Response to crisis often reveals organisational and technological shortcomings, which threaten community recovery and sustainable. Even though some technological solutions exist, challenges of communication, interoperability, and data analytics remain. The deployment and use of technologies, and the social structures in which they are adopted, are interdependent. Hence it is imperative to develop human-centred technologies that take into account actual real world practices of affected populations and responders. The rise of social media as an information channel during crisis has become key to community resilience and response. However, existing crisis awareness applications, such as Ushahidi, while vital for information gathering, often struggle to address the challenges of real-time social data analysis and aggregation of crisis micro-events, and filtering of unverified content and reporters. This project will build an intelligent collective resilience platform to help communities to reconnect, respond, and recover from crisis situations. COMRADES will achieve this through an interdisciplinary, socio-technical approach, which will draw on the latest advances in computational social science, social computing, real-time analytics, text and social media analysis, and Linked Open Data. The platform specifications and design requirements will be derived through participatory design workshops with existing activist, responder, and reporter communities. The open source COMRADES platform will go beyond the now standard data collection, mapping, and manual analysis functions provided by the underpinning, widely used Ushahidi crisis mapping tool, to include new intelligent algorithms aimed at helping communities, citizens, and humanitarian services with analysing, verifying, monitoring, and responding to emergency events. COMRADES platform will be deployed and evaluated with multiple, local and distributed, communities, using collective multilingual crisis information.

The Mobile Age project will focus on open government data, mobile technology, and the provision of public services in relation to Europe’s elderly population. Europe’s senior citizens are growing steadily and are predicted to comprise of 28% of Europe’s population by 2020. However, senior citizens do not normally share the same level of connectivity to the Internet as younger generations, and while government agencies are increasingly providing their services through digital platforms, this risks excluding senior citizens from the design and use of such services. Mobile Age will provide the basis for the development of mobile-based open government services focused on senior citizens. We follow a co-creation methodological approach that will allow for a substantive participation of senior citizens. MobileAge will focus on the co-creation of services related to the production and use of open data for cities. This will be achieved by pursuing four objectives: i) exploring and implementing innovative ways to support senior citizens to access and use public services through personal mobile technologies that are based on open government data, ii) develop and deploy co-creation approaches and methodologies to engage senior citizens effectively; iii) develop a situated, practice-based understanding of accessibility, mobility and usability of services from a senior-citizen point of view; and iv) develop a framework for impact assessment and evaluation for co-creation approaches to open service development for the ageing population. Mobile Age’s approach will be applied in cities and counties that are already providing innovative approaches for the participation of senior people in the development of city services: Bremen, South Lakeland, Zaragoza and the Region of Central Macedonia, with scenarios related to social inclusion, extending independent living, data curation for a safer and more accessible city, and the management of personal health information.

Floods are an increasingly acute problem. Floods endanger lives and cause human tragedy as well as heavy economic losses. In addition to economic and social damage, floods can have severe environmental consequences, for example when installations holding large quantities of toxic chemicals are inundated or wetland areas destroyed. Intense precipitation has become more frequent and more intense, growing manmade pressure has increased the magnitude of floods that result from any level of precipitation, and flawed decisions about the location of human infrastructure have increased the flood loss potential. Flooding cannot be wholly prevented. Flood risk increases with ongoing climate change. Risk reduction in large international basins can only be achieved through transnational, interdisciplinary and stakeholder oriented approaches within the framework of a joint transnational research project. The overall objective of FLOOD-serv is to develop and to provide a pro-active and personalised citizen-centric public service application that will enhance the involvement of the citizen and will harness the collaborative power of ICT networks (networks of people, of knowledge, of sensors) to raise awareness on flood risks and to enable collective risk mitigation solutions and response actions. Other general objectives are: 1. Empowering local communities to directly participate in the design of emergency services dealing with floods mitigation actions. 2. Harness the power of new technologies, such as social media, and mobile technologies to increase the efficiency of public administrations in raising public awareness and education regarding floods risks, effects and impact. 3. Encourage the development and implementation of long-term, cost-effective and environmentally sound mitigation actions related to floods though an ICT-enabled cooperation and collaboration of all stakeholders: government, private sector, NGOs and other civil society organizations as well as citizens.