The Ariadne project aims to promote volleyball as a tool to reduce youth marginality and deviance, issues that increasingly affect young Europeans. The main target group are highschool students between 14-18 years old.The partnership is composed by 5 partners: Province of Arezzo, as lead partner, Katerini Municipality, Riga Volleyball School, Public Institute for Sport Nova Gorica, ICARE Association. The project foresees a bottom-up approach with students and the presence of experts in youth deviance: volleyball games will be organized in schools with the supervision of the experts, then the students will be asked to write essays with personal reflections on marginality and youth deviance. Essays are a good way to evaluate the project impact.The experts will then be able to evaluate both the behaviour during the matches and the writings of the students, reporting the most serious cases to parents and teachers in respect of privacy. This bottom-up approach with young people does not require particular organizational costs: volleyball games in schools have no costs for the partners and neither do the student’s essays. This will make easier to replicate the project's approach to other realities and European regions.Partners will also participate in the European Sport Week by organizing volleyball tournaments for students and, on the final day, a volleyball game in the town square hosting some professional volleyball players who will play together with the students.The communication strategy is built upon some relevant aspects: the presence of volleyball professional players and Nova Gorica as European city of Sport in 2021. The visibility will be enhanced also by the celebration with volleyball games of the National Days against Bullying and Violence and the European initiative 1DayMore4Volleyball.Partners will also join the European Antibullying Network, to ensure a continuity of the activities and of the partners' efforts also after the project lifetime.

Disruptive Technologies (DTs) have a great yet untapped potential to boost the developing of new and more efficient Public Services. Reasons entail resource shortage in terms of competences and infrastructures, but also resistance to and lack of trust in technology. Although a recent uptake of the topic of ethical, social and legal issues related to DTs, practical guidelines to fully assess the risks of adopting DTs in Public Administrations are still missing. The ETAPAS project aims at introducing a practical framework, supported by a prototypical software platform, to offer a first-time assessment methodology capable of measuring and mitigating ethical, societal and legal risks. The project will co-design with Public Bodies a framework consisting of ethical principles, a set of measurable indicators and a legal construct for the responsible adoption of DTs. The framework will be tested and validated on four use cases in which DTs are applied to face the challenges of the Italian Ministry of Finance, Don Gnocchi Foundation, and local municipalities in Norway and Greece. Use cases’ development, as well as exploitation and dissemination activities, will be strengthened by the engagement of two Digital Innovation Hubs and their network. This will ensure ETAPAS framework wide applicability to the European Public Sector and will prove in practice how DTs can support the realisation of responsible innovative solutions of Public Services. Lessons learnt and PAs’ feedback will feed into ETAPAS final output: a governance model to allow other public organisations to replicate the methodology and adopt innovative solutions while assessing, monitoring and mitigating associated risks. ETAPAS project aims at accelerating a responsible adoption of disruptive technologies in the delivery of Public Service so that Public Administrations can reduce management costs, improve service efficiency, securely manage data assets, and foster greater citizen trust and engagement.

'TOKEN' aims at developing an experimental ecosystem to enable the adoption of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) as a driver for the transformation of public services towards an open and collaborative government approach. During 32 months, a multidisciplinary consortium of 11 partners comprising (a) IT developers/RTOs with experience in development of blockchain components/IoT & Big data platforms (FBA, IMEC, VIL, CERTH, FIWARE), (b) blockchain associations (INF), (c) public administrations (AYTOSAN, KATERINI); (d) SSH experts in public management (UC) and (e) think tanks specialised in digital transformation & policy-making (DEMOS) and Open Commons business models (FBR) will develop a Blockchain Platform as a Service Solution (BCPaaS) to be tested in 4 highly replicable application areas that are common to many Public Governments across Europe: public funding distribution; management of public accounts; urban logistics; valorisation of data. BCPaaS implementation will be assessed from a multidimensional perspective (technological, cultural, socio-economic and legal impacts), paying special attention to attitudes shown by public servants, as key individuals in public service provision. BCPaaS architecture will endorse the Next Generation Internet values of trustworthiness, resilience and sustainability and keep the compliance of the privacy-by-design regulation principles as core driver. It will maximise interoperability potential with IoT & Big Data platforms as well as other blockchains. A specific business model, based on Open Commons principles and Distributed Governance, will be elaborated during the second half of the project, and project dissemination will pay specific attention to meaningfully engagement of +30 early adopters, firstly as members of TOKEN Observatory contributing to TOKEN policy learning co-creation, and, secondly, to be invited to join BCPaaS platform after the project ends, and launch roadmaps to bring DLT to other public services.