SOCIO-BEE proposes that community engagement and social innovation combined with Citizen Science (CS) through emerging technologies and playful interaction can bridge the gap between the capacity of communities to adopt more sustainable behaviours aligned with environmental policy objectives and between the citizen intentions and the real behaviour to act in favour of the environment (in this project, to reduce air pollution). Furthermore, community engagement can raise other citizens’ awareness of climate change and their own responses to it, through experimentation, better monitoring, and observation of the environment. This idea is emphasised in this project through the metaphor of bees’ behaviour (with queens, working and drone bees as main CS actors), interested stakeholders that aim at learning from results of CS evidence-based research (honey bears) and the Citizen Science hives as incubators of CS ideas and projects that will be tested in three different pilot sites (Ancona, Marousi and Ancona) and with different population: elderly people, everyday commuters and young adults, respectively. The SOCIO-BEE project ambitions the scalable activation of changes in citizens’ behaviour in support of pro-environment action groups, local sponsors, voluntary sector and policies in cities. This process will be carried out through low-cost technological innovations (CS enablers within the SOCIO BEE platform), together with the creation of proper instruments for institutions (Whitebook and toolkits with recommendations) that will contribute to the replication, upscaling, massive adoption and to the duration of the SOCIO-BEE project. The solution sustainability and maximum outreach will be ensured by proposing a set of public-private partnerships schemes and innovative targeted communication means to streamline exploitation and accessibility to the project impacts.

Europe’s shortage of STEM skilled labour force is well documented, and the lack of STEM-skilled labour is predicted to be “one of the main obstacles to economic growth in the coming years”. There is a real need, at the European level, for innovative approaches to increasing the motivation of pupils towards STEM subjects and for offering teacher training into new ways of introducing science to the classroom. Additionally, there is still work to be done in improving the image of scientists at the societal level and demystifying science in general, if academic institutions are to attract much needed talent in their various fields. To meet these challenges, BRITEC proposed introducing research into classrooms through Citizen Science activities, co-designed between schools and research institutions, initially in the partner countries and with the long-term view of massive uptake in Europe and beyond. Citizen Science is a relatively new way of conducting scientific research, by enlisting the support of citizens into the data collection, data analysis, data interpretation and/or (in rare cases) data presentation. BRITEC proposed introducing the Citizen Science (CS) approach in schools as a way of connecting schools with the world of research and increasing the interest of young Europeans in STEM subjects and careers. BRITEC offers schools and research institutions a multi-stakeholder collaboration model, easy to replicate, to support the promotion and uptake of STEM studies and careers. To build this model, BRITEC suggested a bottom-up approach, including three complementary blocks of activities, which build on each other to develop a set of exemplary practices and guidelines for the implementation of Citizen Science in the classroom and to ensure their large-scale dissemination and uptake: 1. A foundational phase, including desk research into existing national and international citizen science initiatives and the development of a set of guidelines of introducing research into schools. 2. A Piloting Phase, during which teachers and researchers from each of the four participating countries (Belgium, Greece, Poland and Spain) co-defined and ran a number of Citizen Science projects in their countries. Exemplary practices feed into the Citizen Science toolkit for the large-scale implementation of CS in countries all across Europe. 3. The large-scale deployment phase, including the development and running of a Massive Open Online Course and a set of recommendations for policy makers, meant to ensure that the good practices resulted from the project jump from the initial set of participants to other schools and universities/research institutions interested in bringing innovation to STEM teaching. Through these actions, BRITEC aimed to: [1] expose pupils to real-life research actions and allow them to develop skills and competencies related to STEM through learning by doing [2] strengthen the dialogue between research institutions and schools, and the role of educational institutions in their local and regional environments [3] raise the profile of teachers by allowing them to become research coordinators in their schools [4] ensure that good practices which support the development of STEM skills are adequately disseminated to a large population of teachers throughout Europe and beyond.The main participants of the BRITEC activities were: teachers, researchers and students. Additional group benefiting from the BRITEC outcomes: heads of schools, parents, local communities, ministries of education, policy makers in the field of education. We reached directly over 1300 persons and assume that additionally ca. 6000 students benefitted from the BRITEC programme.

<< Objectives >>Our main objective is to improve STEM scientists’ ability to communicate their science to diversified audiences. Communicating science beyond expert audiences has been recognized as a key societal priority. Yet, resources and training designed to enable scientists to do so are lacking. This project will contribute to solving this problem by creating digital resources for professional development to assist STEM scientists (in particular women) to better communicate their science to society.<< Implementation >>We will conduct an ethnomethodological study to obtain data from EU STEM scientists (in particular women) on digital science communication practices and identify their good practices. Informed by this study, we will create instructional materials and develop a fully digital (online) training course, a MOOC and a virtual resource hub to help EU STEM scientists communicate more effectively to public audiences through different modes and digital media and enhance their cross-cultural sensitivity.<< Results >>Using empirical data, we will create an inventory of good practices for communicating science online to multidisciplinary audiences. We will create a sustainable infrastructure (a digital communication training hub) to support the resources for the two course types (testimonials of female scientists on digital communication practices, videotutorials, multiliteracy skills development tasks, guidelines for trainers). We target STEM scientists but the hub will be inclusive of non-STEM scientists.

The overall aim of ECHO is to engage EU citizens in soil health increasing their knowledge, by generating new data on the health status of EU soils to complement existing soil mapping and soil monitoring in EU Member States, and awareness on the ecological and societal importance of soils. ECHO is based on 3 main principles: 1) to engage citizens motivating them to protect and restore soils; 2) to empower citizens by providing knowledge and an active role in data collection; 3) to enable citizens to directly participate in decision-making on soil issues. ECHO will achieve this through co-creation with target societal groups as a cornerstone of delivering a step change in increased soil literacy in society across Member States. ECHO will develop tailor-made citizen science initiatives across EU Member States taking into account different land-uses, soil types and biogeographical regions as well as stakeholder needs, overcoming the recognised challenges related to age, culture, background and language (28 initiatives with 16500 sites assessed). Our ambition is to actively involve and engage citizens building the capacities and knowledge to promote soil stewardship across EU and foster social change through trust and improved understanding of soil. ECHO will create ECHOREPO, a long-term open access repository, fed with citizen science data to be exploited not only by scientists but also by the general public and end-users. This will leverage and provide added-value to existing data and other relevant soil monitoring initiatives. ECHO´s consortium consists of 16 participants with 9 leading universities and research centres, 5 SMEs, and 2 Foundations. The participants from small companies and foundations, as business and civil society representatives, are complementary to the soil and social sciences experts of academic partners and crucial to achieve the ambitious goals of ECHO.

DECIDO enables PAs to take full advantage of shared data, analytical tools and methodologies, computational power and cloud services and co-created data, for the development of better targeted and more effective evidence-based policies, leveraging on the capabilities and services offered by the European Cloud Infrastructure. The main mission of DECIDO is to demonstrate the ground-breaking impact of the adoption of cloud infrastructure to gain access to shared data in the field of Evidence Based Policy Making. DECIDO will provide PAs with an integrated interface for the definition of policy making workflows (from evidence gathering to policy definition and evaluation) enabling the orchestration and integration among tools and services made available by EOSC, with customized tools provided by DECIDO partners and relevant (big) data coming from public, academic and private data providers. DECIDO will develop solid and realistic business plans to ensure the long-term sustainability of the results considering legal, ethical and security aspects. DECIDO will also facilitate the introduction of co-creation in evidence based policy making allowing the active involvement of citizens and communities in the process. Hence DECIDO will also contribute in enhancing trust and boosting the perceived legitimacy of authorities. DECIDO methodological and technological approach will be assessed in different exploitation scenarios - demonstrating the value of collaboration, technology transfer and cross-pollination in 4 flagship pilot activities in 3 disaster risk management domains: floods (IT), fires (ES, FI) and power outage (EL). Data and service interoperability and portability will be granted through the use of ISA² core vocabularies, in describing dataset produced and used by PAs. Considering the complexity of the challenge DECIDO aims to address, a multi-sectorial and multi-disciplinary partnership has been set up to perform all the envisaged activities.