More and more decision makers, municipalities, youth organizations, youth workers and other practitioners in Europe get involved in the topic of e-Participation. They experiment with new tools and services and gain increasing practical experience in the field. This is extremely valuable. But still, although progress is being made, the activities and pioneer projects taking place in Europe are yet rather fragmented and disconnected. Many experienced practitioners in the youth field don´t know about each other, software developers in different countries develop the same kind of tools over and over again, and many user organizations make the same experiences – but also repeat the same mistakes. In this context, the establishment of a regular European-wide exchange between youth workers, participation experts, software developers and other actors in the field is of great mutual benefit. With the #BePart Summit, we aimed to gradually establish such an exchange. Within a 3-day seminar 50 European youth workers from 18 participating organisations in 10 different countries obtained the possibility to share good practices and experiences on e-participation with other experts and practitioners, identifying the challenges and opportunities as well as needs for training and qualification. Participants came from Non-governmental organisations/associations/social enterprises (7), Local Public bodies (2), National Youth Councils (2), Small and medium sized enterprise (2), National Public body (1), Civil Society Organisation (1), European NGO (1), Other(2).The participants have discussed and come to the conclusion that e-participation is a tool for interactive decision making online. Through it a wider range of people, mainly the younger people, can be reached and engaged in giving their opinion on topics that influence their lives. On the subject of what need is it a response they concluded that through its usage the state or the European Union can manage and use its resources and finances more efficiently, further drawing attention to the fact that the offline processes, currently managed by the EU, are more costly. They think that adapting such new ideas and methods of connecting with one another such as the e-participation is an innovative and evolutionary step in itself. The e-participation can be used as a tool to solve the problem with the lack of communication, especially in the younger community within EU, as it serves as a means to reaching each other easily online even to people living in more remote areas. It gives the opportunity to address issues, which young people face, not only on a local but on a global level as well. It is the ideal method for turning youth’s thoughts and opinions into actual involvement.

Digital youth participation empowers young people to become active citizens from local to European level. However, the positive effects only unfold when the participation process is run professionally – just to use digital tools is not enough to inspire young, administrations and youth organizations to collaborate. Unfortunately, potential initiators often lack experience, personnel and financial resources needed to plan and conduct a successful e-participation project. This is a reason why first-time pilot projects may fail due to the many unknown challenges and efforts, leading to frustration among participants. The Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project “DIGY - Digital youth participation made easy” aims to tackle this problem by delivering qualification and capacity building for initiators of digital youth participation projects. The materials designed will be integrated into the OPIN platform, a professional online tool-box for digital youth participation that is already available in 10 European languages. Thus, the European-wide infrastructure for digital youth participation is strengthened and enriched by modules to increase the know-how on how to run a successful digital youth participation project. This is realized in various ways: - by establishing a vivid community of project initiators on OPIN: a space for peer-to-peer knowledge exchange, collaboration and advice (“Opin Community and Forum”). - by designing high-quality online learning materials and trainings, consisting of text-based resources as well as audio and video materials (“e-Learning Materials and Section”). The materials will support initiators in the project planning and implementation phase of their project.- by creating a “Best Practice Living Lab” which will develop a Best Practice example section on OPIN,- as well as a “Re-design of the Opin Platform”, by optimizing the navigation and user interface on the platform and improving the administrator workflow for setting-up and configuring a new project. The Section for Best Practice examples and e-learning materials will be created and the platform will be optimized for the display of various formats, such as audio- and video files.Through all these activities, DIGY will in the long term contribute to a lively landscape of digital youth participation in Europe. With OPIN, a professional yet cost-free and easy-to-use tool is available and well-known in the community. Youth worker benefit from a new qualification and professional development, the number of fairly executed participation projects increases and by this, the inherent potential of youth participation unfolds in all European countries. Young people who participate in the projects will experience an increase of communication skills, media literacy and democratic competencies. The positive interaction with decision-makers leads to a growth of trust in democratic processes and institutions which in turn encourages active citizenship and public engagement. The result has a stabilizing and activating effect on the political system. The platform will be open to be used for free by any person or institution during the duration of the project and after the project termination.The results of the project will be developed by a consortium of 7 partners from all over Europe, who bring in valuable country-specific knowledge and experiences which will be fed-in to the creation of the IOs. Besides experts on participation like nexus, the coordinator, who is since 20 years giving consultancy on participation and doing scientific research in the field and Liquid Democracy, the technical provider and one of the first players in digital youth participation in Europe, the consortium includes 4 youth organizations from Macedonia, Georgia, Slovenia and Malta, who will pilot the DIGY results. Additionally with CREATIVITAS an Erasmus+-proven dissemination partner is on board to make sure that the project results are reaching youth organizations all over Europe.

With the experiences of 3 pilot projects and the expertise of 11 partners from 8 European countries, a digital European youth participation online platform will be built, which is tested and open to be used by administrations and youth organizations of any size and level to set up participative processes. The platform consists of • comprehensive eParticipation package (EUth-applications), bringing together web online participation and mobile participation on a modular, adaptive basis. Foundation are the softwares Adhocracy and FlashPoll (developed in EIT/ICT Labs). • A modularized method-handbook (EUth-methods) made available in a digital decision-support-tool, giving practical support how to make optimum use of the applications’ features. • Country-specific guidelines (EUth-services) to take away fears and give advice on how to solve problems such as community management and online moderation, security etc. The platform will be easy-to-use and perfectly user-adapted through participative product design in a living lab. Special focus is the evaluation of pilot projects using the platform: • The European youth organization AEGEE will improve its communication and discussion process with its members • In France, two institutions, the City of Paris and the French federation of community centers will foster youth empowerment and inclusion • In Italy and Slovenia a cross-border pilot will aim at guiding young community managers that will interact with their respective city administration A sustainable impact is created through an innovation strategy which among other measures includes the deployment of the platform. Within an Open Call 10 European municipalities and local organizations are each given 10.000€ to implement independent participation strategies on the online platform. EUth will increase the trust of European youth in Europe and political institutions by making European youth participation more attractive for all involved actors and thus make it happen more frequently.

Finding and developing ways complementary to existing forms of traditional political communication, dialogue and debate fitting to the needs and interests of the majority of young people today, alienated from political discussions is the core of the project. Addressing and involving such young people that often do not know or care much about Europe, the EU or European integration is a task necessary in European youth work today. Continuously the gap between young people organised in long-standing European youth organisations and those that are not organized (or organised in a different form) increases. In order to not succumb to dialogue with young people that is dominated with the same voices while the others are “speechless”, the project seeks to further develop ways and tools to expand the conversation about the future of Europe and to train multipliers working with them to use these in their activities and projects. To that end, the project addresses on the one hand young people from the participating countries DE, FR, IT and HU between 16 – 27 years old, not interested, aware or keen on their role as European citizens. On the other hand it targets multipliers from diverse fields of education (youth workers, schools, foundations, local administrations etc,) working with these young people and having a decisive influence on their educational settings.Through different stages of combined online and offline working phases on the participative online-pattform Ypart (especially developed for young people), young Europeans are encouraged and supported in telling and sharing “their stories” about life in Europe today as well as their wishes, recommendations and ideas for the future of Europe. In order to achieve a “speechless” dialogue and create an understanding amongst young people from other European countries, these stories will be told in creative formats (photography, video, sketch, street art) and shared with young people from the other countries. In a second round of storytelling it will be task to tell the story of a young person from another country. These “European stories” will then be shared on a “European storytelling festival”. This process shall reach out to between 50 and 100 young people per country (there are no limits, since the online format allows for including many more), with a selected number of 40 young finalists attending the festival.At the same time multipliers working with these young people will be gathered, connected and trained in the usage of the project’s methods focussing on engaging young people in alternative forms of dialogue about Europe and the EU (e.g. storytelling, photography, theatre, etc). Throughout the project, approximately 80 multipliers per country will directly (through attending an activity) benefit from the project. Furthermore, through its extensive dissemination activities and outputs (incl. a summarising handbook and curriculum for multipliers) that are developed to reach out and have a long-lasting impact, even after project completion, an estimated number of 5,000 multipliers in different European countries can be reached.Through its actions and the implementation of combining non-traditional offline tools with online tools, the project reduces the elitist character of European participation and increases the legitimacy of the participation by broadening the spectrum of participants. Moreover, by challenging the participants to discuss and work together despite eventual linguistic barriers and by soliciting the capacity of putting themselves in each other’s shoes in order to tell the stories of their European compatriots, the project enables participants not only to learn and engage themselves throughout the project, but to create close ties, engage them effectively in Europe and European issues and thus strengthen their sense of European citizenship. Multipliers involved in the project gather extensive insight and first-hand experience in working with unconventional, creative and expressive forms of political dialogue and debate with young people about Europe both on local, national and European level. Participation in workshops as well as the many intellectual outputs set them on a path of directly conceptualising, planning and implementing many more youth activities with this target group of participants. Furthermore, through the establishment and offering of local worksshops a connected hub of youth workers, youth organisations, volunteers, staff of foundations and responsible people from local administration comes together to expand their horizons, learn and develop innovative approaches and strategies for involving ALL young people in a participative European dialogue about the future of Europe.