The form below was sent out (on 01 Jun 25) by the Scottish government funded agency Interface-Online – which matchmakes public sector initiatives seeking innovative partnerships with Scottish Universities.
Ref: 25-IF-7088 – Value Prospecting Platform – HEI Form.docx
Please see below details of a recent opportunity received by Interface – The knowledge connection for business. For more information on Interface see www.interface-online.org.uk
Please confirm your interest in developing this potential collaboration further by the reply date indicated below, and we will issue this information to the client.
Please note that expression of interest from the client company may take some time to come to fruition but Interface will keep the point of contact within your institution updated so they will be aware of any developments.
The information included in this Interface Enquiry Form and accompanying e-mail should under no circumstances be shared with anyone out with your Academic Institution.
| Interface Enquiry Number: | 25-IF-7088 – Value Prospecting Platform |
| Response Required By | 2 to 3 weeks once project outline is agreed |
| Business sector | Social Enterprise and Third Sector |
| Sector of Expertise required (University departments / Schools) Can select up to three academic disciplines | Computing Science |
| Social Sciences | |
| Languages and Culture | |
| Geographical Location of company | Aberdeen |
| Brief summary of project description (50-100 words) | CORE VALUE CARE (CVC) is a social innovation venture founded by Robert Weir to develop inclusive processes that embed empathy, care, and nurturing into organisational and community decision-making. Its mission is to create tools that empower people to define what matters to them and to shape collective action around those shared values. This application seeks academic partners interested in co-developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the Value Prospecting (VP) platform. It is hoped that the project will: (a) Design a visual tool (the Value Story Navigator) that lets people explore shared values and see who is affected by different ideas or actions. (b) Build and test simple processes for people to share what they care about, suggest ideas, and understand the impacts of those ideas. (c) Explore how users interact with the platform, and how it can support empathy, inclusion, and better group decision-making. CVC are interested in collaborators working across human-computer interaction (HCI), informatics, deliberative democracy, behavioural science, social computing, knowledge organisation, and participatory design, especially those focused on ethical decision support, collective insight, and civic engagement. |
| If your company is registered in Scotland please provide your Company Number | Core Value Care (CVC) is not registered yet. We are seeking trustees to co-write the Articles of Association … for a Charity or Company limited by guarantee (CLG). |
| Date of Incorporation | Registration pending trustee inputs |
| How many Employees do you have? | 1 (unpaid) |
| What is the turnover of your business p.a.? | Pre-revenue |
| What budget do you have in place to support the proposed collaborative project? | Robert Weir @CVC is seeking to build relationships with like-minded researchers, practitioners, and students. He is also exploring support for a Phase 1 project through an Innovation Voucher. |
| What are your and the company’s previous / existing links with: Universities Research Institutes Innovation Centres | Informal contacts exist with the University of Aberdeen’s Computing Faculty (Aberdeen Software Factory). In the 1990s Robert provided summer work experience student placements linking with Robert Gordon University staff and students on heating engineering and 3D design. |
| If you have had previous links (as detailed above), did you receive any funding to support the collaborative project? | No |
| COMPANY BACKGROUND: The company should be described in a way that is easily understood by others and provide a summary of the key products / processes / services. | CORE VALUE CARE (CVC) is a social innovation venture founded by Robert Weir to develop inclusive processes that embed empathy, care, and nurturing into organisational and community decision-making. CVC’s mission is to create tools that empower people to define what matters to them and to shape collective action around those shared values. CVC does this through Value Prospecting (VP)—an open, online platform designed to support the development and deliberation of ideas that reflect shared human values. VP integrates four deliberative public processes: (1) Developing a Representative Values Register: Individuals share their personal and collective values, building a living record of what matters to them and their communities. (2) Building a Living Register of Prospects Participants propose and co-develop projects through structured dialogue, helping shape actionable responses to shared concerns. (3) Registering Prospect Value Impacts on Stakeholders: Collaborators assess how each Prospect might affect others, helping make wider impacts more visible. (4) Exploring What Matters – Value Prospecting: Using a visual knowledge map, prospectors explore ideas, discover hidden impacts on other individuals and communities, and consider better options. For additional detail, please see white papers: – Vision and Intent, Design for Social Learning |
| MARKET BACKGROUND: Describe the current markets and future opportunities for the product / process / service? What is the route to market for the product / process / service? | Value Prospecting (VP) is a new kind of digital civic platform, drawing on proven pro-social methods to synthesise a single, ‘value-led’ collaborative system. It draws on commons-based approaches (e.g. Wikipedia). Like CCF it supports intrinsic values using ethical frameworks like Value Sensitive Design. Like NatCen VP uses processes grounded in public engagement. It adapts deliberative approaches exemplified by Mini-publics, Polis (video) and the Citizen’s Initiative Review—enabling collective reflection, shared understanding, and thoughtful decision-making. Unlike social media or conventional platforms, VP is designed to foster empathy, care, and social learning. It offers a scalable way for individuals and communities to define what matters and explore how their actions affect others—locally, globally, and across generations. Route to Market; Founder Robert Weir is funding the initial development of a Minimum Viable Product and will ideally co-sponsor a Collaborative Doctoral Award. Ongoing support will be sought from academic, open-source, philanthropic, and social innovation networks. |
| PROJECT BACKGROUND: The project or challenge that is being addressed should be clearly explained and highlight how the project will fit within the company’s wider product / process /service development plans? | VP is a participatory digital platform that helps people share their values, develop ideas, and see how those ideas affect others. It combines collective intelligence, ethical reasoning and interactive visual tools, supporting inclusive value aligned decisions, norms and behaviours. The challenge is to balance inclusivity and rigour -supporting proportionality, consensus and principled disagreement when needed. VP must make global and intergenerational perspectives accessible and intuitive for the public, promoting empathy via social learning. For additional detail, please see white papers: – Vision and Intent, Design for Social Learning |
| ACADEMIC REQUIREMENTS: What specific input does the business require from an academic partner that is not available within a commercial organisation? | This application seeks academic partners to co-develop a Minimum Viable Product demonstrating Value Prospecting. It is hoped that the project will initially: (a) Design a visual tool (the Value Story Navigator) that lets people explore shared values and see who is affected by different ideas or actions. (b) Build and test simple processes for people to share what they care about, suggest ideas, and understand the impacts of those ideas. (c) Explore how users interact with the platform, and how it can support empathy, inclusion, and better group decision-making CVC are interested in collaborators working across human-computer interaction (HCI), informatics, deliberative democracy, behavioural science, social computing, knowledge organisation, and participatory design, especially those focused on ethical decision support, collective insight, and civic engagement. An ideal partner will be able to contribute to ongoing cycles of prototyping and pilot testing, ensuring that outputs are effective, research-relevant, testable, and academically valuable. |
| INNOVATION: Innovation means doing something new, different, smarter, or better. What is innovative about this project? How it is new, novel, pioneering or significantly different to any existing product / process /service? | Value Prospecting (VP) introduces a new form of digital civic infrastructure—an open participatory institution for surfacing, evolving, and aligning human values – helping people develop and express values, explore shared action, and understand who is affected and how. VP visually integrates values, lived experience, impacts, instinctive and reasoned responses – using social deliberation to stimulate inclusive, emotionally intelligent decision-making. Unlike social media or standard decision tools, VP supports proportionate, multi-scale reflection—from personal to global, present to future. Its visual Value Story Navigator is a customised knowledge map which allows users to shift perspectives—zooming between big-picture patterns and individual experiences to explore impact trade-offs and options. VP supports both consensus and principled disagreement within a values-based social learning system—serving as a new civic layer of ethical infrastructure that enables cultural adaptation and socially grounded innovation across institutions, communities, and AI systems. |
| IMPACTS: Do you anticipate any economic impacts from this initial project e.g. new product to market, jobs created/safeguarded. | VP is a public-interest platform, designed for public good—not profit. It differs from commercial tools by focusing on long-term human and ecological wellbeing. Initial Impact: Developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) will support meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration—across informatics, ethics, behavioural science, and social computing—while building partnerships with social enterprises and charities. Long-Term Impact: VP contributes to a cultural shift from consumption to investment in shared well-being—supporting initiatives like low-impact housing, ecosystem restoration and cooperative transport. It helps elevate care, trust, emotional wellbeing, and civic cohesion—qualities often undervalued by conventional markets. Future Vision: As AI systems grow more autonomous, VP provides democratic scaffolding for public input and accountability—helping ensure that human and machine behaviours evolve and align with shared social priorities, —not just technical momentum, or economic incentives. A reflective deliberative online process, fairly representing and expressing human values and assessing new prospects has utility in most societies but is potentially foundational for the safe, ethically aligned deployment of AGI. |
| Do you anticipate any positive environmental impacts arising from this project? e.g. clean energy, sustainability, climate action, biodiversity etc. | Yes, VP promotes environmental stewardship by highlighting sustainable initiatives through its Value Story Navigator, which visually reflects long-term human value by sizing prospects according to their lasting impact. It blends emotion, insight, and analysis to align social norms with progressive environmental policy. By surfacing shared environmental values, VP supports informed behaviour and policy changes that benefit future generations and the planet. |
| Do you anticipate outcomes from this project will promote social inclusion? e.g. safe and resilient communities, health & wellbeing? | Yes, VP promotes social inclusion by giving everyone, including those typically excluded, a voice in shaping decisions that affect their lives. It ensures proportionate, respectful representation for the values of marginalised groups, future generations, and those without digital access—filling key gaps in mainstream inclusion frameworks. VP is not just inclusive in terms of participation – it is inclusive in terms of outcomes – assessing the impacts of all our actions on e.g. global and future out-groups. |
| Do you anticipate outcomes from this project will promote equality and diversity? e.g. equal opportunities, fair work. | Yes, equality and diversity are central to VP, Directly driving more innovative and acceptable, higher quality, socially relevant prospects and outcomes. VP fosters understanding through structured dialogue, helping people challenge bias, build trust, and engage across divides. It promotes equality by giving equal weight to each individual’s values and providing proxy representation for marginalized groups and future generations—while raising awareness of the impacts due to emotional and material inequality. VP supports diversity by engaging underrepresented groups, highlighting diverse perspectives, and fostering social learning and out-group empathy—building a culturally inclusive social value agenda through collaborative crowdsourcing. |
| Proposed timescale to developing new collaboration/partnership? | We aim to initiate collaboration promptly, with development and prototyping in the first 6–12 months. The project’s ambition is to evolve into a public utility over the next 5–10 years. |
| Do you anticipate additional follow-on projects with the university will result after this initial project? | Yes. CVC expects follow-on collaborations with academic partners as we continue to develop, test, and refine open-source tools for sharing value expression and collaborative sense-making. Future work may explore how values-based platforms influence empathy, identity, and social norms—particularly through visualisation, deliberation design, and civic feedback loops. A key interest is in developing meaningful metrics to assess how digital environments affect public decisions, empathy and civic reasoning… …The resulting insights could inform emerging digital responsibility standards especially for platforms wielding broad social influence. We see Value Prospecting as part of a growing ecosystem of civic and commercial social platforms (embedding Human-Value Stewardship) – designed not just to capture attention, but to cultivate understanding, trust and pro-social behaviours. |
| Keywords | Primary Keywords: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Social Computing, Deliberative Democracy, Social Learning, Participatory Sensemaking, Grounded Theory, Collective Intelligence, Cognitive Scaffolding, Human Values, Value Stewardship, Commons-Based Peer Production, Deliberative Systems, Ethics, Perspective-Taking, Inclusive Design, Impact Assessment, Representation, Public Engagement, Systems Thinking, Information Design, Data Visualisation, Participatory Ethics, Intergenerational Equity, Civic Infrastructure, Empathy building. Related/Secondary Keywords: Behavioural Science, Digital Democracy, Ethics in AI, Responsible Innovation, Public Interest Technology, AI Alignment, Social Psychology, Environmental Studies, Sustainability, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Citizens Assembly, Folksonomy, Crowdsourcing, Mutual Understanding, Decision Support Systems, Social Infrastructure, Narrative Mapping, Taxonomy Evolution, Ethical Infrastructure, Social Epistemology, Public Epistemology, Dialogue, Reflection, Norms, Pluralism, Insight, Intuition, Conflict Resolution, Futures Thinking, Alignment, Digital Wellbeing, Trust, Collaboration, Equality, Diversity, Wellbeing,Resource Justice, Ethical Innovation, Value Prospecting |
| In addition to your requirements outlined above, are you interested in our research partners providing other details of technologies or expertise that may be of interest to you? | I’d love to connect with others interested in social deliberation, values, or sense-making—as I’m currently working independently. If you’ve written, read, or imagined something relevant, can share a value-based scenario, or would be happy to be interviewed as part of requirements gathering—I’d love to hear from you. |
| Enquiry Owner/Interface Point of Contact | Gillian Hambley |
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