal collaborations between public & private organisations, missions, along with sessions of international speakers. Our final goal is, indeed, to build a resilient dynamic between diverse stakeholders, within an open, collaborative and win-win multistakeholder framework.