An increasing computing capability is raising the opportunities to use a large amount of publicly available data for creating new applications and a new generation of public services.

But while it is easy to find some early examples of services concerning control systems (e.g. traffic, meteo, telecommunication) and commercial applications (e.g. profiling systems), few examples are instead available about the use of data as a new resource for empowering citizens, i.e. supporting citizens’ decisions about everyday life, political choices, organization of their movements, information about social, cultural and environmental opportunities around them and government choices. Developing spaces for enabling citizens to harness the opportunities coming from the use of this new resource, offers thus a substantial promise of social innovation.

This means that open data is virtually a new resource that could become a new commons with the engagement of interested and active communities. The condition for open data becoming a new commons is that citizens become aware of the potential of this resource, that they use it for creating new services and that new practices and infrastructures are defined, that would support the use of such resource.
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In the recent years, new forms of organization have emerged, that have a disruptive power over the existing social and economic system. This phenomenon is challenging the traditional design approach, based on the idea that designers could design services for citizens and public administrations. In the new processes designers and service provider are simply mediating the process of co-creation and supporting the ecosystem for the value creation process. This paper will propose a logical framework for the design action, according to a multi-level structure that includes the value-creation level, in which design is a prerogative of the stakeholders participating in the value-creation action; the level of infrastructuring in which designers use their expert knowledge to support the interaction in the value-creation phase; and the level of governance, in which designers must figure
out the structure of the ecosystem in which the value-creation process can be adequately organized and possibly scaled-up.@en