Democracy is facing challenges including loss of trust in EU institutions, disillusionment and declining interest among citizens, increasing political polarisation, online disinformation and politically manipulated information, and a growing distance between citizens and elected representatives. We believe this can change if proper deliberative processes and tools are institutionalised that exploit the rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence and citizens’ post-Covid competences. We envision the next generation of digital deliberations as: grounded on solid democracy theory, multimodal (video, audio, text), usable and accessible, gamified (e.g. using skill points, scoreboards, missions, and avatars), mass, enabled by novel but also legal and ethical AI features (e.g., summarisation, moderation, fact checking, hate speech and toxicity detection) and easily adopted and institutionalized. In this context, the aim of AI4Deliberation project is to provide robust, ethical AI tools and comprehensive guidance to assist governments in institutionalising, using and evaluating multimodal, gamified, mass deliberations. The vision of the project is to equip governments with a theoretically solid and empirically tested set of AI-enabled deliberative processes, a comprehensive framework with practical guidelines, and an AI toolkit that will enable them to design, institutionalise, operate and evaluate transparent, ethical, inclusive, multimodal, gamified, mass citizens deliberations resulting in more active and inclusive citizenship and increased trust to rule-of-law based institutions by citizens. To achieve these ambitious objectives, the consortium brings together a team of world leaders in deliberative democracy, AI and LLMs (incl. vid-LLMs), argumentation mining, law and ethics, deliberation platforms (including video-based) while four large scale pilots will be conducted from city level to international discussing topics that include climate change and long Covid.

A major obstacle to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of education in Europe is the lack of widely available, accessible, multilingual, timely, engaging and high-quality educational material (i.e. OpenCourseWare). The creation of comprehensive OpenCourseWare (OCW) is tedious, time-consuming and expensive, with the effect, that often courseware employed by teachers, instructors and professors is incomplete, outdated, inaccessible to those with disabilities and dull. With the open-source SlideWiki platform (available at SlideWiki.org) the effort of the creation, translation and evolution of highly-structured remixable OCW can be widely shared (i.e. crowdsourced). Similarly to Wikipedia for encyclopaedic content, SlideWiki allows (1) to collaboratively create comprehensive OCW (curricula, slide presentations, self-assessment tests, illustrations etc.) online in a crowdsourcing manner, (2) to semi-automatically translate this content into more than 50 different languages and to improve the translations in a collaborative manner and (3) to support engagement and social networking of educators and learners around that content. SlideWiki is already used by hundreds of educators, thousands of learners. Several hundred comprehensive course materials are available in SlideWiki in dozens of languages. In this large-scale trial project, we will further mature the SlideWiki technology platform, integrate it with a state-of-the-art MOOC delivery platform and perform four large-scale trials in (1) secondary education, (2) vocational and professional training, (3) higher education and (4) community-driven open-education. Each of these large-scale trials will be performed with hundreds of educators and thousands of learners in countries all over Europe. A particular focus of the technology development and testing in the trials will be the suitability for academics, teachers and learners with disabilities.

DUET is an Innovation project designed to leverage the advanced capabilities of cloud and high-performance computing (HPC) to evolve the traditional public policy making cycle using large open data sources. The aim is to help public sector decision-making become more democratic and effective, both in the short and long term, through the development and use of Digital Twins for policy impact exploration and experimentation in entire cities and regions. These digital replicas of a cities system will (a) enhance day-to-day city management by helping city managers react quickly to real-time events through rapid experimentation of different decision impacts, and (b) ensure longer term policy decisions are more effective and trusted by enabling city managers from different units, to explore and discuss with citizens and businesses city issues in a visual, easy-to-digest way via a common view. Thanks to the 3D interface public administrations will, for the first time, more easily harness the collective intelligence of ALL policy stakeholders to tackle complex, systemic policy problems that require innovative thinking from multi-sectors to develop transformative solutions. Developed and tested in cities and Regions at different points in their digital transformation journeys – Flanders Region, Belgium, the City of Athens, Greece and City of Pilsen, Czech Republic – DUET will create the concept of Policy-Ready-Data-as-a-Service and ensure all cities across Europe will be able to create their own their own Digital Twins that address ethical considerations around data use whilst also complying with Europe’s stringent privacy and security regulations.

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.

The revolution in information technology over the last years has proven its ability to process huge amounts of data and made evident that big data can change the world. Open Government Data (OGD), from being an obscure possibility just five years ago, is spreading across the globe at a phenomenal rate, delivering the promise to spur innovation, to deliver better services for less money, to improve planning, to increase transparency, and to reduce corruption. In this context, YourDataStories envisions to bring this promise closer to reality, through a highly customisable online platform for data exploitation focused in the financial flows that are critical for transparency, collaboration and participation. Users, ranging from governmental bodies to journalists and to citizens, will be facilitated by powerful and established tools, not only to discover relevant information but also to remix it with diverse and dynamic data sources: YourDataStories acts like an interactive canvas to enable data citizens to (re)write their own data history. YourDataStories brings an innovative solution whose innovation potential spreads across many directions, from leveraging best practices and proven technologies across Europe, to exploiting the social Web for accessing citizens, and to supporting sustainable public services across borders. Building on top of the "Transparency Portal" initiative of the Greek government, YourDataStories can be viewed as a way to showcase and transfer the existing expertise to European level, in an attempt to transform governments and governance in Europe. At the same time, YourDataStories seeks to exploit and embed in this effort the benefits of the social Web, establishing an innovative bidirectional channel between the Social and Semantic Web. Finally, YourDataStories aims to support sustainable services, supported by a marketing ecosystem of applications offering cross-border services of public finance flows across Europe.