The main goal of Co-VAL is to discover, analyse, and provide policy recommendations for transformative strategies that integrate the co-creation of value in public administrations. The project aims to accomplish these objectives by conducting research on the paradigm shift from the traditional top-down model to demand and bottom-up driven models when citizens, civil servants, private, and third sector organizations voluntarily participate in the development of transformative innovations addressing changing needs and social problems. Co-VAL will push the boundaries of both research and practice by providing: i) a comprehensive and holistic theoretical framework for understanding value co-creation in public services from a service-dominant logic and a service innovation multiagent framework, ii) measurement and monitoring for transformations in the public sector by using both existing data and new metrics (large-scale survey), iii) investigation on 4 public-service-related co-creation areas of public sector transformation: digital transformation (including open platforms, big data, and digital service delivery), service design (including service blue-printing), government living labs, and innovative structural relationships (public-private innovation networks and social innovation), and iv) generation of sustainable impacts in public administration policy and practice by delivering actionable policy recommendations that build on the research findings, by tracking and monitoring how governments’ pilot projects and actions, and by facilitating peer to peer knowledge exchange to facilitate implementation. Co-VAL is a consortium of 13 teams from 11 EU countries formed by leading experts in public administration, co-creation and open governance, digital economy and service innovation. The consortium is organised to co-work with stakeholders representing central, regional and local administrations.

systEmic Standardisation apPRoach to Empower Smart citieS and cOmmunities (ESPRESSO) focuses on the development of a conceptual Smart Cities Information Framework, which consists of a Smart City platform (the so-called Smart City enterprise application) and a number of data provision and processing services to integrate data, workflows, and processes in applications relevant for Smart Cities within a common framework. To build this framework, the project will identify relevant open standards, technologies, and information models that are currently in use or in development in the various sectors. It analyzes potential issues caused by gaps and overlaps across standards developed by the various standardization organizations and provides guidelines on how to effectively solve those issues. Particular emphasize will be put on common denominators in order to eventually allow for horizontal interoperability between the various sectors of a smart city. Though horizontal interoperability is out of scope for this project, emphasizing integration reference models as a key common denominator (e.g. in the form of multi-dimensional city models) already defines essential parts of the foundation for future levels of interoperability.

Today the European Public Sector Players lack the necessary infrastructure and technology to allow them to integrate their computing clouds. Furthermore, legislative barriers often make it difficult to use available commercial technological solutions. The SUNFISH project aims to provide a specific and new solution to face these issues. SUNFISH will enable the secure federation of private clouds based on the Public Sector needs: federated private clouds belonging to different Public Sector Entities will be able to share data and services transparently, while maintaining required security levels. The SUNFISH project will develop and integrate software enabling secure cloud federation as required by European Public Sector bodies. The project will achieve this by meeting firstly the specific challenges faced by the Maltese and Italian Ministries of Finance, as well as by the UK Regional Cyber Crime Units, the three SUNFISH selected use cases. Solutions will be developed to be usable by other European Public Organisations, and potentially also by private sector players. SUNFISH will improve security in federated “cross-border” clouds, boosting the development of a cloud computing market in sectors where privacy and control of information propagation are essential (e.g., e-government, e-health etc.) while encouraging a better resource utilisation of Public Administration cloud infrastructure. The secure system for federated private clouds developed through the project will guarantee a high level of safety, a continuous monitoring of inter-cloud communications, and the ability to roll out services cheaply, in a fast, flexible and secure way even between different private clouds. The SUNFISH project aims to reduce the management cost of private clouds owned by Public Administrations, and - beyond pure costs savings – to accelerate the transition to 21st century interoperable and scalable public services, boosting enforcement of the European Digital Single Market.