Migrants as suspects? A participatory consensus conference to promote well-being and inclusion.

One consequence of the securitarian approach against terrorism is the conflictual request both to "spot radicals" and build social cohesion in local communities. As a result, migrants' communities feel discriminated and treated as a "suspect community". The European Project PROVA addressed the prevention of violent radicalization in youth, involving professionals and representatives of local communities, and producing Guidelines in order to contrast the marginalization of suspected communities. The empirical research refers to an innovative way to carry out the Participatory Consensus Conference (PCC), used to define Guidelines aimed at identifying suitable recommendations, costs and benefits for the foreseen policies. Participants were 12 stakeholders (Local Authorities, Juvenile Justice System, NGOs, and Educational Institutions). Methods: the PCC used a scientific process for achieving an agreement with a participatory approach. The final outcomes consisted in the definition of recommendations on the social cohesion among citizens, and the sensitiveness toward migrants' isolation and fear.

Modeling crowdsourcing as collective problem solving.

Crowdsourcing is a process of accumulating the ideas, thoughts or information from many independent participants, with aim to find the best solution for a given challenge. Modern information technologies allow for massive number of subjects to be involved in a more or less spontaneous way. Still, the full potentials of crowdsourcing are yet to be reached. We introduce a modeling framework through which we study the effectiveness of crowdsourcing in relation to the level of collectivism in facing the problem. Our findings reveal an intricate relationship between the number of participants and the difficulty of the problem, indicating the optimal size of the crowdsourced group. We discuss our results in the context of modern utilization of crowdsourcing.