This book is about people, it is about “we”. It is about the daily life relations between democracy and people and the utopic state of the re-generation of democracy through social innovation. At the very center of this idea, citizens (we) are considered experts when it comes to the solution of their own obstacles, finding answers from their own experiences.

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This form of innovation could be defined as collaborative practices. This approach expands the range of participants that could contribute to different causes. Here, people are the ones making things happen, enabling ecosystems, and creating future visions of their own society.

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The city of Medellin will be the geographical context of this study. It is a city that moved from violence to urban innovation and has faced multiple changes and facets over the years. The main goal of this research is to show how the concept of social innovation can turn into a driver of change. People are able to apply design (seen as a human capability) in democracy through collaborative practices such as social innovation and consequently transform the idea of democracy itself.

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This study is also about transformations and the idea that all these changes we are going through in the world or in a particular society need participation and collective actions. Therefore, these actions and behaviors will affect democracy. The goal of this book is to understand why people do participate and what their motivations are regarding social innovation and thereby bring participatory democracy to a new context of learnings and discoveries led by people (we).