ROUTE-TO-PA is a multidisciplinary innovation project, that, by combining expertise and research in the fields of e-government, computer science, learning science and economy, is aiming at improving the impact, towards citizens and within society, of ICT-based technology platforms for transparency. ROUTE-TO-PA envisions that Information and Communication Technologies for Transparency must improve the engagement of citizens by making them able to socially interact over open data, by forming or joining existing online communities that share common interest and discuss common issues of relevance to local policy, service delivery, and regulation; moreover, ROUTE-TO-PA aims at engaging citizens to a higher degree by providing a robust and more holistic understanding of transparency, by underpinning the next generation open-data based transparency initiatives, ensuring that published data are those of value to citizens, with a personalized view in different forms to different segments of the citizens and public based on their profiles for facilitate better understanding. ROUTE-TO-PA will deliver the experimented innovative and engaging ICT platforms to ensure citizen-friendly, conscious, and effective access to open-data, by offering easy understanding of, and social collaboration on, open data offered by PAs. The objectives of Route-To-PA are: (1) develop a Social Platform for Open Data (SPOD) enabling social interactions among open data users and between open data users and government data ; (2) build Transparency-Enhancing Toolset (TET) as extensions for existing major Open Data Platforms; and (3) develop a set of recommendations (GUIDE) as good practice guide for open data publishers for achieving higher quality transparency through open data. The objectives are deployed, tested and experimented in a real setting, with at least 5 pilot studies in five different European countries.

CoAct proposes a radically new approach to face four “wicked” social global issues by engaging vulnerable citizens acting as in-the field competent co-researchers. The approach represents a new understanding of the underexplored field of Citizen Social Science and will result in the implementation of new or improved science-related policies. CoAct’s ambitious Research and Innovation activities will respond to issues related to Mental Health Care, Youth Employment, Environmental Justice and Gender Equality in Barcelona, Vienna, Berlin, Buenos Aires and in European Eastern countries. CoAct will define and develop a general framework for Citizen Social Science as a participatory research co-designed and directly driven by citizen groups sharing a social concern. The methodological framework will be first incubated in a consortium with Research Organizations, NGOs and global networks of Open Science and Open Data activism. Expertises from Computational Social Science, Participatory Action Research, Citizen Science evaluation or Citizen-generated Data will be incorporated to conceive a transdisciplinary Citizen Social Science that place vulnerable citizens at the center of Research and Innovation cycles, as co-designers and co-researchers. Secondly, three mission-oriented Actions and at least three Research Pilots will be led by vulnerable citizen groups with the support of Knowledge Coalitions formed by public bodies, CSOs and social innovators. The common effort will harness novel, simultaneously global and local, socially robust knowledge and scientifically reasoned measures to promote social change. An Open Citizen Science toolkit, Open Source digital platforms, and Capacity Building activities to improve data and science literacy, including a PhD Summer School, will be delivered. To demonstrate the scientific relevance and the social impact of CoAct!, a dynamic co-evaluation process with new tools will be done and shared with the broad Citizen Science community.

OpenBudgets.eu will provide an open-source software framework and accompanying Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) platform for supporting financial transparency, thus enhancing accountability within public sectors, and as a result preventing corruption. A key challenge addressed by OpenBudgets.eu is to provide a multi-stakeholder framework which is scalable, easy-to-use, flexible and attractive. The core objectives of OpenBudgets.eu project are: * A semantic data model, which will be used to integrate all relevant budget and transaction data, giving a pre-defined structure to the input data. This will enable the integration of data from different public sectors at different levels. This integration can then be exploited by comparing different datasets. * A library of visualisation tools with a user-friendly interface, which will enable stakeholders to visualise available data in different granularity and in different modalities (spatial, temporal, administrative). These tools will enable the scrutiny of data under different lenses, enabling stakeholders to explore any relevant budget allocation. * A library of data mining and comparative analysis tools. This library will enable the aggregation of existing data in order to obtain new outcomes and discover trends and patterns, and potentially forecasting budget measures. * A feedback and citizen engagement interface which enables users to discuss and give feed-back on the provided data, for example, suggesting different priorities for budgeting, or discussing a particular transaction. The OpenBudgets.eu open-source framework and portal will integrate these components into a comprehensive portal. The framework will be deployed as a software-as-a-service for thousands of public administrations and millions of citizens. We will apply the project concept to three large-scale pilot scenarios in the domains participatory budgeting, data journalism and corruption prevention.