A framework for collaborative social, economic and environmental development: Building a digital ecosystem for societal empowerment

Traditional approaches to Social, Economic and Environmental Development (SEED) have historically employed a closed, top-down model in which problems are viewed narrowly and the input of local stakeholders is rarely sought. More recent efforts to address development from a holistic, multidisciplinary perspective-while a major step in the right direction-have been hindered by a lack of appropriate tools and well-defined processes to enable disparate resources to work effectively together towards common goals. The proposed SEED Framework leverages and expands the mandate of Digital Agenda set forth by several nations, and the resulting technology development with additional design patterns for the purpose of building a collaborative SEED Digital Ecosystem. The framework aims to effectively support self-organizing, multidisciplinary collaborations and, most importantly, to translate concepts and ideas into actions for holistic and sustained social, economic and environmental development with a deep awareness of the local culture.