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.

PoSeID-on is aimed at developing a novel Privacy Enhancing Dashboard for personal data protection supporting the pillars of the new EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with regards to digital security, that will be implemented within a single, integrated tool, adopting blockchain and smart contracts technology. It will provide targeted benefits for final end users by enabling data protection by design and by default. In particular, the project will deliver an easily accessible and simple privacy enhancing dashboard useful for monitoring, keeping track record, and controlling all aspects related to data subjects personal data, privacy settings, eventually deciding to authorize/un-authorize personal data transfers. Thus, the primary aim of PoSeID-on is empowering data subjects in having a concise, transparent, intelligible and ease access, as well as tracking, control and management of their personal data processed by public and private organizations, acting as data controllers and/or data providers. They will be able to make conscious decisions on who can process their own data based on data controller trustworthiness, enabling or revoking permissions, asking for definitely remove their personal data or restricting the data to be shared following the data minimisation principle. A risk management framework will be integrated into the privacy enhancing dashboard. As secondary aim, PoSeID-on will support the compliance of technological services and products with the GDPR regarding personal data, by integrating advanced ICT-based tools within a replicable and scalable frame, which can be implemented within a broad spectrum of products and services. Moreover, personal data exchanges across data subjects and different organisations (public & private) or among organizations in case of involved third parties will take place in a secure and privacy-compliant way, generating benefits thanks to the adoption of more streamlined procedures.

Digital games are an integral part of most of our students’ life outside the classroom. Throughout the years, games have been increasingly recognised as powerful learning tools to facilitate students’ learning. Most notably, games allow students to be at the centre of the learning experience, allow room for trial and error and make learning fun and engaging. This Strategic Partnership targeted efforts that challenge traditional pedagogies and encourages the use of innovative game-based learning (GBL) methodologies for learning purposes. The Erasmus Plus Strategic partnership developed a Game Creator Tool (GCT) that can be used on a range of devices, developed for ease of use in classrooms to help enrich the educational and skills portfolios of local and European educators. Furthermore, this partnership promoted sharing of best practices, cooperation and cross-fertilisation between the fields of technology and education. The impact of this partnership is aimed at bridging the gap between the complex world of programming and designing games with the availability of an open and easy-to-use tool for game authoring. The project outputs are meant to throw light on the need for further research into the positive potential of actively designing games for learning purposes, enhance the digital competences of students with particular focus on media literacy and STEM education via GBL learning. The synergistic working relationship created between European partners from Malta, Austria, Germany and Luxembourg strengthened the cooperation between organisations, post-secondary schools and also facilitate the exchange, testing and development of best practices in the field of education. The team will work together towards the development of a user-centered game-based learning framework. The GCT will allow students and teachers to work on game projects to dive deeper into the subjects of Fake News and STEM. The Fake News Game will serve as one of the pilot demonstrators for the Game Creator Tool. This will allow both teachers and students to create their own games related to the subject. Based on the current impact of fake news across social media and news portals, it is essential that the general public, in particular youth learn how to identify reliable news sources. On the other hand, the STEM pilot game will be based on and inspired from a current theme in the education STEM syllabi currently being adopted in Malta at post-secondary level of schooling. The game will serve as a precursor to and underpinned by an inquiry-based learning approach, where students will practice both STEM-related process skills and critical thinking skills. A total of 7 multiplier events were planned however due to the Covid-19 situation only 4 were organised as planned, 2 were organised virtually and 1 was cancelled. Originally, 3 transnational partner meetings were planned however the final transnational meeting had to be organised virtually due to the pandemic. One joint training staff event was planned and held in Austria. All of these events involved the participation of various individuals and entities from the European Union with the aim to increase awareness of the project and its goals. Results of the meetings and training events, as well as project progress, were disseminated online to the relevant audiences. Following project closure the consortium took stock of the lessons learnt and the outputs emanating from the project to be in a position to continue disseminating and raising awareness of the game creator tool. A needs analysis report identifying the best practices recommendations document was drafted and published online. The intention of this is to amplify the project’s aims by reaching out to decision makers on curricula in relation to GBL as a powerful learning methodology. The Partnership aims to enhance the level and quality of digital competences and relevance of students' knowledge and skills and promote students' centered learning approaches through ICTs. Through this project, the consortium sought to create an innovative method of teaching as well as learning. ICTs will be used effectively to enable educators to diversify their pedagogies and enable students to learn using a tool that is modern and attractive, thus motivating students' appetite to learn. This Strategic Partnership involves the appropriate mix of complementary project partners with the necessary profile, experience and expertise to deliver successfully all aspects of the project. The consortium consists of a team of academics, researchers, education consultants, and ICT experts. The commitments and tasks have been distributed diligently and responsibly to successfully produce high quality innovative deliverables.

Today public authorities need to provide better services with fewer resources. Citizens require accessible, user-friendly, personalised, and integrated public services that match their needs and circumstances. At the same time, trust in the public sector deteriorates. We argue the solution rests in enhancing existing relevant EU work (on policies, models, frameworks, roadmaps etc) by adopting best research and practice (e.g. in public service co-creation) and by exploiting relevant technologies particularly mobile apps, virtual assistants (chatbots), knowledge graphs, and linked data. We acknowledge that for many years, the EU is providing useful practical advice including frameworks (e.g. EIF), models (e.g. CPSV), architectures (e.g. EIRA), roadmaps, etc. These however are not directly applicable anymore as they do not incorporate the latest research and practice, e.g. in public service co-creation. Similarly, research is not related to EU work and practice is not related to research. The vision of the inGov project is to provide innovative ICT-supported governance models as well as mobile apps including chatbots, which will enable stakeholders' collaboration in co-producing inclusive and accessible Integrated Public Services (IPS) thus increasing trust and satisfaction. For that purpose, multidisciplinary scientific methods will be used including design science, multiple case study and variants of the technology acceptance model. The project results will be piloted in Malta to modernise the digital family household public service (affecting 200,000 households), in Austria to deploy IPS for collecting tourism tax (affecting 3,200 accommodation providers), in Greece to digitise the disabled card renewal service (benefiting 11,500 disabled, low-income citizens) and in Croatia to create AI-driven virtual assistants and services (affecting 32,000 citizens). We aim to feed our results back to EU policies hence achieving alignment between policies, research and practice.

Early school leaving and lack of student engagement are challenges faced by educators in schools around Europe. This Strategic Partnership proposed targeted efforts that challenge traditional pedagogies and encourages the use of innovative game-based learning (GBL) methodologies in English and Maths classrooms. This Erasmus Plus Strategic Partnership aimed to enrich the educational and skills portfolios of local and European educators, to promote synergies, sharing of best practices, cooperation and cross-fertilisation between the fields of education and technology. The consortium consisted of five partners: the Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA), the University of Malta, St. Margaret’s College Malta, Nyströmska School Sweden, and Danube University in Krems Austria. The project kick-started in September 2015, with the objective of enhancing educators’ digital competences and equip them with game-based learning tools and methodologies. The GBL4ESL toolkit developed through this project (www.toolkit-gbl.com) is a platform that can be used by educators to search for lesson plans and share game ideas to teach specific subjects such as Mathematics and English.This project aimed to use games in the classroom as a tool to reduce the rate of early school leavers (ESL). The European Union set the target to reduce ESL to 10% across member states by 2020. Malta had a high rate of ESLs in 2013 (20.9%), and the Government aimed to reduce this rate over the years. Given that students at risk of becoming ESLs are typically disengaged from the traditional curriculum and teaching methods, this project sought to secure their interest by putting the student at the centre of the learning experience through GBL.The key project outputs, that were created over the 2-year project are:TOOLKIT: Educators can find meaningful games that have been tried and tested with students, as well as projects explaining how these games can be used in education and with which student cohort they work best. Guidebook: The consortium has created a practical guide for educators. The guidebook contains examples of games and lesson plans that can be used to teach English and Mathematics. Recommendations & best practices document: to influence policy makers’ perceptions and future actions, and encourage educators to support GBL, create new initiatives, and try it out in class. One of the main aims of the Erasmus+ GBL4ESL project was for teachers, in partner schools, to make the utmost of the toolkit and the guidebook and become ‘agents of change' within their schools by practising and sharing the GBL pedagogical expertise aimed at maximising the engagement in learning of the potential early school leavers. Over the 2 year period, the consortium organised 2 transnational meetings, 7 multiplier events in Malta, Sweden and Austria, 2 short-term staff training events in Malta and Austria, and created the 3 intellectual outputs. Efforts to address ESL are being organised by different local entities. Various stakeholders were involved in this project, mainly schools, educators, policy and decision makers, education officers in charge of curricula, universities, and MITA as the national ICT agency. Reducing the rate of ESLs is in the interest of numerous stakeholders who look at fostering intellectual curiosity, computational thinking and creativity in the upcoming generations, and strengthen the economy by having a highly skilled local workforce.