MESOC adapts and further develops a method for “transition based” impact assessment derived from a previous Unesco Chair publication, building a structural model of the Societal Dimension of Culture, as defined by one of the strategic objectives of the European Agenda. The model will be used in the project: - To define the perimeter of investigation of the societal value and impacts of cultural policies and practices, thus framing and guiding the collection of academic and institutional literature and the definition of a set of case studies relevant to the three crossover themes of a) Health and Wellbeing, 2) Urban and Territorial Renovation and 3) People’s Engagement and Participation; - As a theoretical lens to propose and validate, using the Delphi method, in collaboration with a large representation of key institutional, academic and professional actors, a long list of impact transmission variables and indicators reflecting the underlying approach (“theory of change”) of the surveyed case studies; - As an evaluative tool to assess the societal value and impacts of cultural policies and practices related to the three crossover themes, both diachronically and synchronically, within 10 European City pilots; - To propose a (tentative) set of statistical data sources (possibly including new ones that are practically and economically feasible) which could complement existing measures of the societal value and impacts of culture by adding its effects on personal well-being and health, citizens involvement and participation, urban identity and social cohesion. The ultimate, expected output of the project is a Free and Open Access, online service (named the MESOC Toolkit) that could be used by both researchers and practitioners (the latter including both policy makers and cultural operators from all over the EU) to measure the societal value and impacts of cultural policies and practices.

Civil society and public authorities from all levels of government are increasingly turning to digital democracy tools to improve citizens’ participation in democratic processes and the legitimacy of policy decisions. At the same time, digital democracy technology today is not yet fit to meet the lofty goal of providing an all-round democratic infrastructure that can re-empower citizens and make public administrations more relevant and responsive to the citizenry’s wills and needs. This is because digital democratic technology is currently developed and deployed while we still lack evidence-based methods to design, assess and validate it. We still lack the know-how to discern which specific technological solutions best foster inclusive, meaningful and scalable democratic participation, and under what conditions. PERYCLES tackles the challenge of developing such know-how, analyzing and testing platform designs on an open-source software for democratic deliberation that can be deployed at multiple levels of governance: from local, to national, to transnational. To do so, we develop a first-of-its-kind interdisciplinary approach to the design of digital democracy technology, which integrates methods and concepts from democratic theory, the social sciences and the computing sciences. The outcome of the project will be threefold: first, a set of methods to assess digital democracy solutions in a principled manner; second, readily available open-source implementations of digital democracy solutions that meet the identified standards; third, a library of best practices and recommendations for the design and deployment of online participation platforms, targeting digital democracy practitioners, citizens and decision-makers.

ChArGED addresses the energy consumption in public buildings and proposes a framework that aims to facilitate achieving greater energy efficiency and reductions of wasted energy in public buildings. The framework leverages IoT enabled, low-cost devices (NFC or iBeacons) to improve energy disaggregation mechanisms that provide energy use and (consequently) wastages at the device, area and end user level. These wastages will be targeted by a gamified application that feeds personalized real-time recommendations to each individual end user. The design of the game will follow a cleanweb approach and implement a novel social innovation process that will be designed based on human inceptives factors and will help users to understand the environmental implications of their actions and adopt a more green, active and responsible behaviour. The blend of social interaction and competitions with its personalized character are expected to eventually contribute to the user engagement and commitment to generate savings in the long term leading to tackle energy efficiency targets in public buildings while emphasizing on cost effectiveness. Furthermore, users will become more educated on energy efficiency actions and their impacts which has an impact beyond the actual public building. Efficient energy use will render its consumption predictable and this will be exploited by the ChArGED gamified application to optimize use of the micro-generated energy. Users will be motived to reduce energy consumption when power comes from the grid. Predictable energy consumption will also support more informed decisions of micro-generation sources to match the use patterns. The ChArGED solution will be developed with iterative end users representatives’ engagement during analysis, design and development. Further users at least 150 real building occupants in three (3) countries (50 in each building- validation country) will be engaged for deployment and validation.

Urban ReLeaf is an action-oriented mission to advance citizen-powered science as a central resource for inclusive urban green planning in support of local policy making, European strategies and monitoring systems (e.g., the Green Deal, Copernicus), and global efforts such as the SDGs (e.g., Target 11.7) and GEOSS. The project will: (i) assess current urban greening policy processes within six European cities and co-create solutions that use citizen observations to complement existing data ecosystems and decision-making; (ii) support the validation and long-term inclusion of active and passive data from citizens for urban environmental monitoring within authoritative data streams, including GEOSS & Copernicus; (iii) Mobilize and empower communities through widespread participation in issues of public interest surrounding urban green infrastructure; (iv) develop a community of practice around topics related to the use of citizen observations for urban planning to foster knowledge exchange and develop capacities across multiple sectors; (v) produce flexible and innovative governance solutions to help scale-out inclusive urban green transitions in support of the European Green Deal and UN Sustainable Development Goals; and (iv) promote recognition, adoption and trust of citizen observations and other novel data ecosystems for environmental monitoring to trigger innovation within public institutions. The project is coordinated by IIASA, who led the WeObserve project, and involves partners from previous successful H2020 citizen observatory projects and as well as six cities (Athens, Cascais, Dundee, Mannheim, Riga Utrecht) that are willing to embrace new data streams for urban greening planning and policy making and to fully engage with citizens including marginalized and vulnerable groups. Urban ReLeaf is also supported by technology partners and those with strong links to Copernicus and GEO.

Public Administration (PA) authorities are working towards upgrading the level of their online services through new governance models such as the Open Government. This pushes for greater transparency, accountability and innovation aiming at increasing citizen levels of confidence and trust in PA online services. In this context, user data privacy is an important issue. VisiOn will deliver a high Technology Readiness Level (TRL) Visual Privacy Management Platform, which empowers any citizen to achieve desired levels of privacy by creating and monitoring a personal Privacy Level Agreement. The platform will provide clear visualisation of privacy preferences, relevant threats and trust issues along with an insight into the economic value of user data. The platform will equip PAs with the right tools to improve the transparency and accountability of their operations, by supporting visual analysis of (i) privacy issues at different levels (e.g. design, run-time) and perspectives (i.e. citizen, PA); (ii) regulation compliance; and (iii) business/operational processes. The VisiOn consortium will leverage existing software, tools and methodologies, which partners have developed in previous projects, towards the implementation of the privacy platform software components. The latter will be tested in an operational environment (i.e. TRL 7), in three different pilot scenarios across two different scenario types (i.e. citizen/PA & PA/cross-border PA). Pilots will involve users from three European countries. Driven by the lack of appropriate products in the market, as identified by the relevant market analysis, the VisiOn exploitation strategy is based on commercialisation of the project results at three levels: platform-as-a-whole, fragments of the platform, and partner individual exploitation. This strategy will enable partners to integrate the project results into their existing commercial offerings, thus exploring and establishing new business opportunities and ventures.