Pluggable Social Platform for Heritage Awareness and Participation (PLUGGY) will support citizens in shaping cultural heritage and being shaped by it. PLUGGY will enable them to share their local knowledge and everyday experience with others. The participation will include the contribution of cultural institutions and digital libraries, building extensive networks around a common interest in connecting past, present and future. PLUGGY frames its objectives around the Faro Convention, in line with new social paradigms which declare heritage as an asset and a responsibility for all, aiming to encompass greater democratic participative actions with concern for the local and the everyday. The PLUGGY Social Platform will facilitate a continuing process for creating, modifying and safeguarding heritage where citizens will be prosumers and maintainers of cultural activities. It will be web based, easily accessed and will allow the development of shared identity and differentiation. PLUGGY Social Platform’s users will curate stories using the PLUGGY Curatorial Tool. Content will be both crowdsourced and retrieved from digital collections, allowing users to create links between seemingly unrelated facts, events, people and digitized collections, leading to new approaches of presenting cultural resources, and new ways of experiencing them. PLUGGY will provide the necessary architecture for the creation of pluggable applications, allowing for beyond-the-project, not yet imagined ways to utilize the content on the social platform, while focusing on the design of the social interaction, helping to build new virtual heritage communities. The PLUGGY consortium spans 5 countries and includes 4 academic partners (ICCS, TUK, UMA, ICL), a total of 10 museums (PIOP, ESM) and 3 SMEs (CLIO, VIA, XTS) in the fields of cultural heritage and creative applications. They cover the areas of cultural heritage, social platforms, authoring tools, VR/AR, knowledge management, semantics and 3D audio.

Whilst citizen participation in environmental policy making is still in its infancy, there are signs of a growing level of interest. The majority of citizens, though, both as individuals and as groups often feel disengaged from influencing environmental policies. They also remain unaware of publicly available information, such as the GEOSS or Copernicus initiatives. The SCENT project will alleviate this barrier. It will enable citizens to become the ‘eyes’ of the policy makers by monitoring land-cover/use changes in their everyday activities. This is done through a constellation of smart collaborative technologies delivered by the SCENT toolbox in TRLs 6-8: i) low-cost and portable data collection tools, ii) an innovative crowd-sourcing platform, iii) serious gaming applications for a large-scale image collection and semantic annotation, iv) a powerful machine-learning based intelligence engine for image and text classification, v) an authoring tool for an easy customization by policy makers, vi) numerical models for mapping land-cover changes to quantifiable impact on flood risks and vii) a harmonization platform, consolidating data and adding it to GEOSS and national repositories as OGC-based observations. SCENT will be evaluated in two large scale demonstrations in Kifisos Attica and Danube Delta. Our consortium covers the complete stakeholder chain: industries in machine learning (IBM), SMEs in crowd-sourcing (U-Hopper), gaming (Xteam) and awareness raising (Carr), leading research institutes with expertise in hydrodynamic modelling (UNESCO-IHE), data harmonization and authoring tools (ICCS) and environmental monitoring (DDNI), NGOs at the pilot sites (HRTA, SOR) and policy makers/public bodies (Region of Attica). The SCENT initiative will go beyond the current project and form a European-wide citizen movement, created and fostered by the SCENT stakeholders, that will ensure its sustainability and its complementarity with existing citizen partnerships.