The relation between science and society is strongly influenced by the impressive acceleration of scientific and technological development. Within this society of acceleration (H. Rosa), the young are experiencing a sense of derangement and an alarming sense of loss of future and hope. FEDORA will develop a future-oriented model to enable formal and informal science education to equip the young with thinking, foresight and action competence skills needed to grapple with the societal challenges. In particular, the project aims to address three forms of misalignment that emerge from the difficulties of the educational systems to keep the pace of societal changes: a) the clash between, on one hand, the vertical and hyper-specialized organization of teaching in disciplines and, on the other, the inter-multi-transdisciplinary, multi-actor and open character of the new modus operandi of R&I; b) the mismatch between the formalized and exclusive languages used in schools and the needs for new languages to enhance imagination and the capacity to talk about the contemporary challenges; c) the clash between the a-temporal or historically oriented teaching approaches and the need to support the young to construct visions of the future that empower actions in the present. These forms of misalignment represent blind spots for science education that FEDORA will explore through a multi-layer (institutional, conceptual, cultural) research approach, an articulated structures of actions and a multiform set of research methodologies (qualitative and quantitative surveys, design-driven and Delphi Study methodologies,..). The actions and results will feed into recommendations for anticipatory policies aimed to mobilise visionary attitudes on open-schooling and to orient concrete institutional transformations to nurture, in secondary school students, a new sense of trust and desire needed to support an aware, responsible and sustainable participation in science-related societal issues.

MEET - Missions: Engagement and Education for Tomorrow - is the proposed “European Researchers Night” event and “Researcher at School” programme in Milano and Lombardy (Italy), for the 2024 and 2025 editions of the Night, and for the school years 2024/25 and (partly) 2025/26. Firmly rooted on a mission-oriented approach and bringing together top R&I and institutional players in Milano area, MEET has the challenging goal to reduce the gap between research and citizens, increasing their sense of trust in science and fostering a participatory approach in which everyone feels involved and benefits from the opportunities offered by scientific citizenship, in an inclusive way. The project combines a captivating science festival format for the Nights, targeting the public at large, with a two-years structured programme devoted specifically to the schools. During the Nights, science-based entertainment initiatives, interactive exhibitions, talks and participated moments, such as real-life workshops and science matches, will involve citizens in a journey to discover that R&I could and should be acted and enjoyed by everybody. At school, MEET brings public engagement initiatives and innovative education approaches, with researchers first-hand experimenting citizen science with pupils, engaging them preferably but not exclusively on the themes of the EU Missions. The acquisition and recognition by the research community of the role of citizen science as a research methodology will become a lever for an institutional change, supported by MEET. Overall, MEET will permanently work to stimulate proactive scientific citizenship to engage society and schools, through different tools and methods, in reflecting on grand societal challenges and on how science could shape culture and future habits, finally discovering how much impact could be produced by science in people's daily lives.

There are no recognized standards in science journalism and communication, nor principles or indicators of quality. And yet they are needed, particularly in a moment when science communication is more than ever a key factor in facilitating democratic deliberation and in fighting misinformation. To fully benefit from a digital society, citizens need to feel that the information they receive responds to their needs and is useful to face and solve their problems. The climate crisis, the recent pandemic and many more global challenges can only be dealt within a framework of policies and actions properly informed by science, allowing all relevant stakeholders to decide and act on the basis of evidences and not of noises and misinformation. ENJOI will explore and test engagement as a key asset of innovation in science communication distributed via media platforms, with a strong focus on journalism. Through a combination of methodologies and in collaboration with producers, target users and stakeholders of science communication, ENJOI will co-create and select a set of standards, principles and indicators (SPIs) condensed to a Manifesto for an Outstanding Open Science Communication. ENJOI will deploy a series of actions via Engagement Workshops, Labs, field and participatory research, evaluation and testing phases.It will also build an Observatory as its landmark product to make all results and outputs available to foster capacity building and collaboration of all actors in the field. ENJOI will work in four countries: Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain, taking into account different cultural contexts. ENJOI’s ultimate goal is that of improving science communication by making it more consistently reliable, truthful, open and engaging. Contextually, ENJOI will contribute to the active development of critical thinking, digital awareness and media literacy of all actors involved in the process.

SOCIETY (in Search Of Certainty – Interactive Event To inspire Young People) European Researchers' Night events will take place in 5 cities (Bologna, Forlì, Cesena, Ravenna and Rimini). SOCIETY aims to present research as the best tool to investigate solutions, ideas and innovations to sort out the Societal Challenges that human beings face. In order to achieve its objectives, SOCIETY will rely on interactivity and engagement at large: the project will specifically aim to produce a Night co-design approach, in which researchers together with society will conceive the event programme. SOCIETY project will be extended to two editions of ERN, in 2016 and in 2017, with a project duration of 18 months. The line-up of each Night event will be structured as a subway map, with different lines and stops. Each line will represent an interdisciplinary pathway in some specific big topic for which researchers are trying to find some possible solutions and ideas. The two events will maintain the same overall theme, but a relevant evolution in public collaboration, which will support the design of the programme event, will be envisaged. The co-design of ERN events will act as a concrete lab experience for European researchers in structuring a bottom-up public communication event. The public will have a key role in the project, not only as target, and will be engaged to collaborate in the outline of an event tailored for societal interests. Researchers and research will benefit from this approach as a whole in terms of public support and acknowledgement of the importance of research work for society. SOCIETY Night events will be designed in order to attract different kinds of publics . However, secondary school students, who are about to make their choice in terms of career, will be a privileged target, also through the involvement of Eu and MSCA researchers. Specific activities will be addressed to encourage female young students to embark on scientific and research career.

Citizen science (CS) initiatives are changing the paradigm of science communication (SC). Not only the embedded bottom-up methodology takes into account people’s needs, aligning science to society, but empowers citizens to become science communicators. Moreover, launching a citizen science project requires the creation of a complex ecosystem, in which the participation of quadruple helix stakeholders (interdisciplinary scientists; public sector; industry; CSOs and society at large) is usually a must. This poses a challenge in terms of science communication due to: 1) the wide variety of specific science communication tools and strategies to be used for each target group, and 2) the required continuous feedback to each stakeholder group to maintain the engagement throughout the project. NEWSERA will analyse and evaluate the complex and multidirectional science communication strategies, including digital and non-digital ones, addressed to quadruple helix stakeholders in citizen science projects across Europe as the new paradigm for science communication. An assessment of the initial state-of-the-art of science communication in citizen science projects will be carried out. 4 pilot case studies will be selected from ongoing EU projects mapped under the EU-Citizen.Science platform, taking into account not only the quantity, quality, reliability and effectiveness of the communication, but also psycho-social factors such as the perception and trust on science communication and, in consequence, on science. One further case study will be addressed to science journalists. Innovative strategies will be co-designed for each stakeholder group in our Citizen Science Communication Labs to test the new concepts of Citizen Science Communication and Citizen Science Journalism, to reinforce the interface between science-society-policy and increase trust in science, while advancing the state-of-the-art in science communication.