Impact Assessment and Recommendations: Making Sense H2020 CAPS Project

The aim of this report is to address the impact of Making Sense, considering not only citizens and communities involved on the ground level, but also the organizations behind it. We chose to aggregate, summarize and break down our review into five dimensions, adopting a STEEP model and looking into sub-topics inside each of them: Social (Values, representations and practices; Community extension effects; Collective events as awareness raising; Internal communication; Inclusion and fairness; Exchanges and synergies with other organisations), Technoscientific (Open hardware, software and other open tools; Training and education; Materials and tools for local communities; Technical and scientific outputs; Open source platforms), Economic (New entrepreneurial initiatives; Alternative relationships with economic assets; Job creation; Direct exploitation and transfer), Environmental (Igniting environmental changes; Reducing environmental harm; Collective measuring and calibration events; Networking effects; Sustainability plan), Policy (New ways and channels of participation; Communities capacity to impact policy decisions; Organisational influence in political or power dynamics). Through our strategies to measure and assess impact we were able to conclude that Making Sense impact goals were clearly fulfilled, recalling its main intended impacts established at the beginning, first divided in societal objectives: “Make visible and tangible the invisible”, “Understand their environment”, “Turn data and insight into compelling stories & action”, “Using public networks of low cost, open source sensors”, and second into desired results: “Better informed, more engaged citizens”, “Impactful dialogues between citizens and governments”, “More data, more insight, better policies”, “More enjoyable, social, inclusive, healthy & livable cities”.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

#Blockchain4EU: Blockchain for Industrial Transformations

The project #Blockchain4EU is a forward looking exploration of existing, emerging and potential applications based on Blockchain and other DLTs for industrial / non-financial sectors. It combined Science and Technology Studies with a transdisciplinary policy lab toolbox filled with frameworks from Foresight and Horizon Scanning, Behavioural Insights, or Participatory, Critical and Speculative Design. Amid unfolding and uncertain developments of the Blockchain space, our research signals a number of crucial opportunities and challenges around a technology that could record, secure and transfer any digitised transaction or process, and thus potentially affect large parts of current industrial landscapes. This report offers key insights for its implementation and uptake by industry, businesses and SMEs, together with science for policy strategic recommendations.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

Mapping Participatory Sensing and Community-led Environmental Monitoring Initiatives: Making Sense H2020 CAPS Project

This report presents a summary of the state of the art in urban participatory sensing and community-led environmental monitoring, the types of engagement approaches typically followed, contextual examples of current developments in this field, and current challenges and opportunities for successful interventions. The goal is to better understand the field and possible options for reflection and action around it, in order to better inform future conceptual and practical developments inside and outside the Making Sense project.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

Co-Designing Participatory Approaches for Communities: Making Sense H2020 CAPS Project

This report is focused on the main outputs of a co-design and generative tools workshop with partners and key players from the Making Sense communities, in which the main results were targeted for use “on the ground” with collective ownership by those who would benefit the most from them. It is an enriched textual and visual summary of the workshop, its methods and main exercises, aiming at producing flexible and encompassing participatory framework for urban citizen sensing. The document is structured as follows: Section 1) Co-Creation and Participation in Community Engagement describes the main purposes, key activities and outcomes of the co-design and generative tools workshop; Section 2) Open Shared Framework to Build and Sustain Communities describes the framework that emerged in the final session of the workshop, while also drawing from presentations and exchanges that took place throughout the two days; Section 3) Proposing a Minimally Viable Open Manifesto for Making Sense puts forward a set of principles or guidelines as recommendations for conducting a participatory approach within community engagement contexts for collective environmental monitoring.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

Making sense framework and assessment of participatory strategies

This report is a combined effort of Dundee University and the Joint Research Centre, based on the integration of D5.2 (Report and evaluation of the pilot approaches to ‘Making Sense campaigns’) and D4.3 (Report on assessment of participatory methods in the pilots and final recommendations). The document is structured as follows: Section 1 articulates the Making Sense approach to pilots and covers our campaign rationale, stakeholders and summarises the Making Sense pilots; Section 2 describes the design and iteration of the Making Sense Framework; Section 3 shows how the Making Sense Framework has been exemplified through the pilots and describes and illustrates each phase of the Framework with an example from a pilot; Section 4 focuses on ten key topics where we observed how citizen engagement and community building were addressed inside Making Sense and how the project participatory strategies developed from there on; Section 5 puts forward a new augmented version of previously devised recommendations for participatory or community driven sensing projects, with lessons learned from and for Making Sense.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

Artificial Intelligence: A European Perspective

We are only at the beginning of a rapid period of transformation of our economy and society due to the convergence of many digital technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is central to this change and offers major opportunities to improve our lives. The recent developments in AI are the result of increased processing power, improvements in algorithms and the exponential growth in the volume and variety of digital data. Many applications of AI have started entering into our every-day lives, from machine translations, to image recognition, and music generation, and are increasingly deployed in industry, government, and commerce. Connected and autonomous vehicles, and AI-supported medical diagnostics are areas of application that will soon be commonplace. There is strong global competition on AI among the US, China, and Europe. The US leads for now but China is catching up fast and aims to lead by 2030. For the EU, it is not so much a question of winning or losing a race but of finding the way of embracing the opportunities offered by AI in a way that is human-centred, ethical, secure, and true to our core values. The EU Member States and the European Commission are developing coordinated national and European strategies, recognising that only together we can succeed. We can build on our areas of strength including excellent research, leadership in some industrial sectors like automotive and robotics, a solid legal and regulatory framework, and very rich cultural diversity also at regional and sub-regional levels. It is generally recognised that AI can flourish only if supported by a robust computing infrastructure and good quality data: • With respect to computing, we identified a window of opportunity for Europe to invest in the emerging new paradigm of computing distributed towards the edges of the network, in addition to centralised facilities. This will support also the future deployment of 5G and the Internet of Things. • With respect to data, we argue in favour of learning from successful Internet companies, opening access to data and developing interactivity with the users rather than just broadcasting data. In this way, we can develop ecosystems of public administrations, firms, and civil society enriching the data to make it fit for AI applications responding to European needs. We should embrace the opportunities afforded by AI but not uncritically. The black box characteristics of most leading AI techniques make them opaque even to specialists. AI systems are currently limited to narrow and well-defined tasks, and their technologies inherit imperfections from their human creators, such as the well-recognised bias effect present in data. We should challenge the shortcomings of AI and work towards strong evaluation strategies, transparent and reliable systems, and good human-AI interactions. Ethical and secure-by-design algorithms are crucial to build trust in this disruptive technology, but we also need a broader engagement of civil society on the values to be embedded in AI and the directions for future development. This social engagement should be part of the effort to strengthen our resilience at all levels from local, to national and European, across institutions, industry and civil society. Developing local ecosystems of skills, computing, data, and applications can foster the engagement of local communities, respond to their needs, harness local creativity and knowledge, and build a human-centred, diverse, and socially driven AI. We still know very little about how AI will impact the way we think, make decisions, relate to each other, and how it will affect our jobs. This uncertainty can be a source of concern but is also a sign of opportunity. The future is not yet written. We can shape it based on our collective vision of what future we would like to have. But we need to act together and act fast.JRC.B.6-Digital Econom

Critical Notions of Technology and the Promises of Empowerment in Shared Machine Shops

A variety of making, fabricating, fabbing, tinkering, assembling, prototyping, coding and manufacturing shops are promisingly opening up opportunities for decentralized and collaborative engagements with technology, not only related with material and technical experimentations, but also with economic, cultural, social and political consequences, and ultimately with conceptual and epistemological changes. With due attention to their differences, there is a common and shared rationale that supports an openness when approaching and thinking about technology. This article, however, calls for a closer attention to current narratives that are enveloping the realities of making. It argues that they are popularizing a certain meaning of technology that may grow afar from more critical and democratic understandings. The article concludes with some alternative insights to further advance the realities and spaces of personal fabrication in terms of how technologies themselves are designed, by who, for who and for what.JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Securit

Closing the Impact Gap

As a new generation of spaces, Policy Labs are putting in practice experimental thinking and coming up with out-of-the-box solutions that can induce positive change. Apart from their differences in mandate, methods and affiliation, Labs are going for open, bottom-up or citizen-led processes, characterized by intense idea brainstorming, problem reframing, early needs assessment, co-creation, prototyping and testing before large scale deployment. A number of Labs have popped up, from MindLab in Denmark, La 27eme Region in France or LabX in Portugal (just to name a few in Europe), and even at the heart of the European Commission (EU Policy Lab). Within the current panorama, Lab practitioners and the "converted" underline experimentation's added value in spurring innovation in policy-making. The most innovative ideas don't arise from closed settings, but instead in real-life contexts or hybrid spaces with freedom to collaborate with others and try out risky processes. But just how far Labs have gone in implementing this narrative? What are the most pressing gaps to address for the near future when looking for success and scalability?JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

Emerging ICT for Citizens’ Veillance: Theoretical and Practical Insights

In ubiquitous surveillance societies, individuals are subjected to observation and control by authorities, institutions, and corporations. Sometimes, citizens contribute their own knowledge and other resources to their own surveillance. In addition, some of “the watched” observe “the watchers” “through” sous‐veillant activities, and various forms of self-surveillance for different purposes (Lyon, D. [Ed.]. (2007) Surveillance studies: An overview. Cambridge, Polity.). However, information and communication technologies are also increasingly used for social initiatives with a bottom up structure where citizens themselves define the goals, shape the outcomes and profit from the benefits of watching activities. This model, which we define as citizens’ veillance and explore in this special issue, may present opportunities for individuals and collectives to be more prepared to meet the challenges they face in various domains including environment, health, planning and emergency response.JRC.E.3-Cyber and Digital Citizens' Securit

Emerging ICT for Citizens’ Veillance: Theoretical and Practical Insights

The report explores theories and practices surrounding citizens’ veillance activities, namely a broad range of citizen-driven initiatives for civic purposes. These can aim at creating new forms of knowledge and awareness; building new social communities and commitments; contributing to protection of common goods; empowering citizens in protecting or restoring some fundamental individual and collective rights. The concept of “veillance” is used here to refer to activities performed by citizens broadly and primarily to produce socially useful, empowering knowledge —rather than to control somebody. Therefore, the working definition proposed for veillance is a condition of citizens’ cognitive alertness and knowledge production proactively oriented towards the protection of common goods. Describing the workshop on Citizens’ veillance held on 20-21 March 2014 at the JRC in Ispra, the report further elaborates these discussions and reflections by providing some provisional recommendations while identifying several epistemic and normative issues emerged that require further investigation. Several ongoing changes are reframing the processes of knowledge production. Science and knowledge are no longer produced only in official sites, but everywhere in society, and especially through ICT and the web. Scientists’ (and artists-scientists’) and citizens’ science often merge and converge in producing relevant, reliable and transparent knowledge to complement and in some instances change or redirect official, institutional knowledge. In order to be democratically legitimate and to re-draw the boundaries between the traditional public function of knowledge production and these new forms of lay production of knowledge, the values promoted by these initiatives are to be reflected in more democratic and transparent ICT architectures.JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Securit